Guest Lectures

Several of Stuart Hall’s conference keynotes have been digitised and are available below, providing valuable new perspectives on Hall’s work spanning theory and black identities (UC Santa Barbara 1989), the conceptual foundations of cultural studies (Kyoto 1996), and the disciplinary position and methods of cultural studies in relation to the humanities (Ohio State University 1989). Throughout each of these recordings, Hall contends with the role of theory and theorisation in society - what it is to utilise inventive, critical, and creative ways of thinking both with the world, and why it matters to do so.

This page also contains Catherine Hall’s keynote from the concluding session of an international conference organised by the Stuart Hall Archive Project in 2024. In an interview with Jeffrey Williams (chaired by Rebecca Roach), Catherine Hall (Emerita Professor of Modern British Social and Cultural History at UCL) discusses Stuart Hall’s work at length, the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, and her own work on the history of the Caribbean.

In ‘Speaking for the Subject’ (UC Santa Barbara 1989), Stuart Hall speaks on ‘Black Identities and White Theories’, troubling western maps of knowledge (and particularly poststructuralism) with regard to representation and political change. In Hall’s conclusion to this expansive lecture, he cites the academic tension between the rigours of science and the serious questions of social and historical interest to argue that ‘we know of no more troubling relationship than that between theory and experience’. Hall calls for critical intellectuals of either postcolonial or of marginal peoples (and especially those working in regions of the west) to critically theorise in new ways.

In his lecture at the conference ‘Dialogue with Cultural Studies’ (Kyoto 1996), Stuart Hall explicates the usefulness of Gramscianism to cultural studies, particularly to conceiving of the relationship between culture and society. Throughout his paper, Hall suggests that a post-Gramscian way of thinking provided cultural studies with ‘a non-reductionist conception of culture with an expanded conception of power and a differentiated conception of the social’. This talk is in both English and Japanese.

The audio recording of Stuart Hall’s talk at Ohio State University in 1989 illuminates the disciplinary formation and practice of cultural studies at Birmingham, pedagogy at the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, the vision of the Centre and the challenges it faced, and theory and politics (particularly Thatcherism and British national identity) in the 1970s. Hall argues that the (historical and continuing) vocation of cultural studies must be to enable people to understand what is going on and to provide ways of thinking and strategies of survival to those who are otherwise excluded from access to the national culture or community.