Writings on Media: History of the Present (Stuart Hall: Selected Writings)

Product Description
Writings on Media gathers more than twenty of Stuart Hall's media analyses, from scholarly essays such as “Encoding and Decoding in the Television Discourse” (1973) to other writings addressed to wider publics. Hall explores the practices of news photography, the development of media and cultural studies, the changing role of television, and how the nation imagines itself through popular media. He attends to Britain's imperial history and the politics of race and cultural identity as well as the media's relationship to the political project of the state. Testifying to the range and agility of Hall's critical and pedagogic engagement with contemporary media culture—and also to his collaborative mode of working—this volume reaffirms his stature as an innovative media theorist while demonstrating the continuing relevance of his methods of analysis.
Review
“How refreshing and urgent to revisit Stuart Hall’s formative ideas about racism, identity, ideology, and media at the very moment that media has become such a contested site and source of ideological work. Hall’s searing and critical insights about what media does, how it works, and why it matters have never been as pressing as they are today. In our global and national media ecologies where disputes over facts, epistemological turmoil, fake news, and ideological rigidities are routine, Charlotte Brunsdon’s curated collection of Hall’s essays on the media is a remarkable and indispensable gift.”
-- Herman Gray, Emeritus Professor of Sociology, University of California, Santa Cruz
“Stuart Hall revolutionized the critical study of media, positioning them—newspapers, photographs, television—as key sites of struggle over cultural meaning and power, and thus as central to the project of cultural studies. Above all, however, Hall did not just write about media but used them prolifically as outlets for critical intervention in the world. This superb set of essays testifies to the uniquely powerful voice of one of the most important public intellectuals in postimperial Britain.”
-- Ien Ang, Distinguished Professor of Cultural Studies, Western Sydney University
About the Author
Stuart Hall (1932–2014) was one of the most prominent and influential scholars and public intellectuals of his generation. Hall taught at the University of Birmingham and the Open University, was the founding editor of
New Left Review, and was the author of
Cultural Studies 1983: A Theoretical History,
Familiar Stranger: A Life between Two Islands, and other books also published by Duke University Press.
Charlotte Brunsdon is Professor of Film and Television Studies at the University of Warwick. Her most recent book is
Television Cities: Paris, London, Baltimore, also published by Duke University Press.