Cultural Transformations is an interdisciplinary research programme within Aarhus University’s School of Communication and Culture (IKK) established in 2013, which draws its membership from 8 of the 9 departments in IKK. We interrogate socio-cultural implications of cultural production, circulation and transformation, and explore expression in language, praxis, literature, media, sound and performance, (inter)cultural politics and communication, and outward facing roles for arts and humanities research. 

The accelerated, unforeseen and surprising transformations we witness today call for relevant critical research from the fields of arts, culture and academic humanities to respond to the multiple challenges surrounding us: shifting cultural alliances in the world, crucial concerns about climate and sustainability, the effects of encompassing mediatization, the paradoxes of artificial intelligence, increasing societal fragmentation and the erosion of freedom and democratic values. 

We address these concerns through research in topics such as cultural institutions and policy, popular music, voice, performance, academic filmmaking, post-/decoloniality, death and dying, American, Canadian, Latin American and Irish Studies, fandom, and narratives of health. We provide a responsive and collaborative space where members, each affiliated to different articulations of disciplinarity, come together to contemplate, study, explore, share and engage in debates on how culture both transforms and is transformed.