How does culture shape politics and diplomacy? How do media and technology transform the ways cultures are communicated, contested and shared? And why is culture central to how institutions, communities and societies understand themselves and others?
Culture is everywhere in contemporary political and social life. It can foster dialogue, cooperation and peace, but it can also create boundaries, reinforce inequalities and legitimise conflict. From diplomacy and international organisations to media, technology, education and social movements, cultural meanings shape how people understand the world and how they act within it.
The Cultural Studies research area is being developed into the Academy’s fifth department, with four closely connected pillars: research, teaching, public science and science diplomacy. It provides a space for interdisciplinary research and education while fostering dialogue between academics, diplomats, policymakers, cultural professionals and other practitioners.
At the heart of the area is a transcultural understanding of culture. Culture is not treated as a fixed set of characteristics belonging to particular nations or groups. Rather, cultural meanings are continuously produced, appropriated and negotiated across encounters between people, communities, institutions and forms of knowledge. The research area explores how power relations shape these processes across fields of particular relevance to contemporary global affairs, including:
- Politics and diplomacy: how cultural meanings shape diplomacy, international cooperation, conflict, human rights and public diplomacy;
- Identity, diversity and belonging: how identities are constructed, negotiated and contested, and how cultural politics can enable inclusion or produce exclusion;
- Media, communication and technology: how media, platforms, algorithms and transnational communication flows shape cultural exchange and political life;
- Heritage, memory and public space: how societies remember, represent and contest the past, and how heritage and memory can become both sites of conflict and spaces for peacebuilding and resilience;
- Environment and the more-than-human: how different cultures, traditions and forms of knowledge shape and contest understandings of human–environment relations, environmental justice and the rights of non-human life;
- Transcultural communication and translation: how meanings travel across languages, institutions, media and social contexts, and how translation can become a form of cultural and political negotiation.