The Unfinished Conversations of Cultural Studies

This article discusses the ‘field imaginary’ of Cultural Studies through a reading of the three-screen video installation, John Akomfrah's 2012 film The Unfinished Conversation. In approaching the life and work of Stuart Hall through the incommensurate scales of personal and political histories which run simultaneously across and between the three screens, I argue that this installation enacts something we might call the intellectual aesthetic of the project of British Cultural Studies. The article is drawn from a talk which originally formed part of a panel discussion on ‘The Mark of Cultural Studies on Communication Research’ at the International Communication Association annual conference in 2013.