In 2008-2009, the Townsend Center coordinated the Mellon Strategic Working Group on Cultural Forms/Local Stakes/Global Circuits, led by co-conveners Charles Briggs (Anthropology) and Deniz Göktürk (German).

In their research projects, Professors Briggs and Göktürk have long shared a common interest in channels of circulation and concepts of valuation, from the perspectives of disciplines as wide-ranging as Anthropology, Music, Film and Media Studies, Folklore, and Literary Studies in Dutch, French, German, and other languages. Their studies illuminate a world that is transnationally connected through migration, markets and media, our intellectual maps, cultural policies, and academic departmentalization—a world that still relies heavily on categories and labels of identification. These categories are defined not in terms of interdependence but territorial fixation, national origin, and “authentic” heritage.

The Strategic Working Group on Cultural Forms / Local Stakes / Global Circuits brought into conversation researchers who are studying shifting and emerging objects. The goal of the SWG was to seek new ways of thinking beyond efforts to “update” concepts and scholarly practices. The group explored ways to replace established boundary-work practices that will promote the illusion of autonomy between disciplines and between “the academy” and “the real world” with intimate understandings of unequal exchanges of knowledge between social domains, thereby generating new ways of enabling scholars to handle the complexities of the twenty-first century.