Reading the Crisis
The Reading the Crisis series asks: what kinds of tools and strategies are needed to confront this conjuncture? This online conversation series seeks to advance Stuart Hall’s thinking by analysing a curated selection of three texts in relation to present-day political formations. In alignment with our 2025 programme theme, In Search of Common Ground, we have chosen three Stuart Hall texts where Hall is in dialogue with Edward Said, CLR James and bell hooks.
Each conversation, chaired by Aasiya Lodhi, will form an online teach-in space dedicated to demonstrating how engaging in a conjunctural analysis can enrich artistic practice, deepen organising work, and academic study.
The first conversation, between Brenna Bhandar and Hashem Abushama, will consider the state of contemporary discourse on Israel-Palestine through Hall’s open letter to Edward Said titled For Edward Said (2004). The second conversation, between Houria Bouteldja and Lola Olufemi, will focus on themes relating to anticolonial thought and action through a 1986 exchange between Stuart Hall and CLR James. Finally, the third conversation, between Gary Younge and Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, will think through the relationship between love and political organising using a discussion between bell hooks and Stuart Hall, published in the book, Uncut Funk: A Contemplative Dialogue (2017).
Events will take place online. Live closed captions will be provided.
Reading the Crisis is part of the Stuart Hall Foundation’s In Search of Common Ground programme. Learn more about In Search of Common Ground here.
Supported by Comic Relief, the Hollick Family Foundation and the Paul Hamlyn Foundation, in collaboration with Words of Colour, Pluto Press, Soundings, and Taylor & Francis.
Wednesday 4th June 2025
Brenna Bhandar & Hashem Abushama
‘For Edward Said’ (2004)
5.30pm – 7pm BST
Monday 28th July 2025
Houria Bouteldja & Lola Olufemi
‘CLR James Speaks with Stuart Hall’ (1986)
5.30pm – 7pm BST
Tuesday 9th September 2025
Gary Younge & Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor
‘Uncut Funk: A Contemplative Dialogue by bell hooks and Stuart Hall’ (2017)
5.30pm – 7pm BST
Each text will be made fully or partially available a few weeks before each corresponding conversation.
How to book
- Press the orange 'Get tickets' button further up this page.
- Add a ticket for the events you wish to attend. (You can also add an optional donation to support the Stuart Hall Foundation at this stage.)
- Complete the name and email address fields and press 'Get tickets'.
- Order complete - a confirmation email including a link to the event will be sent to the email address you provided, and you will receive reminders before the event begins.
About the speakers
Brenna Bhandar’s research and teaching broadly lie within the fields of property studies and legal theory, spanning the disciplines of property law, critical theory, colonial legal history and critical race feminism. Her book Colonial Lives of Property: Law Land and Racial Regimes of Ownership was published in 2018 with Duke University Press, and the co-edited book (with Rafeef Ziadah) Revolutionary Feminisms: Conversations on Collective Action and Radical Thought was published in 2020 with Verso. She has published widely in various leading academic journals. She is regularly invited to deliver plenary and keynote addresses at academic venues around the globe, and in a variety of disciplinary and interdisciplinary settings.
Dr Hashem Abushama is an Associate Professor in Human Geography and Tutorial Fellow at St Peter’s College. He holds a DPhil in Human Geography and an MSc in Refugee and Forced Migration Studies from the University of Oxford, and a BA in Peace and Global Studies from Earlham College in the United States. He is also a EUME Fellow at the Forum Transregionale Studien in Berlin as well as a Senior Fellow at the Institute for Palestine Studies. He has authored several academic and journalistic articles on dispossession, arts, urbanization, the archives, and postcolonial Marxism.
Houria Bouteldja, writer and activist of Algerian origin, was a founder and former member of the Parti des Indigènes de la République (PIR), a decolonial political party based in France, which fights against colonialist and neo-colonialist ideologies and practices, racism and Islamophobia. She participated in the founding of the Les Blédardes collective. She has written numerous strategic theoretical articles on decolonial feminism, racism, autonomy and political alliances, as well as articles on Zionism and state philosemitism.
Dr. Lola Olufemi is a black feminist writer and independent researcher from London. Her work focuses on the uses of the political imagination and its relationship to cultural production, political demands and futurity. She is author of Feminism Interrupted: Disrupting Power (Pluto Press, 2020), Experiments in Imagining Otherwise (Hajar Press, 2021), the forthcoming Against Literature (2026) and a member of 'bare minimum', an interdisciplinary anti-work arts collective.
Gary Younge is an award-winning author, broadcaster and a professor of sociology at the University of Manchester in England. Formerly a columnist at The Guardian he is an editorial board member of the Nation magazine, the Alfred Knobler Fellow for Type Media and winner of the 2023 Orwell Prize for Journalism. He has written six books: Dispatches From the Diaspora, From Nelson Mandela to Black Lives Matter; Another Day in the Death of America, A Chronicle of Ten Short Lives; The Speech, The Story Behind Martin Luther King’s Dream; Who Are We?, And Should it Matter in the 21st century; Stranger in a Strange Land, Travels in the Disunited States and No Place Like Home, A Black Briton’s Journey Through the Deep South. He has also written for The New York Review of Books. Granta, GQ, The Financial Times and The New Statesman and made several radio and television documentaries on subjects ranging from gay marriage to Brexit.
Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor is a Professor in the Department of African-American Studies at Princeton University. She is author of Race for Profit: How Banks and the Real Estate Industry Undermined Black Homeownership, published in 2019 by the University of North Carolina Press, a semi-finalist for a National Book Award for nonfiction and a 2020 finalist for the Pulitzer in History. Taylor’s book From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation, won the Lannan Cultural Freedom Award for an Especially Notable Book in 2016. She is also editor of How We Get Free: Black Feminism and the Combahee River Collective, which won the Lambda Literary Award for LGBTQ nonfiction in 2018. In 2021, Taylor was awarded a MacArthur Foundation "Genius" Fellowship.
Aasiya Lodhi is a Senior Lecturer in Media at the University of Westminster. Her research is focused on empire and twentieth-century British history. She led an AHRC-funded project on gender, race, and visibility tied to the BBC’s centenary, and she is currently writing a book on BBC Radio, racial liberalism, and the politics of voice in post-war Britain. Aasiya is a former BBC radio producer and journalist.
About the Stuart Hall Foundation
The Stuart Hall Foundation was established in 2015 by Professor Stuart Hall’s family, friends and colleagues. The Foundation is committed to public education, addressing urgent questions of race and inequality in culture and society through talks and events, and building a growing network of Stuart Hall Foundation scholars and artists in residence.
www.stuarthallfoundation.org