Globalisation is rapidly transforming our world in profound and lasting ways. From new patterns of migration and diaspora, to new trends in city and nation building, to new techno-informational networks of communication and knowledge, the world is in rapid flux.
While the socio-economic dimensions of globalisation have been widely studied, far less attention has been paid to its cultural dimensions. And yet, the need to identify and understand how globalisation is effecting cultural change – spanning from Asia to Europe, and from Africa to the Americas – is central to any effort to form a comprehensive picture of our contemporary world. The ACGS responds directly to this need and, in the process, provides a strong humanities perspective that is frequently lacking in existing academic and public debates.
The Faculty of Humanities at the University of Amsterdam is ideally placed to take up this challenge. It is home to a large and highly-active community of leading international experts working across the full range of humanities fields related to globalisation studies, including film and media studies, literature, history, philosophy, visual culture, musicology, religion, and performance studies.
These researchers have a longstanding tradition of analysing discourses and representations of the nation state, European citizenship, migrants, minorities, new media, and other related issues that are undergoing rapid and dramatic change as a result of globalisation.
The ACGS brings these experts together into interdisciplinary teams of researchers and builds on their shared research momentum and knowledge to generate new ways of understanding and explaining the relationship between globalisation and cultural transformation.
Specific projects will be developed and completed within four interlocking research programmes addressing, respectively, issues of mobility, sustainability, aesthetics, and connectivity. These programmes have been selected to enable groundbreaking approaches to a range of pressing social concerns associated with globalisation, including issues of multiculturalism and multilingualism; ethics, politics, and nationalism; and the rise of new media and digital culture.
