8th Annual Stuart Hall Public Conversation with Françoise Vergès: There Will Be No Future Without Seizing the Present

As part of their inaugurual event of the 2025 programme, In Search of Common Ground, The Stuart Hall Foundation welcomed political theorist, writer, activist, independent curator and political educator, Françoise Vergès to Conway Hall as the keynote speaker for the 8th Annual Stuart Hall Public Conversation.

In Vergés’ keynote, ‘There Will Be No Future Without Seizing the Present’, she considers how we might think across difference to construct a life-affirming politics in times of poly-crisis, with a presentation organised around possibilities for reappropriating the present. A chaired discussion and audience Q&A led by Director of the Decolonial Centre, Mohammed Elnaiem, follows the keynote.

Imagining a post-racist and post-capitalist future seems impossible when the present is plagued with genocide and imperialist wars; when catastrophic floods, hurricanes and fires engulf our planet; when murderous migration policies and increased poverty further entrenches racism, xenophobia, and misogyny into the fabric of our societies.

Liberating the present from colonisation, racial neoliberal capitalism, and the forces which make our planet uninhabitable for human and nonhuman species alike necessitates orienting our political imaginations towards wholesale revolutionary change; towards the possibility of forging a future in which all life can flourish, in which all life is protected.

Stuart Hall called upon us to embrace “a politics without guarantees”, by which he suggests that we cannot construct a politics simply through denunciation and condemnation. Instead, we ought to produce “new dimensions of meaning which have not been foreclosed by the systems of power which are in operation.”

This is a call for radical imagining and action, for thinking beyond the imperialist post-World War II order.

– Françoise Vergès