Centre for Cultural Research

Welcome

Message from the Director

Welcome to the Centre for Cultural Resarch (CCR), an internationally recognised research centre within the College of Arts at the University of Western Sydney, Australia.

CCR aims to address the cultural challenges and contradictions of a 21st century world that is increasingly globalised, diverse and technologically mediated. A key to its research mission is collaboration - researching with communities and organisations, focusing on problem solving, and generating new knowledge in context.

Cultural research is a relatively new academic field, formed out of the connections between Cultural Studies and the disciplines of Anthropology, Geography, History and Sociology. It is also in fruitful dialogue with related fields, including Asian Studies, Education, Media and Communications, and Philosophy.

CCR researchers have initiated and undertaken over 50 research projects during the last three years, many of them funded by highly competitive grants from the Australian Research Council. CCR regularly hosts visiting international scholars attracted by its innovative, dynamic research program. It is also deeply committed to, and successful in, research training, both through conventional thesis-based Masters and Doctorates, and through professional Doctor of Cultural Research and Doctor of Creative Arts degrees.

CCR is a member of the Consortium of Humanities Centers and Institutes administered from Duke University, USA and the Council for the Humanties, Arts and Social Sciences (CHASS) based in Canberra. It currently has links with related centres and institutes in the field of cultural research in Asia, Europe and North America, and is expanding its range of research connections around the world.

On behalf of the centre, I am pleased to welcome you and invite you to contact us if you have any questions about our research and research training programs.

Professor David Rowe
BA (Nottingham), MA (York), PhD (Essex)
Director

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Areas of Expertise

Framing contexts
The Centre for Cultural Research explores the cultural challenges and opportunities of a world that is increasingly globalised, diverse and technologically mediated. It especially emphasises collaboration - researching with communities and organisations, solving problems, and generating new knowledge in particular contexts.

CCR researchers approach culture as a vital dimension of social, political and economic life. Their practice-oriented, interdisciplinary research produces the leading-edge academic work for which CCR is nationally and internationally recognised.

CCR seeks to build the cultural intelligence needed for a complex and changing world, researching cultural diversity and complexity in the contexts of:

• communities - intercultural and intercommunal relations, global movements, transnational experiences, and diasporic identities
• environments - the construction and interaction of natural and human worlds, the politics of sustainability, and social and cultural dimensions of new technologies
• media - the role and power of contemporary communications and forms of representation, and new modes of citizenship in a mediated public sphere
• institutions - governance, policy and practice, especially in cultural and creative organisations, and emerging forms of cultural labour and economy
• cities - local-global relations in urban environments, cultural planning and development, and the social and political dynamics of everyday life.

These themes – captured in the mnemonic CEMIC – are neither comprehensive nor mutually exclusive in mapping CCR’s research activities, but provide useful framing contexts for the Centre’s work.

Location

The Centre for Cultural Research is located on the Parramatta campus.

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