Walking with Hall (below) is a piece of locative non-fiction developed in collaboration with game designer Antonino Frazzitta and undergraduate students at the University of Birmingham. The Walking with Hall app (link here, android-only) guides users to follow in Hall's footsteps, allowing visitors to explore the rich history of Hall’s time on campus and the wider city of Birmingham. 

Users of the app can move an avatar on their smartphones around the University of Birmingham campus to ‘unlock’ narratives and reimagine the campus as it was 50 years ago, including a 3D augmented reality model of the old main library. An exploration of the several venues of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies traces the walk that Hall would have taken from the temporary huts (home to the radical emerging discipline of cultural studies) to the Arts building, where other academics would often express disdain for new methods at open seminars on a Friday morning. With chapters tailored to the unique landscape and history of each location, the aim is to reveal the intensely local influences of the worlds Hall inhabited, and the import of this for his own global thinking and impact.  

The project explores the relation between place and media in light of the innovative work being conducted by scholars and artists working in the digital humanities and new media (and the University’s own research cluster on the ‘Arts of Place’).

Hall’s theoretical works served as an obvious starting point for the conceptualization of this project. In particular, the essay ‘Constituting an Archive’ (2001) provided a way into thinking about Hall’s archive as inextricable from his own praxis; ‘Encoding and Decoding in the Television Discourse’ (1979) offered a theoretical foundation for the mediation and narrative framing of archival materials in Walking with Hall. This project was also informed by Hall’s writings both on public infrastructure, control and authority in Policing the Crisis (1978), and on how space is imagined or inhabited differently according to mediation in The Popular Arts (1964) and Doing Cultural Studies (1996). 

Our initial forays into the archive suggested that a central part of this project would be thinking with spectral presence on campus - not only of Hall himself, but also the contemporary ‘spectre’ of the campus as it was during Hall’s time at the University of Birmingham. In the 1960s the campus was rapidly expanding and extensive building work was taking place; however, that new built environment has been unevenly retained in the twenty-first century. Locations that were key to Hall’s experience, such as the main university library and the Quonset huts that were once home to the CCCS, no longer exist. The clock tower ‘Old Joe’, on the other hand, remains a very visible reminder of the imperialist designs of the University’s first Chancellor, Joseph Chamberlain. Walking with Hall was designed to engage conceptually with the many intersecting aspects of its formation as a locative narrative and a digital representation of the Stuart Hall Archive. Central questions to the project therefore revolved around the materiality and mediation of the archive, and how this might respond to/emerge from Hall’s own thinking.

A static, web-based version of Walking with Hall can be accessed remotely below and includes an expansion into Birmingham's city centre. 

An archiving dossier narrative detailing the first phase of the project is published on the Open Science Framework.