Stuart Hall

It’s 1951, and, against all odds, you, a young man of 19 who has lived his whole life in the tropical Caribbean, have been accepted into Oxford University. You’re to be a fellow on a Rhodes Scholarship and have deep aspirations to study medieval literature. Little do you know that your life will have you cross paths with J.R.R Tolkien, and later, co-founding one of Britain’s most influential cultural studies institutions.

This was the life of Stuart Hall. A pioneering theorist in sociology, cultural, and media studies, this man’s influence stretched far beyond what he could have imagined.

• You will be introduced to the work of Stuart Hall and explore his sociological contributions.
• We will begin by exploring Stuart Hall's early life to understand how it contributed to the development of his theories.
• Then, we will look at Stuart Hall’s most famous works.
• Finally, we will delve into his theories of cultural identity, representation, and crime in sociology.

Stuart Hall, raised in Jamaica, would leave once he received a scholarship to study at the prestigious Oxford University.

Stuart Hall’s early life

Stuart Hall was born in Kingston in 1932 into an aspirational middle-class Jamaican family. His father, Hermann, was the first non-white person to hold a managerial position in Hall's family. Hall's mother was of mixed English descent and held England, the country, its history and traditions in high regard.

Stuart Hall would later talk about how being the darkest-skinned member of his family shaped how he viewed the world. He attended the all-male Anglican Kingston College, modelled on the colonial British education system. From 1934 to the modern day, the school would send students to study at Oxford University on the Rhodes Scholarship.

In 1951, following Kingston College's academic tradition, Stuart Hall won the Rhodes Scholarship and relocated to Oxford, England.

Stuart Hall’s move to the UK

After winning a scholarship to attend Oxford University, Hall made the daunting journey to travel to the UK at 19, becoming part of the Windrush generation.

Immigration and Windrush

From 1948 to 1971, many West Indian and Caribbean individuals made their way to live and work in post-WW2 Britain. The group became known as the Windrush generation after the MV Empire Windrush ship. The primary motivation of this Caribbean migration was to fill work shortages in the post-war UK. Unfortunately, many who immigrated would end up living in unsuitable conditions and, in many cases, bunkers left from WW2. In addition, the decades following their move would be sullied with discrimination, racism, and protests, culminating in several deportations in the 21st century.

Arriving in 1951, Hall was within this immense sweep of immigration. Hall reflected that on his first train journey from Bristol to London, he was familiar with the landscape he saw through the window as he was such a vigorous reader.

Stuart Hall: University, career, and later life

Once Hall arrived at Merton College, Oxford, he began his undergraduate studies in English, later earning a Masters in Art in the subject. Hall had then hoped to continue studying medieval poetry but was deterred by the Lord of the Rings author and Oxford scholar J.R.R. Tolkien. He did begin a literary PhD, but his interests became distracted when the Soviet Union invaded Hungary.

After he graduated from Oxford, Hall would begin his professional and political career. First, Hall joined the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. Then, from 1958 he worked as a secondary school teacher in adult education and secondary modern. In 1964, he married Catherine Hall.

Stuart Hall attended the prestigious Oxford University.

Richard Hoggart invited Hall to become one of the first fellows at The Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, founded in Birmingham in 1964. Four years later, Hall would find himself as the centre's managing director. In 1972, he was promoted to the position of Director.

Since its creation, the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies has become increasingly popular and solidified the position of cultural studies within British academia.

Now that you’re familiar with Stuart Hall's life, we can move on to examine his theories.

Stuart Hall: cultural identity and diaspora summary

Cultural studies emerged in Britain in the 1950s. For Stuart Hall, culture is always a place of interpretive struggle.

Hall's view of culture worked by combining Marxist perspectives, Antonio Gramsci's concept of hegemony, as well as Louis Althusser's views on the media.

Althusser argued that the media acts as a means through which an institution can pass on its agenda without using physical force. Typically, these institutions serve the bourgeoisie.

