This project brings together researchers in the College of Arts & Law and beyond to explore effects of global communications over the past 200 years.
Our activities aim to trace past and present approaches to global communications across creative, critical and popular contexts.
Key Aims
This initiative is supported by a CAL research incubator grant, aiming to:
- Develop an interdisciplinary group with interests in global communications.
- Provide space for research and help identify potential collaborations.
- Co-create resources for future research, public engagement or impact activities.
Understanding lived experience of global networks and their relationship with local environments.
A transhistorical approach to global communications can help to identify patterns and trends over time, bringing a range of perspectives together and building the groundwork to influence public and institutional understanding of shifts in global communications.
This is important work in an era subject to intensive transformation by combined effects of artificial intelligence, big data, and global media, in ways that echo previous generations’ experiences of phenomena such as telegraphy, radio and telephony.
Around the World in 80 Ways
We are building an online research gallery to gather texts, quotes, images and objects that reflect approaches to global communications, curated by researchers in CAL and beyond.
Get involved
If you’d like to join future activities and events, please request access to the Teams network. All welcome, from any career stage or discipline.
Connections
Developing a cross-departmental network of research and teaching linked to global communications.
Workshops
In Spring 2025, a series of workshops will bring together different perspectives on key themes and ideas.
Resources
Our activities are creating an archive of resources for further research, impact or public engagement work.
Future Collaborations
We aim to identify potential connections, e.g. for co-authoring or mutual support in funding applications.
Topics and questions
Imagining distance
Innovations in long-distance communications can change popular perceptions of time and space. How have impressions of distance been represented in creative arts, pop culture, and other media?
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?
Communities, environment and wellbeing
How do communications across global distances, ubiquitous media networks and communications infrastructures affect local environmental contexts, cohesion of communities, and individual health and wellbeing?
News and Events
- Find out more about our upcoming events – all welcome!
- Join the Teams channel to follow updates, connect with others and access resources.
