The International Association for Media and Communication Research – IAMCR – invites applications from graduate students and emerging scholars for a prize in memory of Stuart Hall, to be awarded at IAMCR annual conference (July 12-16 2015) in Montreal, Canada.

The Stuart Hall Award was established at IAMCR’s Hyderabad Conference to celebrate his lasting contribution to communications scholarship and to remember his work. His writings, inspirational mentoring and teaching, intellectual leadership, and political vision, shaped the study of communications in decisive ways.

The deadline for submissions is 4 April 2015.

Criteria

A scholarly paper with an innovative theoretical foundation, combining analytical excellence with a commitment to extending the interventionist, critical attributes that marked Stuart Hall’s contribution to the study of media, culture and communication.

Rules

•Papers may be submitted by graduate students and emerging scholars who have been members of IAMCR for at least one year and who are under the age of 35 at the time the paper is submitted.

•Papers are limited to 7,000 words.

•Papers must be based on work that has not already been published.

Procedure

•The closing date for submissions is April 4, 2015. Send submissions in electronic form to the Stuart Hall Award Committee (see below). The subject of your message should be Stuart Hall Award 2015.

•If an award is made, the author(s) will be notified at least 3 weeks before the IAMCR conference when the result will be publicly announced.

•The award consists of a cash prize of USD 1,000, plus the 2015 IAMCR Conference registration fee, together with a commemorative plaque marking the winner’s achievement.

•An award will not necessarily be made following the Call, and decisions arrived at by the Stuart Hall Award Committee will be final.

Send submissions to: hall2015 (at) iamcr.org with Stuart Hall Award 2015 as the subject of your message.

2015 Stuart Hall Award Committee

•Hopeton S. Dunn, Chair, The University of the West Indies

•Graham Murdock, University of Loughborough, UK

•Usha Raman, University of Hyderabad, India

•Garry Whannel, University of Bedfordshire, UK

Brief biography of Stuart Hall

Stuart Hall was born in Kingston, Jamaica on February 3, 1932 and attended Jamaica College. He won the Rhodes Scholarship and left Jamaica in 1951 to study in Merton College at Oxford University in England. His experiences and analyses of race, popular culture and anti-colonial struggles fashioned his early scholarship, leading to an exceptional and distinguished career in cultural studies and communications theories.

Hall’s theoretical constructs, including original and influential ideas on Encoding and Decoding in communication discourses, Multiculturalism and Ethnicity in Sociology and his re-conceptualization of Reception Theory, among others, all earned him wide respect and admiration by several generations of academics and communication scholars around the world.

Stuart Hall’s early scholarship from the political left, advanced to new levels after he moved to Birmingham in the British Midlands, where, under the leadership of writer and academic Richard Hoggart, he served as a Research Fellow and later Director of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at Birmingham University. Hall is regarded as the founder of the modern discipline of ‘Cultural Studies’. He developed an impressive body of work on issues of cultural hegemony, identity and communication.

He became Professor of Sociology at the Open University in the UK in 1979, remaining there until 1998, when he retired in the capacity of Professor Emeritus. Hall remained active as a critical scholar and leading intellectual throughout his retirement, until his death on February 10, 2014, one week after his 82nd birthday.

http://iamcr.org/congress/hall-2015