Stuart Hall

*His works are widely accepted as influential, such as studies showing the link between racial prejudice and media, and are important as foundational texts for contemporary cultural studies.
*Stuart Hall is one of the main proponents of reception theory. This approach to textual analysis focuses on the scope for negotiation and opposition on part of the audience. This means that a text — be it a book or a movie — is not simply passiviely accepted by the audience, but there is an element of activity involved. The person negotiates the meaning of the text. The meaning depends on the cultural background of the person. The background can explain how some readers accept a reading of a text while others reject it.
*These ideas are further developed in Hall's model of encoding and decoding of media discourses. The meaning of a text is located somewhere between the producer and the reader. Even though the producer encodes the text in a particular way, the reader will decode it in a slightly different manner. What Hall calls the margin of understanding. This line of thought is linked to social constructionism.