Hall's Radical Contextuality

To do a project of cultural Studies is to work on the 'Radical Contextuality' [Stuart Hall]

"If you's just taken race as a black issue, you's have seen the impact of the law and order policies on the local communities, but you'd have never seen the degree to which the race and crime issue was a prism for a much larger social crisis. You wouldn't have looked at the larger picture. You'd have written a black text, but you wouldn't have written a cultural studies text because you wouldn't have seen this articulation up to the politicians, into the institutional judiciary, down to the popular mood of the people, into the politics, as well as into the community, into the black poverty and into discrimination."(Hall, 1998, "Cultural Composition: Stuart Hall on Ethnicity and the Discursive Trun")

This clearly shows that Hall has never worked on race and ethnicity as a kind of subcategory, but he has always worked on the whole social formation which is 'racialized'. And, that's why the heart of Cultural Studies to Hall is the radical contextualism /conjuncturalism, where no element can be isolated from its relations, even though those relationships can be changed and are constantly changing. This radical contextualism is embodied in the concept of articulation. If we see doing cultural studies is a way to produce the realities, even contexts and power, it thus is the transformative practice of making, unmaking, and remaking relations and contexts, of establishing new relations out of old relations or non-relations, of drawing lines and mapping connections.