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In recent decades, ‘cultural heritage’ has emerged as one of the key concepts of critical cultural study. The research area Cultural Heritage, Image and Narrative contextualises how heritage and archival material, especially in oral, corporeal and visual form, impact on knowledge production, individual and collective identity, values and power relations. Building on interdisciplinary collaboration between the Department of Cultural 91̽»¨s and the Centre for Critical Heritage Studies at the University 91̽»¨, we explore democratic issues pertaining to cultural heritage. This includes cultural expressions in a wide range of material and intangible cultural heritage, from everyday routines and traditions to the use of narrative and re-consumption. More specifically, studies focus on how images (in a broad sense), life stories and archives can enable people to understand themselves, their communities, their contexts, their pasts, their aspirations and their futures in new and constructive ways.

The city is a place of meaning-making practices that generate various forms of spatiality. Within the research area of The City – Culture and Democracy, studies focus on governing strategies: marketing, urban development projects and cultural planning, as well as on people’s everyday use and re-use of urban space. The role of architecture, art and culture in urban development is analysed, along with everyday culture and geographies of the city. Governing cities is largely about spatial distribution of resources, making questions of democracy particularly relevant. Themes of segregation, gentrification and the function(s) of public space are used to analyse how power and influence are negotiated and distributed among different actors and stakeholders.

The research conducted in the area of dance and music cultures is rarely about dance and music per se, often focusing instead on everything surrounding these two common and important cultural expressions. When, where and why is music heard and performed, and by whom? The same questions apply to dance: who dances what, when and why? Some of these issues are always addressed in some form, but rarely or never do they all appear in the same project or study.

Practically everyone encounters dance and/or music in some form. Music in particular is all around us almost all the time, but dance is also something that everyone relates to, whether or not they dance themselves or watch performances. The plethora of opinions about dance and music are what make these cultural expressions an interesting object of study.

Those of us researching dance and music cultures at the Department include musicologists, ethnologists and art historians.

The main focus of the research field Youth and Popular Culture is directed towards the life conditions of the modern individual and their need for a sense of meaning and community. Contemporary social and cultural processes of change – such as globalisation and mediatisation – have led to the dissolving of traditional patterns of identity once connected to class, gender, ethnicity, nation and religion. The central interest for our research is to study how children, young people and adults use symbols, styles, cultural codes and consumption, and the production and uses of music, dance, film and fashion, to deal with changes in their contemporary life world. By putting phenomena like these into their social and historical contexts, we can study their functions and understand them as signifying practices. Seen through this kind of theoretical lens, these cultural phenomena can all be seen as symbolic expressions for the struggles of the contemporary individual to deal with and understand the life conditions of late modernity.