Using these ideas, Hall argued that the rise of popular mass media permanently changed the relationship between power and authority. Media became a vehicle for powerful groups in society to assert their cultural dominance and pursue their own interests, without directly appearing to do so.

According to Hall, culture is a place of interpretive struggle - an experience that is lived, interpreted, and ultimately defined, a place for negotiation. This idea will be explored further when we outline his reception theory.

In 1983, Stuart Hall travelled to the University of Illinois to deliver a series of lectures on cultural studies. It was a time when many academics presumed studying popular culture was beneath them.

However, Hall’s studies allowed him to differentiate between authentic validated tastes (the tastes of the upper-class) versus the culture of the masses. Hall ascertained that the authenticated validated tastes of the upper class are not simply what the upper-class fancy, as popular culture is a space of negotiation, of give and take.

Stuart Hall: representation

Stuart Hall's theory of representation argues that within a media text, there will oftentimes not be a true representation of events, people, places, or history. Why? Because there can never be one true meaning. Any meaning can always be contested. Producers, therefore, have to imbue a particular meaning to the piece of media text they are working with.

People with social power and privilege may attempt to spread an ideology within media text, pushing their preferred messaging or interpretation (this will be explored more in the Reception Theory section, below). Studying the meanings and messages in media reveals the viewpoints, biases and political positions of those who created it.

Stuart Hall: reception and encoding/decoding

Over his career, Hall became increasingly intrigued by the reception of media by audiences. He devised reception theory to examine how media messages are encoded and decoded.

The producers of media encode messages into the media they put out, and these messages are, in turn in, decoded by audiences. Because they are so diverse, members of the audience are free to decode the messages as they choose. For example, consider the three following positions:

• The dominant or preferred message refers to how the producer wants the audience to decode the message. If the audience is of the same age group, gender, ethnicity, class, etc. as the producer, it is easier for them to align to the dominant message.

• The oppositional message refers to when the audience rejects the dominant message and creates their own meaning. Often, the audience will adopt the oppositional position if they're of a different demographic or hold differing views to the producer of the media content.

• The negotiated reading is a compromise between the dominant and oppositional messages. The reason the audience may take this position is multifaceted - they may be of the same background as the producer and/or understand some of the messages within it, but they may also feel the issue itself is more complex than the media shows and needs greater exploration.

Factors which may influence the reception of media:

• Age

• Gender

• Class

• Ethnicity

• Religious background

• Political views/allegiance

• Educational background

• Life experiences

• Mood

Stuart Hall: sociology and crime

Hall was also interested in criminology - the sociological study of crime - and how perceptions of crime are biased.

In 1979, Hall released his study Policing the Crisis, which examined the moral panic that developed around muggings in the 1970s. His theory is now a key Marxist approach to understanding ethnicity and crime.

In Policing the Crisis, Hall points out how mass media, particularly newspapers of that time, would publish reports on crime mainly focused on young Black men, often with headlines such as ‘Black youths out of control’. This fed into a culture of panic and suspicion amongst the public, even when data was released that showed that muggings were actually rising at a slower rate than in the 1960s.

So, why were Black youths demonised in such a way? To distract the public from the true economic and social issues prevalent in society by giving them a scapegoat.

Throughout the book, Hall argued that:

1. A major recession led to widespread strikes and unemployment in the 1970s.

2. This was a capitalist crisis, but the elite and powerful did not want to address that.

3. Black youths were socially and economically marginalised, and were pushed into criminal activity because of the harsh economic conditions.

4. The media picked up on a rise in muggings across the UK, and publicised it heavily without context.

5. Black youths became associated with the muggings and therefore with criminality, with little room to counter-argue.

6. A higher police presence was established in predominantly Black areas and areas with high crime rates.

7. Arrest rates of young Black men rose and were again exaggerated by the media.

8. The public's attention and outrage focused on Black criminality, instead of the failings of capitalism.