The Scientific Council of the Institute for Development and International Relations, at its meeting on February 27, 2024, accepted the foundation of two Centers of Excellence, CULTURELINK and CEMEDIG, which are being established as part of the CULTMED project – Interdisciplinary Research on Cultural and Media Policies and Practices: Developmental and Democratic Potentials.
The establishment of the Center for Cultural Policy, Development, and Cooperation (CULTURELINK) and the Center for Media Sociology and Digital Society (CEMEDIG), is planned to create structural conditions for continuous scientific work on the research of culture and media. The establishment of this new structure aims to achieve better sustainability, visibility, and systematicity of research on culture and media, with a special focus on cultural and media policies, through scientific insights and understanding of global processes of sustainable cultural and communication development. This working structure will ensure the implementation of planned activities during the duration of this project cycle, as well as the long-term monitoring of these research topics through an interdisciplinary approach inherent in cultural policy and cultural development research.
The CULTURELINK Center will encourage further expansion and development of national and international collaborations of the Department of Culture and Communication in the processes of researching culture, cultural policies, and sustainable cultural development, thereby building continuous credibility, presence, and recognizability of the quality of research activities of the Department of Culture and Communication and IRMO at the international level. In addition, the goal of the CULTURELINK Center is to formalize the existing research heritage of IRMO and capitalize on the multi-decade engagement in coordinating the World Culturelink Network (culturelink.org) for research and collaboration in the field of cultural development, which has gathered more than 2000 institutional members from all continents since its establishment in 1989.
The CEMEDIG Center will deal with various levels of social reality and social developmental perspectives of digitization. This center aims to promote scientific excellence in the field of media sociology and related disciplinary areas and to provide independent scientific research on media and digital society. Special attention will be paid to strong fundamental research and its balanced linkage with normative and developmental perspectives, international dissemination of results, and education of young researchers.
