The Future of Cultural Analysis

Auteur

Murat Aydemir is associate professor in Literary and Cultural Analysis at the University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands. He is the author of Images of Bliss: Ejaculation, Masculinity, Meaning (Minnesota University Press, 2004) and the (co)editor of Migratory Settings: Transnational Perspectives on Place (Brill, 2008) and Indiscretions: At the Intersection of Queer and Postcolonial Theory (Brill, 2011). From 2011 to 2021, he served as academic director of the Netherlands Institute for Cultural Analysis (NICA). Noa Roei is assistant professor in Literary and Cultural Analysis at University of Amsterdam and a research fellow at the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis. She works in the field of visual culture, focusing on conflict, war, and nationalism, with a recent turn towards questions of spatiality, care, and infrastructure. Aylin Kuryel is assistant professor in Literary and Cultural Analysis at the University of Amsterdam and documentary maker. Among the books she co-edited are Cultural Activism: Practices, Dilemmas and Possibilities (Rodopi, 2010) and Küresel Ayaklanmalar Ça.inda Direni. ve Estetik (Resistance and Aesthetics in the Age of Global Uprisings, Iletisim Press, 2015).

Texte du rabat

Across the humanities and the social sciences, "cultural analysis" is a vibrant research practice. Since the introduction of the approach in the 1990s, the main principles of cultural analysis have remained largely the same: interdisciplinarity, social and political urgency, a heuristic use of theoretical concepts, the detailed analysis of objects of culture, and a sharp awareness of the situatedness of the scholar in the present. But is the practice still suited to the spiraling of social, political, economic, and environmental crises that mark our time? Drawing on experiences in research, teaching, administration, institutional politics, activism, and the creative arts, contributors explore what cultural analysis was back then, what it is right now, and what it may be by 2034. In a shifting conjuncture, these contributors strike notes of concern, discomfort, defiance, self-criticism, complicity, and irony-as well as a renewed sense of urgency and care.