Small Talk: A Workshop with Stefano Harney

For the second workshop in the ‘Small Talk: On the Corners of London & Paris’ event series, part of the 2026 Banister Fletcher Global Fellowship, we are delighted to welcome Stefano Harney.

Stefano Harney is a thinker and writer whose work arises from the situations that working-class peoples of all colours find themselves inhabiting.

Thinking in and writing about places of leisure (bars, clubs, carnivals), work (factories, schools, universities, post offices) and community (churches, family barbecues and street-corners), he has used the dynamics of life in such situations to explore how working-class people of colour have used their own modes of social organisation to create meaning.

This work has provided the foundation for books such as Nationalism and Identity: Culture and Imagination in a Caribbean Diaspora (University of West Indies, 2006), State Work: Public Administration and Mass Intellectuality (Duke University Press, 2006) and, with Fred Moten, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study (Minor Compositions, 2013) and All Incomplete (Minor Compositions, 2021).

For this workshop, we will use the 1977 song by Gil Scott-Heron, ‘95 South (All of the Places We’ve Been)’ to frame a discussion about the geographical spread of Harney’s thinking.

The discussion will centre on his attentiveness to working-class life in locations as varied as Toronto, Port of Spain, London, New York and Rio de Janeiro.