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Stuart Hall
He taught Britain that a message is remade by whoever receives it — the nation included.
The rise
Born in Kingston in 1932 into a middle-class family anxious about shade, he took a Rhodes Scholarship to Oxford in 1951, abandoned his doctorate for politics, and in 1960 became a founding editor of New Left Review. He stayed in England without ever ceasing to be a migrant in the country he analysed.
What they did
His 1973 paper on encoding and decoding broke the idea that an audience takes a message as sent: meaning is remade at the other end, and can be read against the grain. At Birmingham's Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, which he led to 1979, it became a field. Policing the Crisis (1978) read a mugging panic as racial construction, and he named Thatcherism before Thatcher won.
The full picture
Critics on the left argued that his turn to discourse and identity detached radical politics from class and material demands, and that cultural studies drifted into abstraction as it spread through the universities. Late in life he said publicly that he was not sure he liked what the field had become.
Why it matters
He gave Britain the words it still argues about race and belonging with, then built the institutions — Iniva, Autograph — that carried them out of the seminar room.
“I am the sugar at the bottom of the English cup of tea.”