The Cultural Globalization Workshop

Historicizing Global Cultural Flows

In an age of global image overload, the Cultural Globalization Workshop historicizes the cultural flows, networks, and infrastructures that have shaped globalization over the longue durée, in conversation with the questions explored by the CATARACTS project.

The concept of globalization entered academic and public debates in the 1980s and has since generated an extensive body of scholarship, particularly in economics. Yet cultural globalization—understood as the intensification and expansion of cultural exchanges, circulations, and interactions across the world—remains comparatively underexplored. This imbalance is striking, as globalization was initially conceptualized not only as an economic phenomenon but also as a profoundly cultural process.

The Cultural Globalization Workshop seeks to address this historiographical gap by creating a space for collective reflection on the history of global cultural flows. Conceived as an experimental and provocative laboratory, the workshop brings together scholars interested in rethinking cultural globalization through rich empirical research, long-term historical perspectives, and genuinely global approaches that move beyond methodological nationalism and regionally bounded narratives.

Each monthly session assembles four leading scholars from different parts of the world, invited to test new hypotheses and ambitious interpretations through short, exploratory presentations grounded in concrete case studies. The workshop privileges intellectual risk-taking, cross-regional dialogue, and fresh perspectives over the presentation of finished research, fostering intensive discussion and collective experimentation.

Approach: Short presentations, minimal apparatus, intensive discussion. More than a seminar, the Cultural Globalization Workshop is a forum for intellectual provocation, collaborative inquiry, and the development of new agendas for the global history of culture.

Programme

September 23, 2026 — Closed session with PhD candidates and Postdocs
October 2, 2026 — Travelers, workers, migrants: do the actors of cultural globalization share common features?
November 13, 2026 — What constitutes the imaginary of globalization?”
December 4, 2026 — The technical shaping of cultural globalization: infrastructures, dispositifs, and actors
January 8, 2027 — Are there economic formats specific to cultural globalization?
February 5, 2027 — Is transmediality necessary for the global circulation of cultural objects?
March 5, 2027 — Is the dream of a global culture outdated? A historical perspective
April 2, 2027 — Can global culture be regulated? A historical perspective
May 7, 2027 — Is globalization a sharing of tastes?
June 4, 2027 — De-westernizing globalization: not such a new project?

September 2027 — What happens to metropolitan cultural forms (textiles, the Bible, sport, music, art, cinema, school, museum, objects) when they circulate in colonial worlds?
October 2027 — The colonized share of imperial cultures: what happens to non-Western objects, motifs, and forms of knowledge when they circulate to Europe and America in the 19th and 20th centuries?
November 2027 — Did imperial globalization sow the seeds of its own critique?
December 2027 — What are the predecessors of today’s global forms of encounters among nations?
January 2028 — Should the notion of a global cultural capital be rethought?
February 2028 — What within the national is not global?
March 2028 — What do digital formats (and which formats) do to cultural globalization?
April 2028 — Cultural industries in the 21st century: mass customization?
May 2028 — Are digital countercultures more globalized than mainstream forms?
June 2028 — States facing the digital challenge