Stuart Hall holds an MA from Merton College in Oxford. He was a Rhodes scholar at Oxford University. He has contributed to key works on culture and media studies, as well as politics.

Hall covers issues of hegemony and cultural studies. He takes a post-Gramscian stance. He regards language use as within a framework of power, institutions and politics/ economics. This view presents people as producers and consumers of culture at the same time. Hegemony refers to the willingness of one social group to dominate and control other social groups.

Start Hall developed reception theory. This approach to textual analysis focuses on the scope for negotiation and oppostition on part of the audience. This means that a text – be it a book or a movie – is not simply passiviely accepted by the audience, but there is an element of activity involved. The person negotiates the meaning of the text. The meaning depends on the cultural background of the person. The background can explain how some readers accept a reading of a text while others reject it.

These ideas are further developed in Hall's model of encoding and decoding of media discourses. The meaning of a text is located somewhat between the producer and the reader. Even though the producer encodes the text in a particular way, the reader will decode it in a slightly different manner.