Across the humanities and the social sciences, cultural analysis is a vibrant research practice. Since its introduction in the 1990s, its main principles have remained largely the same: interdisciplinarity, political urgency, a heuristic use of concepts, the detailed analysis of objects of culture, and an awareness of the scholars situatedness in the present. But is the practice still suited to the spiraling of social, political, and environmental crises that mark our time? Drawing on experiences in research, teaching, activism, and the creative arts, contributors explore what cultural analysis was back then, what it is now, and what it may be by 2034. In a shifting conjuncture, contributors strike notes of discomfort, defiance, and ironyas well as a renewed sense of urgency and care.
Introduction: Cultural Analysis, Circa 2034 - Noa Roei, Murat Aydemir,
and Aylin Kuryel, Part One: Speaking and Silenced Objects, Cultural Analysis:
Critical Encounters in Time, Space, and Thought - Mieke Bal, Cultural
Analysis as Reading for the Object - Esther Peeren,Notes Toward a Decolonial
Praxis of Cultural Analysis: Exemplarity and Listening as Other, Divya
Nadkarni and Alex Thinius, Objects in the Making: Cutting Through Analysis in
Art Education, Jules Sturm, Part Two: Traveling Concepts, Theories, Methods,
Cultural Analysis: A Global South Critical Approach, Paulina Aroch Fugellie,
Traveling Concepts and Conjunctural Analysis: Concepts Gone Bad, Murat
Aydemir, Cultural Analysis as Reportage, Joost de Bloois,Gathering, Framing,
and the Temporality of Cultural Analysis, Ernst van Alphen, Part Three:
Interdisciplinary Spaces,Objects, Infrastructures, and Thick Description: The
Lifeworld of the Text as the Space for Cultural Analysis, Noa Roei, From
Situated Knowledge to Intensional Field Theory, Jeff Diamanti, Cultural
Analysis at a Tipping Point, Seb Wigdel-Bowcott, Part Four: Social Relevance
and Intervention, From Social Relevance to Public Intervention: Cultural
Analysis in and out of the Classroom, Aylin Kuryel, Toward a Decolonial
Classroom: Re-situating Cultural Analysis as Pedagogical Intervention, Asli
Özgen, Crises, Social Relevance, and Critical Discomfort: Shooting Ourselves
in the Foot, Alvaro Lopez,Parochialism as Method: Pejorative, Partage,
Pastoral, Niall Martin, Afterword, Noa Roei, Murat Aydemir, and Aylin Kuryel.
Murat Aydemir is associate professor in Literary and Cultural Analysis at the University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands. He is the author of Images of Bliss: Ejaculation, Masculinity, Meaning (Minnesota University Press, 2004) and the (co)editor of Migratory Settings: Transnational Perspectives on Place (Brill, 2008) and Indiscretions: At the Intersection of Queer and Postcolonial Theory (Brill, 2011). From 2011 to 2021, he served as academic director of the Netherlands Institute for Cultural Analysis (NICA). Noa Roei is assistant professor in Literary and Cultural Analysis at University of Amsterdam and a research fellow at the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis. She works in the field of visual culture, focusing on conflict, war, and nationalism, with a recent turn towards questions of spatiality, care, and infrastructure. Aylin Kuryel is assistant professor in Literary and Cultural Analysis at the University of Amsterdam and documentary maker. Among the books she co-edited are Cultural Activism: Practices, Dilemmas and Possibilities (Rodopi, 2010) and Küresel Ayaklanmalar Ça.inda Direni. ve Estetik (Resistance and Aesthetics in the Age of Global Uprisings, Iletisim Press, 2015).
