Research Clusters and Networks

The Division of Humanities has established a number of Research Clusters and Networks in areas where it has a concentration of research strength.

Below you will find a list of clusters and networks that staff in the department are coordinators or researchers.

Cultures and Identities in Film, Media and Literature

Cultures and Identities is a research network dedicated to presenting themes relating to the development of culture and identity in film, media and literature. This project explores in particular the issues relating to the formation of identity in the aftermath of post-colonialism, post-feminism, and post-modernism and in the context of contemporary globalization.

An interdisciplinary network, it has as its goal to foster new research by bringing together researchers with common interests from different disciplines using different methodologies. Its aim will be to encourage productive dialogue on the general topics of identity, culture, and social change with emphasis on film, television, new media and literatures, including national literatures.

For more information.

Cultural Transformations

The Cultural Transformations Research Group is an interdisciplinary gathering of established and emerging scholars who explore the ways culture, broadly defined, changes and adapts to new locations, to interactions, to the availability of new media, and to other contextual changes. Within this framework members of the group examine, individually or in small groups, cultural products and art-works and their formation from a range of geographical and historical contexts and across a range of media including literature, film, television, theatre, music and new media.

For more information.

Political Communication, Policy, and Participation

This cluster aims to prioritize research that seeks to assess and enhance citizen participation/engagement in a range of civic activities that are central to civil society including policy formation/negotiation. The cluster will organize and coordinate research on political communication, and related issues of 'public policy formation' and 'public sphere participation'. The cluster will develop and apply reconceptualizations of the role of political communication at both the national and international levels. At the national level, researchers will work with theories of civil society that view engaged, informed civility as essential for public sphere participation.   At the international level, researchers will also apply theories of media and globalization that trace the emergence of a transnational media system with many implications for both national and transnational politics and social institutions. For more information.

Download a copy of the March Newsletter. (3.1mb)

PPP Postgraduate Research Workshop 12th April 2006. Democratisation- Communication Flow and Interaction

Download a copy of the programme. (312 kb)

Postcolonial Studies Research Network

The Postcolonial Studies Research Network brings together an interdisciplinary group of established and emerging scholars whose research engages with a range of aspects of postcoloniality. These include the historical cultures of empire, and the contemporary cultural politics of indigeneity, of (post)colonial settlement, and of the diasporic condition. We make critical theoretical interventions into diverse historical and contemporary questions of ethics, political economy, cultural formations and representations, and the uses and implications of media and technology in relation to a variety of (post)colonial contexts, including Aotearoa-New Zealand, Australia, Canada, the Pacific Islands, India, South and South East Asia, Africa and the Caribbean.

For more information.