The Caribbean Institute of Media and Communication (CARIMAC), at the University of the West Indies, has learnt with deep regret of the passing in the United Kingdom of world renowned Jamaican sociologist. cultural anthropologist and communications theorist Professor Stuart Hall.
 
He was ailing over the last several years and died yesterday (February 10, 2014), one (1) week after his 82nd birthday.
 
Stuart Hall's theoretical constructs, including original and influential ideas on Encoding and Decoding in communication discourses, Multiculturalism and Ethnicity in Sociology and his re-conceptualization of Reception Theory, among others, all earned him wide respect and admiration by several generations of cultural studies academics and communication scholars around the world.
 
Stuart Hall was born in Kingston, Jamaica on February 3, 1932 and attended Jamaica College. He won the Rhodes Scholarship and left Jamaica in 1951to study in Merton College at Oxford University in England. His experiences and analyses of race, popular culture and anti-colonial struggles fashioned his early scholarship, leading to an active engagement with immigrants and youth in such neighbourhoods as Brixton and Soho in London.
 
Stuart Hall later moved to Birmingham in the British Midlands, where, under the leadership of writer and academic Richard Hoggart, he served as a Research Fellow and later Director of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at Birmingham University. He developed an impressive body of work as an emerging theorist on issues of cultural hegemony, identity and conceptual processes in human communication.
 
He became Professor of Sociology at the Open University in the UK in 1979, remaining there until 1998, when he retired in the capacity of Professor Emeritus. Hall visited the University of the West Indies on several occasions during visits to Jamaica, including in 2001, when he was special guest at the 25th anniversary celebrations of CARIMAC, on the UWI's  Mona Campus.
 
As a cultural activist and exponent on the political left, Hall was influenced by such writers as Antonio Gramsci, Raymond Williams, Louis Althusser, Karl Marx, Michel Foucault, Roland Bathes and Umberto Eco. In the Caribbean, his work paralleled that of UWI's Cultural Historian Rex Nettleford and Anthropologist Barry Chevannes, both of whom predeceased him.
 
The death of Stuart Hall also comes shortly after the passing in December 2013 of another Jamaican scholar and political historian, Richard Hart, who had also settled in the United Kingdom after a distinguished and scholarly career in public life.Like Richard Hart, Stuart Hall will be sorely missed for his warm and engaging personality and the force of his ideas. The social and academic work of both Hall and Hart will serve as lasting legacies of world class scholarship, rooted in anti-colonialism and popular struggles for justice and equity.
 
February 11, 2014The tribute was penned by Hopeton Dunn, Director of the Caribbean Institute of Media and Communication (CARIMAC), and Professor of Communications Policy and Digital Media at the University of the West Indies, Mona.
The Centre for Caribbean Thought at the University of the West Indies (UWI), Mona also honoured the Jamaican-born Stuart Hall in the Third Caribbean Reasonings Conference held on the Mona Campus June 17-19, 2004. The conference was held under the theme, “Culture, Politics, Race and Diaspora.