'Thinking With Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues on Art and Culture' (Event Curator and Speaker)- at Beirut Art Center, in conjunction with Unfinished Conversations exhibition (Beirut- Lebanon)

Thinking with Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues on Art and Culture (curated by Layal Ftouni) is an event of roundtable discussions paying special tribute to the late cultural theorist and sociologist professor Stuart Hall. as a co-founder of the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies and the journal New Left Review, Stuart Hall’s intellectual trajectory has been a driving force for artistic, cultural and intellectual production in Britain and beyond.

The event brings together cultural studies scholars, artists and art critics from the region and internationally to think with, through and beyond Stuart Hall’s ideas and oeuvre of writings on art, identity and culture. Topics for discussions include: the relationship between aesthetics and politics (anti-racist, anti-colonial, identitarian) in Black British and transnational art practices ; cultural studies’ belated encounter with gender and sexuality; and de-centring cultural studies: theoretical and philosophical explorations outside and beyond the continent.
Thinking with Stuart Hall is an attempt at cultural translation as an intellectual, political, and aesthetic endeavor that performs and establishes nodes of connectivities and spaces of disjuncture between British Cultural Studies and the emerging field of Arab Cultural Studies. it attends to the urgent debate around the place of identity in both Black and Arab cultural politics.