Strategic Working Groups

Cultural Forms / Local Stakes / Global Circuits || 2008-2009

In 2008-2009, the Townsend Center will fund a Strategic Group on Cultural Forms / Local Stakes / Global Circuits. The directors of the group will be Charles Briggs (Anthropology) and Deniz Göktürk (German).

In their research projects, Professors Briggs and Göktürk have long shared a common interest in channels of circulation and concepts of valuation, from the perspectives of disciplines as wide-ranging as Anthropology, Music, Film and Media Studies, Folklore, and Literary Studies in Dutch, French, German, and other languages. Their studies illuminate a world that is transnationally connected through migration, markets, and media, our intellectual maps, cultural policies, and academic departmentalization; a world that still relies heavily on categories and labels of identification. These categories are defined not in terms of interdependence but territorial fixation, national origin, and “authentic” heritage. Recent critiques suggest that our attempts to think beyond national borders and fixed social domains have been shaped by naïve notions of global and local, of flow and circulation, and of how cultural forms are produced, owned, and valued. When sites of production, translation, and reception are dispersed world wide--each shaped by global/local assemblages of language, interest, and capital--how do we adequately document the complex ways that objects, practices, capital, and bodies circulate between them?

The Strategic Working Group on Cultural Forms / Local Stakes / Global Circuits will bring into conversation researchers who are studying shifting and emerging objects. The goal, however, is not to compare notes but to collaboratively discover new ways of thinking beyond efforts to “update” concepts and scholarly practices. The problem goes beyond disjunctures between the pace of change in the world and the snail-like pace of “academic time.” The digitization of scholarly writing and its fusion with other modes of knowledge production and exchange over the Internet suggests how deeply corporations, states, and NGOs are influenced by their readings of academic writing. The group will explore ways to replace established boundary-work practices that promote the illusion of autonomy between disciplines and between “the academy” and “the real world” with intimate understandings of unequal exchanges of knowledge between social domains--thereby generating new ways of enabling scholars to handle the complexities of the twenty-first century.

Other group members include Daniel Boyarin (Professor of Near Eastern Studies), Pheng Cheah (Professor of Rhetoric), Suzanne Guerlac (Professor of French), Carlos Noreña (Professor of History), Aihwa Ong (Professor of Anthropology), Candace Slater (Professor of Spanish & Portuguese), and Chenxi Tang (Professor of Professor of German).