The great cultural theorist and sociologist Stuart Hall died today aged 82. Born in Jamaica, Hall relocated to Britain where he helped establish the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural studies. Hall wrote some extremely influential texts (mostly chapters and articles - curiously few books) on subjects as broad as TV, marxism, racism, semiotics, and communication theory.

More often than with any other academic, I heard people say "oh I love Stuart Hall." He was intellectually brilliant, but also immensely likeable. His many public talks were laced with an affectionate enthusiasm for his subjects and an impish wit.

There are already plenty of obituaries (1 2 3) springing up around the Internet, and by the end of the week there will surely be dozens more. I have no special perspective on his life to offer. Instead, I want to acknowledge three of his ideas that deeply influenced my thinking on society and politics.

Hall was the first author of one of the key books on moral panics - a specialist subject of mine - Policing the Crisis: Mugging, The State, and Law and Order. Policing the Crisis combines a rich case study of the demonization of black youths in 1970s UK with a perceptive analysis of the relationship between state elites, the media, and popular sentiments of moral outrage. Hall was among the first sociologists to recognize the tremendous utility of Antonio Gramsci's political theory for explaining power dynamics and the significance of culture in modern capitalist societies. Hall and his colleagues diagnosed a prominent feature of modern governance whereby frothing opprobrium is directed at perennially subjugated groups (e.g. illegal immigrants, working class youths, drug users) in order to deflect popular attention away from more insidious problems inherent to our backfiring political structures (e.g. post-industrialism, economic crisis).

Many will remember Hall primarily for his work on racism. As a cultural theorist, Hall was a strong proponent of the view that "race" is not a fixed feature of human populations at all, but rather a "discursive construct" - in other words, a type of label that finds its meaning in concrete relations of struggle. In his very approachable speech, Race: The Floating Signifier, Hall shows how the basic material differences of "hair, skin and bone" are imbued with particular positive and negative connotations through corrupted discourses of scientific racism (eugenics, craniometry), eurocentrism, and cultural racism. Hall's arguments persuaded me that a proper anti-racist politics should be built on the staunch refusal of the notion of racial difference, rather than efforts to recognize and integrate supposedly inherent differences between groups.

Finally, Hall was among a minority of academics who took seriously the explosion of forms of mass media in the 1970s-80s. In a break from both traditional communication models of "sender-->message-->receiver", and also neo-marxian interpretations of media as an extension of the commodity form, Hall saw media as an inherently participatory system. Audiences play active roles in producing and negotiating meaning at the point of reception. Denying both the passivity of media audiences and the ideological dominance of media producers permits far more nuanced understandings of the ways mass media reproduces power than existed prior to Hall's intervention. And in a time when media is simultaneously all-pervasive yet more nakedly audience-beholden than ever, we would do well to heed Hall's call to recognize our complicity and power, and ask - as he so unrelentingly did - how we can harness this power for more egalitarian and creative purposes.