Steven Thrasher

The Documentary (EP. 8)

Stuart Hall: In Conversations revisits the life and work of the Jamaican-born cultural theorist, Stuart Hall, a key figure in the foundation of the field of Cultural Studies. Through interviews, music, and audio archives, this program examines the political and historical context that shaped Stuart Hall’s ideas.

From the 1950s until his death in 2014, Hall was a world renowned black public intellectual, known for his role in establishing the New Left in Britain, his groundbreaking analyses of Thatcherism, and his dialogical understanding of culture and representation.

Hall saw politics in a range of human formations, from the mundane and everyday to the global expansion of free market capitalism.He argued that culture should be understood both as a site for the reproduction of dominant ideologies as well as a location for resisting power and claiming new identities.

Stuart Hall’s visionary understandings of neoliberalism and what he called “authoritarian populism” are worth revisiting today in an era of racially charged nationalism, evidenced in the 2016 Brexit vote in the United Kingdom, Marine Le Pen’s rise in popularity in France, and the election of Donald Trump to the presidency of the United States.

Stuart Hall Live (Ep. 7)

Listen back to our Views and Brews discussion from December 13, 2016 with KUT’s Rebecca McInroy, along with sociologist Ben Carrington, art historian Cherise Smith, and journalist Steven Thrasher of The Guardian.

They talk about the life and legacy of Stuart Hall and take audience questions.

Who was Stuart Hall? What can his ideas teach us about populist politics, the importance of the visual arts, and the role of the media in our current social and political moment?

V&B: Stuart Hall

They talk about the life and legacy of Stuart Hall and take audience questions.

Who was Stuart Hall? What can his ideas teach us about populist politics, the importance of the visual arts, and the role of the media in our current social and political moment?

Steven Thrasher (Ep. 5)

Steven Thrasher is a writer for the guardian and a PhD student in American Studies at New York University. In this conversation with University of Texas Sociology Professor Ben Carrington, Thrasher discusses his first encounter with Stuart Hall’s work.

The interview provides insight into Hall’s intellectual reach. Thrasher shares how his engagement with Hall comes from a journalistic perspective. Having first read the British intellectual in his American Studies classes, Thrasher discloses feeling initially confused about why a British scholar would be relevant to American Studies. However, he found Policing the Crisis to be especially important for his thinking about covering the aftermath of Michael Brown’s shooting and the ongoing Black Lives Matter movement.

The conversation includes a discussion of how being a public intellectual is not limited to the academy, but also how Hall created a space in which black people can take up the space of public intellectual. Likewise, Thrasher and Carrington comment on the importance of popular media as a “gatekeeper of intellectual space” and Twitter is posited as a useful platform for making intellectual interventions in the public sphere.

-Anima Adjepong