Research in Art History and Visual Studies

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.

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 Sciences and the Centre for Critical Heritage Studies at the University of Gothenburg, 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 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.

Visual Culture encompasses a wide range of visual expressions in various media and display contexts. The field is not restricted to the examination of artifacts, but also turns its attention to vision and perception and the position of the beholder. Contemporary phenomena are studied, as well as the visual culture of bygone eras. The disciplines most closely associated with the field include art history, film studies and media studies, but visual culture is also a common theme in gender studies, history, history of ideas and philosophy, as well as in several other disciplines.