It’s a truism that cultural studies is different wherever it's practiced. In this workshop, two institutions come together to compare notes on the field in relation to present circumstances and challenges: the Sussex Centre for Cultural Studies (SCCS) and the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis (ASCA). The workshop is informed by the SCCS seminars on the “state of cultural analysis,” exploring the most contemporary approaches to culture, cultural studies, and cultural analysis, and the recent volume The Future of Cultural Analysis: A Critical Inquiry (edited by Murat Aydemir, Aylin Kuryel, and Noa Roei) on the pasts, presents, and futures of cultural analysis. 

PROGRAM

11:00 OMHP A0.09

Keynote lecture: Ben Highmore, “Cultural Analysis in the World” 

The history of cultural analysis can’t be separated from its institutional settings, whether these are the adult education classes that Raymond Williams taught in the 1960s or the postgraduate opportunities for interdisciplinary close reading of more recent years. This talk shifts away from the question of how to undertake cultural analysis to the question of where cultural analysis is performed and pursued. What happens when we shift our purview to take in not just universities and adult education but also art galleries, political collectives, TV documentaries, and so on? Perhaps we can think of a vernacular humanities that has a rough and ready relationship to the established professional humanities ensconced in universities. Within this vernacular humanities, perhaps we can see versions of a “wild” cultural analysis.

12:30 OMHP C2.17 Lunch

13:30 OMHP C2.17

Workshop: Naaz Rashid, “The Cultural Politics of Nutmeg”

Alongside the symposium, Dr Naaz Rashid will run an informal workshop centered on nutmeg. As an (almost) everyday commodity, rooted in both Dutch and British colonial and culinary history, it offers a vehicle for the analysis of everyday culture. Participants will be encouraged to think about the cultural politics and poetics of nutmeg through engagement with multiple senses, including touch, taste, and smell, as well as the more common sight and sound. 

14:30 OMHP A0.09 Break

15:00 OMHP A0.09

PhD Panel, convened by Charlotte Fraser

PhD researchers from the Amsterdam School of Cultural Analysis and the Sussex Centre for Cultural Studies come together to reflect on institutional approaches, their own projects, and the shifting states and futures of cultural analysis.

16:00 OMHP A0.09

Plenary Discussion, with Jaap Kooijman, Niall Martin, and others

Participants share key takeaways and insights, and discuss suggestions for further collaboration.

17:00 Drinks OMHP A0.09
 

Organizers and Participants

Murat Aydemir is associate professor in literary and cultural studies. He is the author of Images of Bliss: Ejaculation, Masculinity, Meaning (2007) and the (co-)editor of Migratory Settings: Transnational Perspectives on Place (2008), Indiscretions: At the Intersection of Queer and Postcolonial Theory (2011), and The Future of Cultural Analysis: A Critical Inquiry (2025). From 2011 to 2021, he served as academic director of the Netherlands Institute for Cultural Analysis (NICA). Together with Pepita Hesselberth and Daan Wesselman, he is currently working on an edited volume titled Bad Concepts: Coming to Terms. Email: m.aydemir@uva.nl.

Charlotte Fraser is postgraduate researcher in Cultural Studies at the University of Sussex. In 2023, she completed a research Master's in Cultural Analysis at the University of Amsterdam. Charlotte’s PhD project maps cultural responses to the “cost-of-living crisis” and considers how it was narrativized in mainstream and popular sources. It explores how the “crisis” framing was used to make sense of that period of inflation and shapes the political responses available to it, focusing on how the globalized dimensions of the crisis, from supply chain disruption to pipeline sabotage, are articulated in the everyday. As Senior PGR Events Officer for the Faculty of Media, Arts and Humanities (2024-25), she organizes the faculty-wide PGR work-in-progress seminar, Chapter Chats, and co-organizes the PGR-led Media and Culture Research Group. Charlotte is on the steering committee for the Sussex Centre for Cultural Studies and co-organizes the Centre's “State of Cultural Analysis” seminar series. Email: charlotte.fraser@sussex.ac.uk.

Ben Highmore is emeritus professor of cultural studies at the University of Sussex, United Kingdom. He has published extensively on everyday life, lifestyle, domestic interiors, British art, and playgrounds. His books include The Art of Brutalism: Rescuing Hope from Catastrophe in 1950s Britain (2017), Cultural Feelings: Mood, Mediation, and Cultural Politics (2017), Culture (Key Ideas in Media and Cultural Studies) (2016), and The Great Indoors: At Home in the Modern British House (2015). Email: b.highmore@sussex.ac.uk.

