Projects

The CGCC is a leader in developing new research and new approaches to understanding the globalization of markets, communities, and cultures - promising to shape the way we think about and study global communication. The CGCC is home to a number of projects that take an interdisciplinary approach to the study of global culture and communication.

Cultures of Democracy

Project Director: Dilip Gaonkar, Associate Professor, Communication Studies

The Cultures of Democracy project examines one of the most pressing issues for today’s foreign policy makers: democracy - how to foster it, where and why it thrives, and how we ought to think about it. Project Director and CGCC Director Dilip Gaonkar explains, "With the collapse of the Soviet Union , you see former Soviet states embracing the promise of democracy. This is also true in Latin America , in Asia , even in Africa and in places like Iran... To properly study and understand emerging democracies in other countries, it is important to put aside Western assumptions about the definition of a democracy."

Difficult Dialogues

Project Director: Dilip Gaonkar, Associate Professor, Communication Studies

Difficult Dialogues is scheduled to run from 2006-2008 and is an undergraduate teaching and consciousness-raising project funded by the Ford Foundation. The hallmark of the Difficult Dialogues initiative is a series of twelve seminars directed primarily at incoming freshman. The seminars will be offered by the School of Communication and taught by a select group of faculty members from a wide range of academic units. Northwestern University wants to prepare its students for leadership in the global civil society of the twenty-first century. This project works to fulfill this mission by preparing students to recognize difference in others and in themselves, to understand collective memory, and to communicate effectively about and across ethnic, religious, and other commitments. The seminars will focus on both multicultural issues and challenges in the US as well as conflicts and controversies that arise in other geographical sites over religious, ethno-racial, and cultural differences. Students will have an opportunity to become engaged participants in discussions of complex moral, religious, and cultural issues. In addition to the seminars, CGCC will organize six public forums to engage the wider university in cross-cultural awareness, learning and understanding.

Performing Diaspora

Project Director: E. Patrick Johnson, Associate Professor, Performance Studies

The Performing Diaspora project engages performance theory and praxis to study the impact of globalization on cultural identity. Participants include performance scholars/practitioners and cultural theorists who interrogate how performances of cultural identity are produced at the conjuncture of the transnational and the postcolonial. These scholars and practitioners also rearticulate notions of “home” and “identity” as on the move; these movements are sometimes voluntary but often economically propelled and politically coerced. Therefore, one goal of the project is to examine our understanding of “local context” such that we expand it to encompass the historical, dynamic, often traumatic, movements of people, ideas, images, commodities, and capital. Employing performance as theory, method, and object of study, the project ultimately interrogates how performance and the work of imagination accommodate, enable, mediate, contest, and leverage the forces of displacement, dispersal, and regrouping.

Globalizing American Studies

Project Director: Brian Edwards, Assistant Professor, English

The project was developed as a forum for thinking about the place of the U.S. and American culture in the world and to showcase comparative or transnational approaches to the study of the United States. Project goals include the creation of a network of scholars whose work is pushing the boundaries of fields such as literature, anthropology, gender studies, media studies, African American studies, and history; and to provide a dynamic space for thinking about Americanist work that responds to questions of globalization, global culture and Diaspora. Participants include United States-based scholars who are working in comparative and interdisciplinary modes and who are using archives and research outside the U.S. to analyze the international reach of American cultural production. Participants also include scholars from abroad who are analyzing the workings of U.S. politics and culture from a necessarily different perspective.

Global Visual Cultures

Project Director: Robert Hariman, Professor, Communication Studies

The project on Global Visual Cultures will explore key questions at the intersection of visual studies and globalization, with initial emphasis on three themes: (1) The visual citizen and visual advocacy: how are images of citizenship promoted, disseminated, and used within particular national contexts and in respect to articulating a global civil society? To what extent is citizenship in a global media environment dependent on visual representation, and how do those representations reflect specific interests, conventions, and ideologies? How are visual media used on behalf of global political action, whether by states, NGOs, social movements, or other actors? (2) Visual circulation and cultural identity: How do specific visual images acquire transnational circulation, and how does that affect communication and identity in varied contexts of reception? How are the “same” images and practices such as icons and video games used in different societies, and how are they used to articulate a transnational culture? How do different forms of visual literacy emerge and how do they sustain themselves or change amidst global media? (3) Visualizing global modernity: How is globalization itself dependent on visual images and conventions? How are local-global interactions and anxieties mediated by visual practices? Which visual arts, artists, and cultures offer alternative visions of global society? How do theories of the visual double as means for explicating forms of globalization?

Print Culture in the Digital Age

Project Director: Pablo J. Boczkowski, Associate Professor, Communication Studies

This project examines the global transformation of print culture in the digital age through studies of how the construction and use of digital media technologies affect the work practices, communication processes, and interaction with consumers of organizations and occupations that have traditionally been associated with print media. It currently includes studies of two of the foremost institutions of print culture: the library and the printed press. The first one looks at transformations in the higher-education library professional in Canada, the United Kingdom and the United States that have arisen as these librarians have attempted to extend their mission of cultural custody-capturing, preserving and making available the cultural record of a scholarly community-in the digital domain. The second one analyzes changes in editorial criteria and organizational practices of the Argentine press that have emerged as a result of the leading online newspapers' decisions to produce online news content for a relatively new time and space of news consumption: people who access the news online during their work day and at their work places.

The Weimar Exchange

Project Director: Helmut Muller-Sievers, Professor, German and Director of Comparative Literary Studies

The CGCC, in conjunction with the Department of German, the Program in Comparative Literary Studies, and The School of Communication’s Program in Screen Cultures is involved in an exciting transcontinental exchange program with a group of graduate students from Germany. These German doctoral students are enrolled in an interdisciplinary program called "Media of Historiography/Historiography of Media" which is sponsored by the German government and jointly administered by scholars from the universities of Weimar, Erfurt and Jena. This group of doctoral students, known as The Weimar group, is defined by a common interest in the effects of media on global culture. During a visit to Northwestern by the Weimar group’s faculty director, it was determined that there is a great deal of synergy between the Weimar group and a considerable cross section of graduate work at Northwestern. A plan was born to initiate a long term-exchange program with a kick-off workshop taking place at Northwestern in February, 2006. The hope is that a number of joint opportunities will emerge including joint publications and quarterly or year long exchange programs between Weimar and Northwestern students and faculty.