Impasse? Cultures of globalization and the globalization of culture

Debates on globalization as a key concept imagining the world in the 21st century are running deep in all social sciences and cultural studies today. Attempts at theorizing space and place go hand in hand with a far reaching critique of mainstream social and cultural thought, particularly the idée fixe of self-containedness and territorial enclosure of societies, communities, and cultures. It is this “spatial turn” in combination with the radical shift of analytical attention from stasis to mobility that define the main issues of quotidian globalization discourse.
The opening conference for the new IFK_focus on “The Cultural Paradoxes of Globalization” will investigate four key issues: the conceptualization of global cultures, the interplay of space, place and culture, the new features of architecture, urbanism and postcolonial challenges, and the international flows of media images and messages.

CONCEPTION: Helmuth Berking (Institute of Sociology, Technical University Darmstadt)
PARTICIPANTS: Heike Behrend (Institute for African Studies, University Cologne), Michael A. Crang (Department of Geography, Durham University), Jonathan Friedman (Department of Sociology, Lund University), Ulf Hannerz (Department of Social Anthropology, Stockholm University, IFK_Senior Fellow), Mark B. Hansen (Department of English, University of Chicago), Jyoti Hosagrahar (School of International and Public Affairs, Columbia University), Anthony D. King (Department of Art History, Binghamton University), Rolf Lindner (Institute of European Ethnology, Humboldt University, Berlin), Martina Löw (Institute of Sociology, TU Darmstadt), Purnima Mankekar (Center for India and South Asia, UCLA), David Morley (Goldsmiths College, University of London), Claus Pias (Institute of Philosophy, University of Vienna), Rob Shields (Department of Sociology, University of Alberta), John Tomlinson (School of Arts and Humanities, Nottingham Trent University), Anna Wessely (Department of Sociology, ELTE Budapest)