International Conference On Stuart Hall

The Institute of Caribbean Studies and Reggae Studies Unit in association with the Stuart Hall Foundation and the Faculty of Social Sciences  at the University of the West Indies, Mona Campus invite proposals for papers in Cultural Studies or related fields for the 2017 Stuart Hall Conference under the theme "Whither the Caribbean?: Stuart Hall's Intellectual Legacy".

Jamaican-born Stuart Hall can best be described as a cultural theorist and master intellectual. Hall is one of the founding fathers of the Birmingham School of Cultural Studies and by extension is credited, along with his contemporaries, for the genesis of the field of Cultural Studies. While other West Indian thinkers chose economics and development as their hermeneutic method, diaspora-based Stuart Hall turned to culture as the analytic mode of choice. For him questions of language, diaspora, ideology, politics, mass culture and representation became objects of study and analysis. Although Hall went on to become globally acclaimed as one of the pre-eminent public intellectuals of the 20th century few are aware of how influential his Jamaican background and heritage were in formulating the heterodox positions for which he became known.

This conference will offer the opportunity to reflect both on how the Caribbean and Jamaica influenced Stuart Hall’s thought but also on how we might bring this unorthodox, paradigm-shifting intellectual’s work home as it were. How can the lens of culture offer alternative approaches to the study of our postcolonial present? How might cultural studies-inflected strategies amplify the ability of policy-makers, educators and technocrats to craft more people-friendly forms of governance? What lessons of negotiating and thinking about social conflict and its management might be embedded in the life and practice of this exemplary public intellectual?