Our emphasis on culture speaks to several overlapping areas of research interest that tap the sociocultural and contextual underpinnings to media texts and practices. These include perspectives that examine the role of culture in urban regeneration and city branding initiatives, as well as the cultural impacts these bring in terms of place image, representations of place and identity, or the cosmopolitan fabric of cities and other urban landscapes. Anthropological understandings of culture as everyday practices are also strongly reflected in the work of the research group, particular as linked to urban locales, communities of practice, amateur film practices, consumption and cultural identity, ordinary affects and everyday aesthetics, material cultures, digital culture and new media, ethnography and ethnographic film, and the creative-critical interface between art and anthropology. As the group continues to expand, research into the history, theory and practice of photography and also of gaming cultures has become an increasingly central focus of activity.
Secondly, space also occupies a central area of research focus that combines interests in cities and urban landscapes, place-making and the habitus of place, translocal and transnational geographies, spatial anthropology and spatial humanities, mapping cultures and digital mapping, as well as work that explores the proliferation of digital spaces and virtual environments, encompassing developments in the visual arts, locative media, GIS, psychogeography and deep mapping, transmediality and affect.
Lastly, memory is also an area of research that sits at the core of work being developed by members of the research group. This is represented in a number of ways, including research that addresses debates in postmemory, digital memories of disappearance (with a particular focus on Latin America), critical heritage, museum studies, archival practices, sites and practices of memory work in post-communist Bucharest, landscape and memory, everyday sites, objects and processes of remembrance.
Synthesising the various theoretical and thematic interests cited above, some of our key research interests include:
- Spatial anthropology and place-making
- Social and cultural memory; memory and visual culture
- Visual, sensory and experimental methodologies
- Affect, aesthetics and materiality
- Digital cultures and virtual spaces
- Regeneration, culture and the city
- Transdisciplinary and mixed-methods approaches
- Posthumanism and cultural/critical theory.
Members of the Culture, Space & Memory research group currently include:
- Dr. Jordana Blejmar
- Prof. Peter Buse
- Dr. Beatriz Garcia
- Dr. Alyssa Grossman
- Prof. Michelle Henning
- Dr. Wallis Motta
- Dr. Les Roberts (Group Leader)
- Dr Paolo Ruffino
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The Keyword Conversations
THE KEYWORD CONVERSATIONS will involve 4 or 5 speakers in a round-table-style setting, each presenting a 10 minute position paper that addresses, however obliquely or tenuously, ideas that will feed discussion pertaining to, after Raymond Williams, a given Keyword. Read more.