Welcome

Contemporary political orthodoxy assumes that the arts matter, but this view is often tied to a narrow conception of the ‘creative economy’. Challenging and seeking to expand this reductive position, the 'Translating Cultures' project sets out to illuminate the multiple ways in which the arts manifest a significant presence in an age of globalization.

The project is conceived as a series of case studies that take up the theme of ‘translating cultures’ from different perspectives and with regard to different geopolitical constellations. They pose the central question of the arts’ role in the production and reproduction of knowledge, taking up central questions of translation as it is understood in the AHRC’s emerging research theme ‘Translating Cultures’: not merely translation from one language to another, but translation as cultural exchange, in the form of translation from one media or discipline to another, between theory and practice, or between different political, social and cultural contexts.

The project builds on existing work carried out in Aberdeen, some examples of which are provided here:

Diaspora as Social and Cultural Practice Diaspora as Social and Cultural Practice: a Study of Transnational Networks across Europe and Africa. An AHRC-funded collaborative research project led by Dr Nadia Kiwan, University of Aberdeen and Professor Ulrike Meinhof, University of Southampton, which focuses on the ways in which (post-)migrant cultural practitioners, performers, and musicians originating from North-Africa and Madagascar are able to use multiple translocal and transnational networks across African, European and wider global spaces. This project marks a key development in the empirical study of networks, by investigating links between migrant cultural practitioners which develop outside of established cultural/historical ties. Learn More
Electroacoustic Music Pete Stollery composes almost exclusively in the electroacoustic medium, particularly music where there exists an interplay between the original "meaning" of sounds and sounds existing purely as sound, divorced from their physical origins. In his music, this is achieved by the juxtaposition of real (familiar) and unreal (unfamiliar) sounds to create surreal landscapes.
In recent years he has become interested in how we relate to our sonic environment and has created many works for non-performance contexts.

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