CULTURELINK – Centre for Research in Cultural Policy, Development and Cooperation

CULTURELINK Centre was established in 2024 as a result of IRMO’s long-term engagement in coordinating the Culturelink Network. The Centre aims to build on and further develop IRMO’s affluent research repository and decades-long commitment to coordinating the global cultural network (culturelink.org) for research and collaboration in the field of cultural development, which gathered more than 2000 institutional and individual members from all continents since its establishment in 1989.

Culturelink Centre’s work and activities will provide an organizational and infrastructural framework for the Department of Culture and Communication national and international research partnerships and collaborations c  contributing to the wider outreach and better visibility of the Department’s research results.

Through interdisciplinary international scientific and professional collaboration at the local, national, and global levels, CULTURELINK Center, aims to advocate for culture as a public, universally accessible good that is not reduced to an instrumental role of ‘added value’ to other areas such as economy, politics, foreign relations, etc.  To that end, CULTURELINK aims to contribute to understanding cultural policy as an independent area of public policy and fosters a critical approach to researching cultural practices and finding sustainable patterns of cultural action.

In line with the legacy of the Culturelink World Network’s work, the CULTURELINK Center aims to endorse global cultural dialogue by promoting knowledge from local, peripheral, and marginalized contexts. This particularly applies to revitalizing existing and establishing new international collaborations with actors from the European (semi)periphery, the Global South, as well as focusing on underrepresented social groups, cultural practices, and new trends in cultural development and policies arising from so-called subordinate positions.

The Center’s focus in the coming period will focus on issues concerning sustainable cultural policies, cultural diversity, cultural rights,  forward-thinking cultural development, development perspectives of digitization and digital transformation in culture.

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