The Award in Memory of Stuart Hall is offered to graduate students and early-career scholars for work that combines analytical excellence and an evident engagement with the interventionist, critical attributes that marked Stuart Hall's contribution to the study of media, communication, culture and political science.
The Stuart Hall Award was established at IAMCR's Hyderabad Conference in 2014 to celebrate his lasting contribution to scholarship in communication and culture, and to commemorate his world renowned and exemplary work. Stuart Hall’s writings, inspirational mentoring and teaching, his intellectual leadership, and political vision, all helped to shape the study of communication in decisive ways.
Awarded papers will be acknowledged with a USD 750 grant.
Requirements
- Papers may be submitted by graduate students and emerging scholars who are members of IAMCR for the year 2025 (individually or through their institution's membership).
- There is a two-step submission process:
- Your paper must first be submitted to any IAMCR section or working group in response to the 2025 calls for papers.
- Once a paper has been accepted for presentation at the annual conference by a section or working group, it can be submitted to the Stuart Hall Memorial Award by 24 March 2025.
- Papers must not exceed 7,000 words (abstract and references will not count towards the paper limit).
- Papers must be based on work that has not previously been published or firmly committed elsewhere.
The Award Selection Committee will select up to three papers, but can decide to award fewer or none. If an award is made, the author(s) will be notified by 21 April. Decisions of the Award Selection Committee will be final.
Deadlines
There are two deadlines to keep in mind.
- 7 February at 23h50 UTC is the deadline to submit an abstract of the paper to any IAMCR section or working group.
- 24 March at 23h59 UTC is the deadline to submit the final paper via an online form that will be made available here.
2025 Stuart Hall Award Committee
- Chair: Hopeton Dunn, University of Botswana, Southern Africa
- Members: TBC
Brief biography of Stuart Hall
Stuart Hall was born in Kingston, Jamaica on February 3, 1932 and attended Jamaica College. He won the Rhodes Scholarship and left Jamaica in 1951 to study in Merton College at Oxford University in England. His experiences and analyses of race, popular culture and anti-colonial struggles fashioned his early scholarship, leading to an exceptional and distinguished career in cultural studies, communication theories, political activism and public broadcasting.
Hall's theoretical constructs, including original and influential ideas on Encoding and Decoding in communication discourses, Multiculturalism and Ethnicity in Sociology and his re-conceptualization of Reception Theory, among others, all earned him wide respect and admiration by several generations of academics and communication scholars around the world.
Stuart Hall's early scholarship, delivered from the perspective of the political left, was sustained and advanced to new levels after he moved to Birmingham in the British Midlands. There, under the leadership of writer and academic Richard Hoggart, he served as a Research Fellow and later Director of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at Birmingham University. Hall is regarded as the founder of the modern discipline of 'Cultural Studies'. He developed an impressive body of work on issues of cultural hegemony, identity and communication.
He became Professor of Sociology at the Open University in the UK in 1979, remaining there until 1998, when he retired in the capacity of Professor Emeritus. Hall remained active as a broadcaster, critical scholar and leading intellectual throughout his retirement, until his death on February 10, 2014, one week after his 82nd birthday.