The task for week two was to respond to the readings and interview with Stuart Hall based on my findings and look for meaning. My main area of focus was the interview as I was intrigued to see Stuart Hall’s views and ideas outside of his academic writing in order to get an understanding of how these would apply in real life as opposed to in theory. For me, the most noticeable part of Hall’s interview for me was when he spoke about how there was a time where race and culture were not seen as important by people in media studies, following this up with the idea that there were “very few black students” (Stuart Hall Interview Transcript, see below). This showed me straight away how this this interview can be useful as it portrays a distinct change in ideas of critical thinking related to cultural studies. Essentially, this could be used to show a stark difference between how we view cultural studies now, with ideas about race such as how black people are represented in different forms of media, and how cultural studies of race were viewed in the past, with less focus being placed upon these. This is extremely relevant in today’s society with the Black Lives Matter protests in America as the protesters were portrayed in different ways by different sources, such as Donald Trump portraying protesters as “Thugs” (@realDonaldTrump tweet 8/9/20, see below) whilst other news sources such as The Guardian show protesters as non-violent and misrepresented. (The Guardian – Nearly all Black Lives Matter protests are peaceful despite Trump narrative, report finds, see below) My personal view on why Hall’s thoughts are relevant are that if these protests had taken place back when cultural studies of race were not deemed as important, the multiple narratives about protesters may have not been given, instead potentially giving way to a possibly misleading representation due to the lack of people looking at events critically. Due to this, I began to understand the importance of critical thinking and representation, not only for ideas of race but in all forms of identity, and thought of many hypotheticals about how people may be have misrepresented in the media had their stories taken place before cultural studies were seen as important. This also makes me think that we could currently be at a point where, in the future, critics may use our media culture as an example of progression in cultural studies as there are still to this day examples of misrepresentation and racism in the media, whether subtle or obvious.

Encoding, Decoding – https://coventry-parse-bucket.s3.amazonaws.com/f8f6b9ee01c2fb7909de07f60e7266a3hall.1980.encoding_decoding.pdf

Cultural Identity and Diaspora – https://coventry-parse-bucket.s3.amazonaws.com/572321366001c20eecb4036db5a403behall.1990.cultural_identity_and_diaspora.pdf

Stuart Hall Interview – https://vimeo.com/53744509

Stuart Hall Interview Transcript – https://www.mediaed.org/transcripts/The-Last-Interview-Transcript.pdf

@realDonaldTrump tweet 8/9/20 – https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1303292111136190465?s=20

The Guardian – Nearly all Black Lives Matter protests are peaceful despite Trump narrative, report finds – https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/sep/05/nearly-all-black-lives-matter-protests-are-peaceful-despite-trump-narrative-report-finds