Organisation profile

CECC was created in 2007 as an interdisciplinary hub in the Humanities responding to the challenges brought about by globalization and media change and the growing awareness about the role of culture in shaping the 21st century. CECC's mission is the study of culture literature art and communication as drivers of societal change and the promotion of advanced research training in the humanities with a focus on the development of innovative cross-disciplinary challenge-based inquiry. CECC's objects of study are texts in the broad semiotic sense of the term from literature and the visual and performative arts to news posts or tweets. It is focused on old and emerging discursive techniques driven to underpin the strategies whereby meaning is constituted where the virtual meets the physical and hence redesigns the very idea of the human. The changing practices in communication enabled by digital technologies and new media as well as the trials of cultural interaction in the wake of human mobility prompted by opportunity need or conflict are reshaping today's cultural dynamics. Aimed at unpacking this change and its impact on the wider circulation of intellectual energies across the globe in late modernity CECC structures its research according to two tracks that reveal the complementary conceptual dynamics of the centre's scholarly work. Under the perspective of "Cyber Humanity" CECC studies the impact of technological and digital change on cultural development as well as the central role of media in the construction of cultural narratives. Under a second and complementary perspective CECC studies "Global Cultures" in their diversity both as a matter of conflict and belonging.