Stuart Hall, the key figure in British cultural studies, was born in Kingston, Jamaica in 1932. In the 1950s he collaborated on the launch of two radical journals, The New Reasoner and the New Left Review. In 1964 he joined the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at Birmingham University, becoming the director of the Contemporary Cultural Studies unit in 1968. He is currently emeritus Professor of cultural studies at Goldsmiths College, London. His many books include Encoding and Decoding in the Television Discourse (1973), Policing the Crisis (1978), The Hard Road to Renewal (1988), Resistance Through Rituals (1989), Modernity and Its Future (1992), The Formation of Modernity (1992), Questions of Cultural Identity (1996) and Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices (1997).

Recent articles

The contemporary city, London especially, was supposed to be the model for the workable, cosmopolitan multicultural future. But neo–liberal globalisation and its disastrous consequences are reproducing in the city the growing inequalities of the world, argues the foremost analyst of multiculture.