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Esther Peeren

Prof. dr. E. (Esther) Peeren

Faculty of Humanities

Literatuurwetenschap

Global Spectralities

Keywords: globalisation, spectrality, ghosts, haunting, precarity

This project explores the intersections of spectrality and globalisation. On the one hand, it looks at ghosts and haunting as globalised figures in both popular culture (as fictions or possible actualities) and the cultural theory produced in the so-called 'spectral turn.' Conversely, it explores the spectrality of globalisation, which, as a concept and as lived, remains ungraspable despite its pervasiveness and may be seen to produce ghostly subjects. The latter comprise those living increasingly precarious lives, but also the global elite in its ability to enjoy full mobility while remaining insulated from global social, economic, and ecological crises. 

The first output of the project was the publication, in August 2013, of The Spectralities Reader (Bloomsbury Academic), an edited collection of seminal texts from the 'spectral turn' containing a section on 'Spectropolitics: Ghosts of the Global Contemporary.' In September 2013, a two-day seminar on Global Spectralities was held at the University of Amsterdam, including a book launch for The Spectralities Reader at Spui25. In January 2014, a monograph entitled The Spectral Metaphor: Living Ghosts and the Agency of Invisibility appeared with Palgrave Macmillan. 

Partner: María del Pilar Blanco (University of Oxford)

Running Time: 2012-2017

Global Peripheries 

Keywords: globalisation, periphery, rural, chronotope, place

Globalisation is most often looked at in terms of its centres: global cities, developed or rapidly developing nations or regions, and hotbeds of cultural production. This project draws attention to global peripheries, those areas considered to have been sidestepped by global processes or seen as immune to them. Peripheries can be continents, regions, countries, provinces, rural areas or even cities. While the notion that these peripheries offer an escape from the impact of globalisation is largely illusionary, this impact is of a different order. The project will explore how global peripheries, as spaces, places or chronotopes, are lived and imagined—in terms of mobility, sustainability, aesthetics and connectivity.

The project is connected to the ASCA Peripheries Project.  

Running Time: 2012-2017

 

Amsterdam Centre for Globalisation Studies
© Jeroen de Kloet