CAL Global Communications

This project brings together researchers across disciplines to explore past and present approaches to global communications, tracing creative, critical and popular reactions at key moments over the past 200 years.

We are especially invested in exploring relationships between lived experience of local environments and global networks, in an era subject to intensive transformation by the combined effects of artificial intelligence, big data, and global media, in ways that echo previous generations’ experiences of telegraphy, radio and telephony. We aim to situate contemporary research on digital media and communications in the context of longer historical trends, building the groundwork to influence public and institutional understanding of these issues.

We opened with three core themes to adapt as discussions develop.

  1. Imagining distance: Long-distance communications can affect perceptions of time and space. How are impressions of distance represented in creative arts, pop culture and other media?
  2. Narratives of newness: Global communications have been subject to a series of technological shifts over the past two centuries, from telegraphy to artificial intelligence. How have different disciplines tackled expectations of novelty and progress, for example in discourse of mind-expanding or transformative effects?
  3. Communities and environment: How do communications across global distances, ubiquitous media networks and communications infrastructures affect local environmental contexts, cohesion of communities, and individual health and wellbeing?

Priorities

  • Develop a cross-departmental network of researchers to explore a range of approaches to global communications.
  • Co-create resources for future research, public engagement or impact activities.
  • Provide space for research and help identify potential collaborations within the group, e.g. opportunities for co-authoring or mutual support in funding applications.

Activities

We are building an online gallery of texts, quotes, images and objects that reflect approaches to global communications in the College of Arts and Law. You can see a prototype version here:

Around the World in 80 Ways

Get Involved

If you’d like to suggest items for the gallery or come along to future networking events, we’d love to hear from you. Please email Dorothy Butchard (d.butchard@bham.ac.uk) to join the Teams network and come along to future events and workshops.

Thanks

This initiative is funded by Incubator funding from the College of Arts and Law at the University of Birmingham