The cultural theorist Stuart Hall has died at the age of 82. Dubbed the “godfather of multiculturalism,” Hall was a Jamaican-born sociologist who lived and taught in Britain for decades. He was a founding editor of the journal New Left Review and a key figure in the development of cultural studies. He discussed cultural studies in a 2012 interview with Sut Jhally of the Media Education Foundation.

Stuart Hall: “I’ve always thought that cultural studies had to have a political dimension. By that I don’t mean that it had to be recruited to a particular party line or particular political position, but that if your task was critical thinking, you were bound to question the boundaries, the hierarchies, the orthodoxies, the established views, and that was itself a political project, a challenge to existing forms of knowledge.”