About CCR

• Welcome message
• Research agenda
  

Welcome

The Centre for Cultural Research (CCR) is a leading interdisciplinary research centre based in the College of Arts at the University of Western Sydney, Australia.

CCR aims to build the cultural intelligence needed to address the cultural challenges and contradictions of a 21st century world that is increasingly globalised, diverse and technologically mediated. Building cultural intelligence means recognition that confronting issues in their full complexity is the most practical path to generating solutions to contemporary cultural and social problems.

The distinguishing feature of CCR research is critical engagement. Combining theoretically directed research with a practical emphasis on collaboration, this means working across disciplines, sectors, communities and sites to generate and empirically test innovative methods of knowledge production.

CCR’s distinctive approach derives from the shared commitment of its members and researchers to intersectional thinking. CCR research aims to integrate and move across a range of issues, including the politics of intercultural dialogue, the governance of cultural institutions, the changing face of cultural labour, and the cultural collapse of the myth of human separateness from nature.

Associate Professor Brett Neilson
CCR Director

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Research Agenda

CCR has developed a unifying research theme as well as four integrative themes. These themes function as organisational foci that guide the development of cross-theme projects.

Unifying theme: Knowledge Practices: Theory, Method, Engagement

The purpose of the unifying research theme is to coordinate and reflect on the relations between theory, method and engagement that occur within and across the integrative themes. This unifying theme stimulates the development of innovative interdisciplinary methods spanning divisions within the humanities and social sciences and facilitates their use across different areas of inquiry within CCR. In doing so, it aims to develop new paradigms for engaging with research partners and users, going beyond linear knowledge transfer paradigms, to involve them as active co-producers of new knowledge practices.

Integrative Theme 1: Intercultural Dialogue

In today’s deeply interconnected, globalised world, ‘intercultural dialogue’ has been an ongoing buzzword and platform intended to ameliorate cross-cultural tension, aversion and conflict, and to promote social harmony, respect and understanding. CCR aims to contribute to an interrogation and elaboration of this agenda – both in theory and practice – through a fundamental repositioning of intercultural dialogue as a central yet problematic task for all social and human practice today. This integrative theme brings into play conceptual advances in humanities and social science scholarship that have nuanced understandings of cultures as fundamentally overlapping, interdependent, and internally negotiated.

Integrative Theme 2: Institutions, Governance, Conduct

In modern liberal democracies such as Australia the shaping of social discipline has been mediated by the work of institutions that act on the social conduct of populations. Cultural institutions such as museums, art galleries, libraries, broadcasting, and cultural policy agencies have developed distinctive forms of making ‘culture’ as a resource of social change through the deployment of expert knowledge disciplines such as art history, literary studies, aesthetics, archaeology, and so on. Their continued effectiveness is in need of thorough analysis, if not fundamental critique leading to potential policy overhaul. This integrative theme will address this important challenge through in-depth investigation of the historical and contemporary performance of institutions in social and cultural governance.

Integrative Theme 3: Cultural Economy and Globalisation

Three of the most complex and contested processes of the contemporary era are the increasing importance of culture to the social, the extensive development of the media, and the diffusion of culture and labour across national boundaries. They characterise, respectively, the breakdown of barriers between culture and society; the heightened importance of the media to the entire field of culture and its production, consumption and politics; and the destabilisation of established relationships of time, space and collective identity. This integrative theme generates critically sceptical inquiry into grand theories surrounding the relationships between the creative arts, culture, economics, labour and globalisation by engaging with specific, concrete contexts and problems.

Integrative Theme 4: Culture, Nature, Environments

The idea that civilisation marks humanity’s triumph over the limits imposed by nature is a defining, but also increasingly contested feature, of Western-derived cultures. Today, much that is happening in areas of environmental concern – from climate change, to land degradation, to the genetic modification of organisms – exposes the deceptive fantasy that upholds the divide of culture from nature. The problematisation of the nature/culture divide shatters the logic of any definitive specification not only of environment but also of culture itself. This integrative theme addresses these questions by pursuing the philosophical, conceptual and empirical challenges of ‘more-than-human’ modes of enquiry for cultural research.

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