The Amsterdam Centre for Globalisation Studies is the public face of the Cultural Transformations and Globalisation Research Priority Area. The Research Priority Areas represent the very best the University of Amsterdam has to offer in terms of research. They are also areas in which the UvA is a leader worldwide. A quarter of all research conducted at the UvA is organised within these priority areas.

The research conducted within the ACGS focuses on the profound and lasting ways in which globalisation is rapidly transforming our world. From new patterns of migration and diaspora, to new trends in city and nation building, to new techno-informational networks of communication and knowledge, the world is undoubtedly in rapid flux.

While the economic dimensions of globalisation have been widely studied, far less attention has been paid to its social and cultural dimensions. And yet, the need to identify and understand how globalisation is effecting social and cultural change – spanning from Asia to Europe and from Africa to the Americas – is central to any effort to form a comprehensive picture of our contemporary world. The ACGS responds directly to this need and, in the process, provides a strong humanities and qualitative social science perspective that is frequently lacking in existing academic and public debates.

The Faculties of Humanities and Social and Behavioural Sciences at the University of Amsterdam are ideally placed to take up this challenge. They are home to a large and highly-active community of leading international experts working across the full range of humanities and social science fields related to globalisation studies, including film and media studies, literature, history, philosophy, visual culture, musicology, religion, performance studies, politics, sociology and anthropology.

These experts have a longstanding tradition of analysing discourses and representations of the nation state, European citizenship, migrants, minorities, new media, and other related issues that are undergoing rapid and dramatic change as a result of globalisation.

The ACGS brings these experts together into interdisciplinary teams of researchers and builds on their shared research momentum and knowledge to generate new ways of understanding and explaining the relationship between globalisation and cultural transformation.

The ACGS is organised into four interlocking research programmes: mobility, sustainability, aesthetics and connectivity. These programmes have been selected to enable ground-breaking approaches to a range of pressing social concerns associated with globalisation, including issues of multiculturalism and multilingualism; ethics, politics, and nationalism; and the rise of new media and digital culture.

Although each research programme pursues a specific set of thematic, theoretical, and topical concerns related to globalisation, the Research Priority Area is specifically designed to stimulate exchange and collaboration between the research programmes in the form of joint projects, conferences, publications, and grant applications.

See also http://acgs.uva.nl