Global Connections

Global Connections concentrates on the world-wide movement of values, technologies, people, goods and images and its consequences for the ongoing transformation of social and cultural life in the current world.

Research targets

Recognizing that global or universal claims are always made in particular localities, and that people always make a particular place for themselves in translocal relationships, our research targets the balance of power and the inequalities between people as they try connect to each others’ worlds, or block the connections that seem harmful to their own development.

Global Connections

Such political economies of scale-making and the production of differences between human beings take place in changing landscapes of media, violence, cultural heritage, development policy and practice, social and religious movements, urban-rural relationships, and environmental concerns. They call for innovative research in situ that uses the classical concern with validity and ethics of ethnography to experiment with a variety of analytic methods from the humanities and with the emphasis on measurement and replicability of quantitative social science. 

Merging Anthropology and Development Studies

Global Connections defines the meeting point of our department’s heritage in cultural anthropology and development sociology: whereas the world of development cooperation increasingly requires a sophisticated study of culture (in, for example, understanding how the modern cultural presuppositions of NGOs and donor organizations work out in practice), developments in the field of media and cultural heritage increasingly need a thorough understanding of the sociology and political economy of transnational corporations and international organizations.

Research Themes

The following keywords define the international appeal and ambitions of (several clusters of) the Institute’s current research:

  • visual anthropology;
  • media and material culture studies;
  • conflict and the aftermath of violence or disaster;
  • the cultural and social conditions and consequences of migration;
  • tensions and entanglements of the religious and the secular;
  • the historical heritage of post-colonial societies and civilizing missions;
  • the social and cultural conditions of global markets and the extraction of raw materials;
  • environmentalism and the transformation of urban-rural relationships; and
  • development in policy and in practice, from the tranformation of donor organizations direct interventions

More information

For a comprehensive description visit our research themes website. 

Regional Expertise

Global Connections builds on a heritage of area studies, especially in comparing expertise on Africa, South Asia, Southeast Asia, and the Caribbean with Europe. For more information about our research in these areas visit our Regions website.


Web editor Cultural Anthropology and Development Sociology
Last Modified: 06-03-2009