Global Communications
Past, Present, Future
Bringing together staff and students at the University of Birmingham to explore effects and experiences of global communications.
Our activities in the College of Arts & Law and beyond aim to trace past and present approaches to global communications across creative, critical and popular contexts.
Themes
Find out about activities across key themes for 2025-26.
Digital Media
Exploring digital media, communications, and creative industries in partnership with the Centre for Digital Cultures.
Global Pop Culture
A cross-disciplinary working group for researchers in all aspects of popular culture.
Wellbeing
Working with the Centre for Urban Wellbeing to understand wellbeing and inclusion in global communications.
Key Aims
In 2024-25 this initiative was supported by a CAL research incubator grant, aiming to:
- Develop an active interdisciplinary group with wide interests in global communications.
- Provide space for research and identify potential collaborations within and outside the University of Birmingham.
- 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
Our online research gallery gathers texts, quotes, images and objects that reflect global communications over the past 200 years.
The gallery is an evolving project curated by researchers in CAL and beyond. If you have a suggestion to add to the gallery, please get in touch! Email Dorothy Butchard (d.butchard@bham.ac.uk).
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
Our workshops 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.
What we’ve been doing
For a list of past and upcoming activities, browse our events page here.
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.
