‘Keywords’: Stuart Hall, an extraordinary educator, cultural politics and public pedagogies

Abstract

This special issue rethinks Stuart Hall neither strictly as a Cultural Studies scholar nor as a sociologist but rather, more broadly as an extraordinary educator of multiple and broad oppositional constituencies, publics and counter-publics. In so doing, it probes Hall's keywords for querying, contesting, and shifting the educational landscape and lexicon of culture, which previously had been wed to hegemonic essentialist notions of ‘race,’ nation, gender, and sexuality. Re-reading Hall as a public educator and public pedagogue, the issue recognizes how his extraordinary accomplishments, multiple counter-hegemonic projects, theoretical resources, and achievements in building diverse oppositional constituencies are now our inheritance. While some contributors of this issue show that Hall wrote about education throughout the course of his career, more importantly all show that Hall's commitments were born of political commitments to think educationally, about who constitutes ‘the public,’ and in whose name education's cultural politics and public pedagogies speak. Drawing upon ‘keywords’ of Hall's educational thinking and lexicon, we show how our understandings of hegemony and counter-hegemony do not take for granted any pre-constituted notions of culture, social subjectivity, or publics. This in turn has enormous implications for the cultural politics of education, public pedagogy, and our social future.

Keywords:

• Stuart Hall
• educator
• public pedagogy
• cultural politics
• ‘keywords’
• counter-hegemony

Notes

1. Retrieved from http://www.theguardian.com/education/2014/feb/10/godfather-multiculturalism-stuart-hall-dies

2. Retrieved from http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/may/20/stuart-hall-artist-black-intellectuals

3. Retrieved from http://anniepaul.net/2014/02/10/a-stuart-hall-shaped-hole-in-the-universe/