Stuart Hall

Stuart Hall’s ideas come up in this course in two ways: encoding and decoding, and representation.

Encoding and decoding

This is an extension activity: exploring Stuart Hall’s ideas of encoding and decoding when making sense of a media text. Extension activities are differentiated content for stronger learners, not core AS content.

The standard three reading positions — dominant, negotiated, oppositional — are widely taught. Treat them as course-standard knowledge.

Hall’s model is a way of thinking about how audiences interpret the media, including how they may interpret the same text in different ways, using a variety of theories or ideologies.

Representation

Hall is also studied as a representation theorist. When you learn the concept of Representation, you can do this with reference to theories of representation, including Hall, Van Zoonen, hooks, Gilroy, Alvarado.

Where it leads

Encoding/decoding is the bridge from thinking about audiences as a target to thinking about audiences as interpreters. It feeds forward into Power and the Media, where the question of whose reading counts becomes the topic itself.