Stuart Hall: Why Does Popular Culture Matter?

Stuart Hall (1932-2014) was born in Jamaica.
He was one of the founders of the Birmingham School of Cultural Studies.
Hall was a Marxist.
He served as a professor of sociology at the Open University, which was founded to promote equality of opportunity and social mobility through television, radio, and night school programs.
Hall adopted a semiotic approach to mass communications, building on the work of Roland Barthes.
He was a main proponent of reception theory and developed the encoding/decoding model.
He expanded cultural studies to include race and gender.