Babylon
We focus on interdisciplinary and collective research efforts, in an attempt to explore the limits of current disciplinary frameworks. We focus on a broad range of research topics and areas, covering issues that occur at the strictly local level as well as on the global level, and creating a sound basis for comparative work and theoretical generalization, and we do so by means of paradigmatic orientations towards super-diversity, complexity and mediation, with an immediate contact with partners in the field.
In Memoriam
Babylon's research program 2018-2020
Superdiversity online and offline
Social life in the 21st century is increasingly led in online as well as offline contexts, with intersections between both structuring everyday activities as well as institutional ones. In the domain of social, cultural and linguistic diversity, the online world has become a dense new layer of diversification complicating both the phenomena on the ground as well as public debates about them and existing social-theoretical approaches to them.
Babylon puts the online-offline nexus central in its engagement with diversity in society and will focus over the next couple of years on several key issues in research.
- The precise nature of new forms of social interaction in the online-offline world, with special attention to new forms of multilingual and multimodal practice;
- The effects of online-offline social life on identities, both individual and collective;
- The emergence and formation of new communities in the online-offline world;
- The importance of learning practices and knowledge distribution in the formation of identities and communities;
- The development of security as a key institutional format structuring the online-offline world;
- The tensions and overlaps between moral orders and worldviews articulated in online-offline social practices;
- The social-theoretical implications of all this, and the adequacy or inadequacy of existing theoretical and methodological frameworks for addressing the new forms of social life we observe.
Babylon will address these research issues in continued collaboration and dialogue with the partners in the INCOLAS consortium, with a number of new partners, and with the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity.
Latest Tilburg Papers in Culture Studies
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Paper 243 - Haiyan Huang & Ellen Van Praet: Digital popular culture as a way to promote Chinese national identity in the post-socialist era: A case study of My People, My Country
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Paper 242 - Alan Runcieman: Community interpreting and the Covid-19 crisis: Present relevancy and future directions
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Paper 241 - Inge van de Ven & Tom van Nuenen: Digital hermeneutics and media literacy: Scaled readings of The Red Pill
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Paper 240 - Ico Maly: Flemish Interest in an attention-based hybrid media system
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Paper 239 - Farzad Karimzad: Multilingualism, chronotopes, and resolutions: Towards an analysis of the total sociolinguistic fact
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Paper 238 - Piia Varis: Conspiracy theorising online: Memes as a conspiracy theory genre
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Paper 237 - Tünde Faragó: Deep fakes - an emerging risk to individuals and societies alike
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Paper 236 - Jan Blommaert: Political discourse in post-digital societies
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Paper 235 - Marco Jacquemet: 45 as a bullshit artist: Straining for charisma
- Paper 234 - Jan Blommaert: Sociolinguistic restratification in the online-offline nexus: Trump’s viral errors
- Paper 233 - Ico Maly & Jan Blommaert: Digital Ethnographic Linguistic Landscape Analysis (ELLA 2.0)
- Paper 232 - Ico Maly: Hipsterification and Capitalism: A digital ethnographic linguistic landscape analysis of Ghent
