Making and moving publics: Stuart Hall's projects, maximal selves and education

Abstract

An extraordinary educator and public intellectual, Stuart Hall's career as a scholar, activist, teacher and mentor has touched almost every field in the social sciences and humanities. Paradoxically, education rarely claims him as an educator. Stuart Hall's refusal to see publics as given, fixed or settled matters with clear or final demarcations and boundaries allowed him to move pedagogically and politically between and among different constituencies and sites of formal and non-formal education, policy and praxis, arts’ groups and social theorizing in larger national and transnational spaces as places for public thinking, teaching publics and, thus, for making what I will call ‘maximal selves’. Indeed, his praxis articulated Michael Warner's queering of our theoretical understandings of publics and counter-publics, addressing and registering affectively and effectively with variously hyphenated communities. I will show how his formation as an intellectual worked with uncomfortable diasporic differences of his own ‘minimal selves’ to suture together alliances with specific marginalized groups as part of his extraordinary commitment to education as public thinking and teaching publicly. It is only until we understand him as an extraordinary educator that our tasks and inheritance from Hall's varied projects become appreciable.