Culture, Politics, Ethics

This inter-disciplinary project seeks to explore the complex and diverse interfaces of culture, politics and ethics in contemporary political life. The claims of those who insist we live in post-modernity and therefore in transformed times for political debate have significantly challenged the way we look at culture, ethics and politics. The ‘cultural turn’ has alternately impoverished or enriched (or both) debate around and strategies and repertoires for political intervention and ethical articulations in the public realm, and therefore led to a renewed and critical interest in the relationship between cultural life, aesthetics and political thought and action. Ethics has been retrieved from philosophical formalism and academic marginalia to the forefront of political debate with alternate claims that it is the ‘last grand narrative’ and the basis for thinking future particular formulations of political organisation and public life. Politics itself has shifted from a traditional focus on institutions and processed in organised systems to take concern at more disparate movement alignments in political representation and articulation within the public realm and the changed conditions and circumstances under which they have prominence. Whilst questions of power, resistance, oppression and inclusion are still important, questions of aesthetics, performance, the affective and governance have provided a critical framework for rethinking politics.

The purpose of this project is to provide an international network and space to explore these issues and debates, and to explore them across disciplinary and domain boundaries.