Walking with Hall

New app brings to life Stuart Hall’s seminal career at Birmingham

A new app, developed by researchers in English Literature at the University of Birmingham, uses GPS technology to bring cultural studies pioneer Stuart Hall’s legacy to life. Created in collaboration with game designer Antonino Frazzitta and the Stuart Hall Archive Project, Walking with Hall guides users to follow in his footsteps, allowing visitors to explore the rich history of Hall’s time on campus – and beyond – through previously unpublished documents, video and audio clips. 

“Walking with Hall brings Stuart Hall’s life and thinking out of the archive and into the world around us,” says Rebecca Roach, Associate Professor of Literature, who co-leads the Stuart Hall Archive Project. “It gives communities a chance to interact with archival materials that they might not otherwise access and prompts hard questions about the relationships between archives, digital technologies, race, and physical spaces.”

Co-founded by Stuart Hall at the University of Birmingham in 1964, the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies provided an international hub for research in this new, groundbreaking field. It brought a critical rigour to the study of mass culture that had previously been reserved for the established academic canon. The Centre became internationally renowned for its radically democratic approach to teaching and collaboration, which flew in the face of institutional norms. While its pioneering analysis of race, class, gender, and British politics inspired great teachers, writers, artists, and activists in the latter half of the twentieth century.

Users of the Walking with Hall app can move an avatar on their smartphones around the University of Birmingham campus to ‘unlock’ narratives and reimagine the campus as it was 50 years ago, including a 3D augmented reality model of the old main library. It was conceived as an innovative way to help researchers and the wider community connect with Hall’s legacy through his own archive, held at the Cadbury Research Library. 

“The exciting thing about Walking with Hall is that it reimagines the University of Birmingham campus as a crucial site for the development of Hall’s life and thought,” says Katherine Parsons, Postdoctoral Researcher at the Department of English Literature, who worked on the app. “By literally following in Hall’s footsteps, we are prompted to think about the wider influence of place on his life and work. This feature will only become more substantial as the project expands to narrate Hall’s movements around the wider Birmingham cityscape and beyond.”

These future ‘chapters’ of the project are now in development with the collaboration of University of Birmingham students in the School of English, Drama and Creative Studies. They’ll explore Hall’s legacy in sites around Birmingham, as well as London, Oxford, and Jamaica. With chapters tailored to the unique landscape and history of each location, the aim is to reveal the intensely local influences of the worlds Hall inhabited, and the import of this for his own global thinking and impact.