Culturalisation and Globalisation:

Advancing Cultural Research in Sweden and Australia

ACSIS and Centre for Cultural Research (CCR) has been involved in a mutual exchange programme in the last four years. Due to a contribution from STINT it is now possible for us to expand this cooperation over the coming years. STINT has given us a grant of 400 000 Sek/year for two to four years to develop a common research project entitled Culturalisation and Globalisation.

There is a widespread understanding that processes of Culturalisation and globalisation characterise the present era. These two discourses are deeply interrelated. On one hand, culture – in any of its many forms – seems to expand and acquire an increasingly central role in political, economic and social life. The discourses of aestheticisation, mediatisation, creative or experience industries and knowledge societies put cultural aspects into the focus of regional planning, sustainable growth and concerns for democracy and social cohesion in a late modern world. Culturalisation is a general term for all such claims, summing up a cluster of processes, discourses and practices, transforming the position and meaning of culture in society at large.

Culture has tended to be discussed within national contexts, including the impact of the cultures of dominant nations on less powerful ones. But the growing networks of transport, trade, travel, tourism, migration and communication have redefined the relations between the local and the global. Discourses of diversity, hybridity and transnational flows have made it increasingly futile to be confined to local or national understandings of culture. The process of globalisation captures this cluster of ideas, with its economic and political as well as social and aesthetic dimensions increasingly enmeshed with the aforementioned process of culturalisation.

These two processes feed upon each other. Intensified transnational encounters make interpretations of media texts and cultural representations an urgent task in politics, business and everyday life. The increased foregrounding of culture in social life is often experienced as a global trend that calls for local accommodation. Globalisation may be seen as one facet and force of culturalisation, at the same time as culturalisation may be interpreted as one of the main forms of globalisation. Still, surprisingly, much research remains anchored to only one of these dimensions, neglecting to explore and analyse their dynamic interaction and exchange.

This project will bring these sets of perspectives on contemporary cultural processes and conditions together. A set of cultural domains that relates to the overarching theme will be explored in four different workshops and Ph.D. courses

Cultural Policy and Cultural Production: This theme will be developed in a workshop and a Ph.D. course in Sydney, spring 2009.

Media and Popular Culture: Will be discussed in a workshop and a course in Norrköping, spring 2010.

Urban Tourism: Is the object of a workshop and a course in Sydney, spring 2011.

Uses of History and Museums: Will be examined in a workshop and a Ph.D. course in Norrköping or Sydney, spring 2012.

Apart from this, the department that is not currently hosting any of these bigger events will arrange a smaller workshop that relates to the theme but has a more exploratory character. These will take place in Norrköping in the autumn of 2008; in Sydney, autumn 2009; Norrköping, autumn 2010 and Sydney, autumn 2011.

This is an extensive research project that will lead to an extended exchange of personnel as well as a series public and semi public arrangements. You can read more about the project and its upcoming events at Culutralisation and Globalisations webside: http://www.isak.liu.se/acsis/culturalisation-globalisation