In her inaugural lecture, Suzanne Hall engages with what it means to learn and teach at this volatile point in the lifespan of the UK university ecosystem.

Hall locates the university in the intersection of sustained state underinvestment, the expansion of student indebtedness and the cost of living crisis, and systemic inequalities that fundamentally reconstitute university life.

At the core of this lecture is a claim to space: an assertion of the university as a vital threshold for the everyday interruption and transgressive disruption of normalcy. Focusing on the threshold as the practice of entering into another space, Hall connects the collective acts of risking, caring and transforming, to insist on the possibilities of learning and teaching together.

Meet the speakers:

Suzanne Hall is Professor of Sociology at LSE. Her work engages with the intersections of global migration and urban marginalisation, and focuses on how political economies of displacement shape racial borders, migrant livelihoods, and urban multicultures. She is author of The Migrant’s Paradox: Street Livelihoods and marginal citizenship in Britain (University of Minnesota Press, 2021)

Ayça Çubukçu is Associate Professor in Human Rights and Co-Director of LSE Human Rights. Her research and teaching interests are in social, political and legal theory, with a focus on human rights, cosmopolitanism, political violence, internationalism, postcolonial studies, and transnational social movements.

David Madden is Associate Professor in Sociology and Co-Director of the Cities Programme. He works on urban studies, political sociology, and social theory. His research interests include housing, public space, urban restructuring, and critical urban theory.

Fran Tonkiss is Professor of Sociology at LSE. Her research and teaching is in the fields of urban and economic sociology. Her research interests focus on urban inequalities, urban development and design, social and spatial divisions, and the socio-economic organisation of urban space.