Malcolm James is senior lecturer in Media and Cultural Studies and Co-Director of Sussex Centre for Cultural Studies at the University of Sussex. His research interests are in cultural studies and post-colonial approaches to race, nation, youth, the city, migration, music, and sound. He is the author of the books Sonic Intimacy: Reggae Sound Systems, Jungle Pirate Radio, and Grime YouTube Music Videos (Bloomsbury), Urban Multiculture: Youth, Politics and Cultural Transformation (Palgrave), and co-editor of the book Regeneration Songs: Sounds of Investment and Loss in East London (Repeater Books). Dr. Malcolm James' current research on alternative cultural politics explores and documents the alternative cultural political formations of everyday life from a critical theoretical, postcolonial studies, and sound studies perspective. Responding to the presiding negativity of late modernity, it seeks to trace and evaluate the popular resources of the alternative, as they are held in theory and in contemporary culture. Email: Malcolm.James@sussex.ac.uk.

Jaap Kooijman is associate professor in Media Studies and American Studies and academic director of the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis (ASCA) at the University of Amsterdam. He is the author of Fabricating the Absolute Fake (AUP 2013) and De muziekfabriek (Mazirel 2024), and co-editor, with Glyn Davis, of The Richard Dyer Reader (BFI 2023). His articles on American pop culture and politics have been published in journals such as The Velvet Light Trap, European Journal of Cultural Studies, The Journal of American Culture, Post Script, Celebrity Studies, Popular Music and Society, Cinema Journal, Critical Studies in Television, and VIEW Journal of European Television History and Culture, as well as in edited collections such as Unpopular Culture (AUP 2016), A Companion to Celebrity (Wiley 2016), Revisiting Star Studies (Edinburgh UP 2017), Music/Video: Histories, Aesthetics, Media (Bloomsbury 2017), and Beyoncé: At Work, On Screen, and Online(Indiana UP 2020). His audiovisual essays have been published in [in]Transition: Journal of Videographic Film & Moving Image Studies, NECSUS: European Journal of Media Studies, 16:9, Collateral, tecmerin: Journal of Audiovisual Essays, and zfm: Zeitschrift für Medienwissenschaft. Email: j.w.kooijman@uva.nl.

Aylin Kuryel is assistant professor of Literary and Cultural Analysis at the University of Amsterdam. Her research focuses on image politics, nationalism, aesthetics and resistance, and the politics of emotions. She is the editor of Utanca Bakmak (Looking at Shame, Cogito, 2023) and Sıkıntı Var (Essays on Boredom, İletişim, 2020), and co-editor of Being Jewish in Turkey: A Dictionary of Experiences, (İletişim, 2017), Küresel Ayaklanmalar Çağında Direniş ve Estetik (Resistance and Aesthetics in the Age of Global Uprisings, İletişim, 2015), and Cultural Activism: Practices, Dilemmas and Possibilities (Rodopi, 2010). She is also active as a documentary filmmaker. Her films include The City and the Messiah (2024), Translating Ulysses (2023), A Defense (2021), CemileSezgin (2020), The Balcony and Our Dreams (2020), Heads and Tails (2018), and Welcome Lenin (2016). She is a member of the Image Acts Collective (https://www.imageacts.com/). Email: a.kuryel@uva.nl.

Niall Martin is assistant professor in the department of Literary and Cultural Analysis and a former coordinator of the Research Master’s in Cultural Analysis. After completing an ASCA-funded Ph.D. in 2012, he was awarded a postdoctoral fellowship by ACGS to work on a project titled “London's Demons: Noise in the Global City.” This research is incorporated in his book Iain Sinclair: Noise, Neoliberalism and the Matter of London (Bloomsbury, 2015). Niall is currently working on a project titled “Noise Worlds: reading Globalisation Through Noise,” which extends his earlier research on noise to examine the different ways in which concepts of noise interact with and produce our ideas of globalization. He is also working on the topic of “il/literacy” and is interested in the ways in which the construction of the il/literate extends questions of decolonization into discussions of semiosis and new materialism. His most recent publication is a volume, co-edited with Ilios Willemars, on the concept of “replaceability”: The Replaceability Paradigm: Replacement and Irreplaceability from Dante to DeepDream. Email: N.Martin@uva.nl.

Naaz Rashid is an independent scholar in Media and Cultural Studies and a member of the Sussex Centre for Cultural Studies’ Steering Committee. Her research is broadly focused on the intersections of race, religion, gender, and class. Dr Rashid is currently writing up a research project, Eating the Other: Exploring the dynamics of London’s supper club scene, which explores ideas of “authenticity” within the broader phenomena of multiculturalism and gentrification. Dr Rashid also researches the experiences of the Bangladeshi diaspora in the UK and the USA and is currently working on a book, Situated Citizenship: From Brick Lane to Little Bangladesh (UCL Press 2026). She is also the author of Veiled Threats: Representing the Muslim Woman in Public Policy Discourses (Policy Press, 2016) and has written extensively about the changing representations of Muslim women in the UK's counter-terrorism agenda. Email: drnaazrashid@gmail.com.

Contacts:

Aylin Kuryel, a.kuryel@uva.nl
Murat Aydemir, m.aydemir@uva.nl
Charlotte Fraser, Charlotte.Fraser@sussex.ac.uk