17 June 2014
While globalisation has opened up the world, helping to forge international connections across nations and economies, according to visiting Professor at UniSA’s Hawke Research Institute, Jurgen Barkhoff, one of the least understood effects of globalisation impacts our sense of identity.
Director of the Trinity Long Room Hub, Trinity College Dublin's flagship Arts and Humanities Research Institute and UniSA Distinguished Researcher of the Year (2014), Prof Barkhoff will explore the weakening of the relationship between place and identity as we emerge into a 21st century where global connectivity and personal mobility are mainstream.
He will explore these themes in a Hawke Research Institute Distinguished Lecture on June 26 - Belonging and place in the age of globalisation - in the Bradley Forum, Hawke Building, City West.
“Cultural theories around globalisation throw up some very interesting questions,” Prof Barkhoff says.
“With increased mobility and connectivity how do we, and should we be striving to maintain a sense of identity that is linked to place?
“In the slipstream that is globalisation where do notions of citizenship, cultural kinship, belonging and participating sit – so in a bid to have a more connected world are we in fact undermining what it is that makes us citizens of the world.”
A champion of the research theme on Identities in Transformation at Trinity, Prof Barkhoff been an advisor for the Hawke Institute around the development of its own research themes in identity transformations.
Professor of German in Trinity’s School of Languages, Literatures and Cultural Studies, he has published widely in the fields of medical humanities, environmental humanities and on questions of identity.
Drawing on that expertise, Prof Barkhoff will analyse some examples of cultural and literary narratives of rootedness, migration, displacement and re-embedding in Europe in relation to belonging and globalisation.
Prof Barkhoff is a member of the Executive Board of the Coimbra Group, a pan-European network of research intensive, historical European universities.
In 2013 the UniSA’s Hawke Research Institute signed a MOU with Trinity’s Long Room Hub for ongoing research collaboration and engagement.
While visiting, Prof Barkhoff will deliver a special masterclass series for PhD and early career researchers at UniSA on the pre-Freudian unconscious and the crisis of modernity.
Media contact: Michèle Nardelli office: 08 8302 0966 mobile: 0418 823 673 email: Michele.nardelli@unisa.edu.au
