Presentation
My research has always been manifestly theoretical. In my dissertation, which I published in 2007 (Peter Lang: New York), I explore how certain aesthetic structures which have become peculiar to the novel as a cultural form base themselves on earlier cultural patterns which are modi!ed and transformed in order to produce new content. The authorship of John Barth was the focus of this research but the ambition was to explain the postmodernist play/critique of aesthetics in a broad and general sense. My research has taken a distinctively political/social turn since my dissertation. I’m still very much concerned with what I would like to call the ”phenomenology of the concept”, that is to say, how a particular conceptual apparatus allows/disallows a certain content to emerge, or how a certain apparatus brightens some boundaries and makes others invisible. This orientation has led me into research on concepts like transnationalism, cosmopolitanism, citizenship and race. One example of this shift in research interests is a research project organized through IMISCOE called POPADIVCIT (Popular Arts, Diversity and Cultural Policies in Post-Migration Urban Settings). In this project, we are right now preparing a special issue of IDENTITIES. My part of this project concerns the city of Malmö and the way in which popular culture is being operationalized as a producer of social cohesion and immigrant integration. The working title of my part of this project is ”Cosmopolitanism, Artistic Activity and Civic Education in Malmö.” A second research project in which I am engaged is called ”Social Sustainability and Urban Restructuring: From Integration to Conviviality.” The working title of my part of this project is ”Mimesis, Migration and Malmö.” All the above mentioned projects are conceptually related. Although their empirical contents differ they all suggest an interest in the production of social life. How and why this production needs cultural form to function is one of the main threads of my research.