Globalisation and Representation

The study of globalisation is of unprecedented interest across the humanities, the arts and the social and political sciences. Hosted by the University of Brighton's Faculty of Arts and Architecture this conference provided a unique, critical forum to debate the relationship between globalisation and the problem of representation at the start of the 21st century.

Can globalisation be represented, or is globalisation a further challenge to the possibility of representation itself?

This two-day conference brought together academics, practitioners, journalists and activists to transgress both the traditional disciplinary boundaries and the theory/practice divide.

Conference report by Peter Seddon (originally published in Research News Edition 11, Summer 2005)

The Globalisation and Representation conference, held in the Faculty of Arts and Architecture between 18 and 20 March 2005, was the third and by far the most ambitious such conference to be hosted at the university. Its theme, Globalisation and Representation, was also the most extensive in terms of globalisation, its theories and debates, and certainly the most broad-ranging in pulling in participants from across the entire spectrum of the Faculty’s work.

A cursory glance at the titles of the eight strands available in the conference would confirm this: Visual Cultures; Modernism and our Post-Modern Condition; Architecture and Town Planning; Design; Environmentalism; Political Economy and Politics.

The range of participants was impressive, including major academics, cultural theorists, post-graduate researchers, students and activists. In this a parallel could be drawn with History Workshop Conferences and its mixture of academics and activists.

There were major figures participating in this conference from the worlds of art and design history. Tim Clark, Charles Harrison and Julian Stallabrass, for example, are well known for groundbreaking work in the fields of art history and cultural ideas. More significant figures from such worlds could not be found and they all gave papers and contributed to plenary sessions.

Also notable was the presence of practitioners whose research interests intersected with the major themes of the conference. The global reach of the conference was appropriately significant with participants from the US, Taiwan, Japan, India, Palestine/Israel, Mongolia, France, Greece and Australia - every continent in the world (apart from Antartica) was represented. In addition, members of the School of Arts and Communication and Faculty generally were well represented as givers of papers, chairs of plenary sessions and strands across a range of key themes.

Perhaps the most notable achievement, from our colleagues in the Humanities section of SHACS who organised the conference, was careful and considered intersection between practice, art and design history and those necessary influences from political, sociological, cultural and environmental theory and debate that has so informed, and continues to inform, the world of art and design practice and theory.