An interventionist sociologist: Stuart Hall, public engagement and racism

Abstract

While Stuart Hall is often acknowledged as a public intellectual, it is argued here that a better way of understanding his practice is as an interventionist, whose public engagements are always set in a specific context. This way of seeing Hall draws on his own words and from approaches to intellectual work that foreground how scholars present themselves. Combining this approach with Hall’s own reading of Gramsci as a grounded intellectual, this article then illustrates the idea of Hall as an interventionist sociologist through three examples of his public works on race and racism, exemplifying his well-known use of conjunctural analysis. Thus, the purpose of this article is twofold: first it seeks to ‘disambiguate’ Hall from the public intellectual label; and secondly in resituating him it highlights his public engagements on race as interventions in and as sociology.