The Winchester Centre for Global Futures in Art Design and Media highlights historical, contemporary and future roles for art, design and media within the nexus of local, national and global circumstances. It provides an overarching vision for all of the School's research activities and underpins a vision for experimental, interdisciplinary and impactful research. Staff, students and organisational partners come together under the auspices of the Centre in order to pursue high quality research initiatives and enable dissemination and impact for a diversity of audiences, users and beneficiaries.
Based around five distinct, but interlocking research groups, the Centre’s activities are focused on creating and sustaining mutually beneficial and interactive partnerships with a range of public organisations. These include galleries, museums, arts and community centres, publishers and online sources whose activities may benefit diverse social groups locally, nationally and around the world.
Engaging in the domains of fine art, graphic arts, media and cultural studies, fashion and textile design, marketing, branding, management and contemporary arts and curatorship, the School focuses upon the following areas of research:
Archaeologies of Media and Technology - a research group that approaches technology and media writ large through their links to science, art, visual culture and critical theory with a strong emphasis on artistic practices.
Critical Practices - encompasses several research strands concerned with critical practices in art production, history, theory and criticism. Our staff are experts in their fields and are widely published.
Intersectionalities: Politics-Identities-Cultures - examines issues of equality and diversity, power, technologies of resistance and control; researching the links between culture, politics and identity from a variety of disciplines and from an intersectional perspective.
Transforming Creativity - research on transformations in cultural production and creative economies from the everyday to the industrial, wrought by digital, networked and participatory media culture.
The Winchester Luxury Research Group - encompasses luxury-based production across the areas of fine art, design, and media, and is engaged in a range of research projects that concern the theory and practice of concepts such as pleasure and sumptuousness, excess and waste, extravagance and consumption. It is home to the academic journal Luxury: History, Culture, Consumption .