Music student wins 2026 Stuart Hall Essay Prize
Harriet Hillier, a second-year undergraduate student in Music at the University of Manchester, has been awarded the Stuart Hall Essay Prize for 2026. The prize, worth 拢2,000, is open to UK-based academics, students, journalists and other writers aged 18-30. Harriet鈥檚 essay, 鈥楥hoosing a Nation: Identity, Belonging, and Representation in International Sport鈥�, will be published by the Stuart Hall Foundation.
Harriet Hillier, a second-year undergraduate student in Music at the University of Manchester, has been awarded the Stuart Hall Essay Prize for 2026. The prize, worth 拢2,000, is open to UK-based academics, students, journalists and other writers aged 18-30, and aims to stimulate new contributions to the areas of political, cultural and educational research pioneered by the Jamaican-British cultural theorist and sociologist Stuart Hall.
Harriet鈥檚 essay, 鈥楥hoosing a Nation: Identity, Belonging, and Representation in International Sport鈥�, was the unanimous choice of the judging panel. The essay focuses in particular on fencing, a sport at which Harriet has represented Great Britain in international competitions.
The judges, Professor Catherine Hall, Professor Jo Littler and Professor Kennetta Hammond Perry, gave the following comments on the prize-winning essay: 鈥淭his essay applies Hall鈥檚 conjunctural method to read culture at the intersection of political, economic and ideological forces. The case study is of fencing as an international sport and the author applies their experience of it as a participant to discuss what it means to represent a nation at this time, in a post-Brexit world in which borders have become ever more problematic, where sport is transnational yet aims to figure as a key symbol of national unity, and athletes adopt strategic nationalities in order to gain funding enabling them to compete. The essay is beautifully written and engages throughout with different aspects of Hall鈥檚 thinking 鈥� put to work in relation to the specificity of now. The moment 鈥� it is argued 鈥� is one of both crisis and opportunity: it raises the question as to what kind of nation we want to be, and insists that the nation鈥檚 story can be retold. We appreciated its extrapolation of the hybrid histories of the sport, its grasp of the neoliberal dynamics shaping its present, and its deft threading through of personal experience to tell the story on multiple levels鈥�.
The winning essay has been published on the .