AvÐÔ°®

The city is a place of meaning-making practices that generate various forms of spatiality. Within the research area of The City – Culture and Democracy, studies focus on governing strategies: marketing, urban development projects and cultural planning, as well as on people’s everyday use and re-use of urban space. The role of architecture, art and culture in urban development is analysed, along with everyday culture and geographies of the city. Governing cities is largely about spatial distribution of resources, making questions of democracy particularly relevant. Themes of segregation, gentrification and the function(s) of public space are used to analyse how power and influence are negotiated and distributed among different actors and stakeholders.

In recent decades, ‘cultural heritage’ has emerged as one of the key concepts of critical cultural study. The research area Cultural Heritage, Image and Narrative contextualises how heritage and archival material, especially in oral, corporeal and visual form, impact on knowledge production, individual and collective identity, values and power relations. Building on interdisciplinary collaboration between the Department of Cultural AvÐÔ°®s and the Centre for Critical Heritage Studies at the University AvÐÔ°®, we explore democratic issues pertaining to cultural heritage. This includes cultural expressions in a wide range of material and intangible cultural heritage, from everyday routines and traditions to the use of narrative and re-consumption. More specifically, studies focus on how images (in a broad sense), life stories and archives can enable people to understand themselves, their communities, their contexts, their pasts, their aspirations and their futures in new and constructive ways.

The research group studies activism, feminism, queer and trans movements in both local and transnational contexts. At the heart of this research are questions about how political subjectivity, community and resistance arise through activist practice. Decoloniality, racism, capitalism, neoliberalism and the relationship between religion/secularism and North/South are of particular interest. South Asia, Latin America, Turkey, Russia and Scandinavia are some of the geographical starting points. The research group contributes to feminist theory and methodology by posing questions such as: How can transnational movements be studied beyond organisations? Can knowledge gained through video-archives challenge and renew academic knowledge production? How can resistance be theorised as a space for interactions between micro and macro levels? What can we learn from the tensions surrounding concepts like civil society, gender equality and human rights?

The main focus of the research field Youth and Popular Culture is directed towards the life conditions of the modern individual and their need for a sense of meaning and community. Contemporary social and cultural processes of change – such as globalisation and mediatisation – have led to the dissolving of traditional patterns of identity once connected to class, gender, ethnicity, nation and religion. The central interest for our research is to study how children, young people and adults use symbols, styles, cultural codes and consumption, and the production and uses of music, dance, film and fashion, to deal with changes in their contemporary life world. By putting phenomena like these into their social and historical contexts, we can study their functions and understand them as signifying practices. Seen through this kind of theoretical lens, these cultural phenomena can all be seen as symbolic expressions for the struggles of the contemporary individual to deal with and understand the life conditions of late modernity.