Intimacy, archive and aesthetic practices

Focusing on intimate structures, practices, and materialities reveals how people shape familial relationships and networks. Intimate dynamics, affective relations, and kinship ties also influence fields including the political sphere, law, migration, as well as popular culture and art. In the study of intimacy, time and temporalities are influential: what affective-relational ties do people form with their past and future, and how do these shape their everyday lives in the present (consider themes like biography and subjectification; diaspora and postcoloniality; gender and sexuality; education and social inequality).

The archival focus further expands on analytical categories from cultural studies of time, temporality, and intimacies, placing archival and historical materialities and (personal) modes of narration at the centre (e.g., documents, letters, photographs, and oral histories). It also examines the epistemologies (logics of knowledge) and politics of the archive (such as completeness, testimony, memory, categorization, exclusion, etc.). With the archival turn in postcolonial studies and queer theory, this focus expands to explore the body as an archive, archives of emotions, and methods and possibilities of counter-archiving.

The overarchiving focus of this research area lies in the study of aesthetic practices. It examines the symbolic-material order and economies within which concrete sensory practices and their cultural products generate meaning and create publics. In this context, various media practices and formats are analysed within their contexts of use as indicators of social dynamics, structures, and power relations. At the same time, they are also viewed as concrete aesthetic practices where actors are productive, collaborative, and creative, facilitating the production of subjectivities, group affiliations, and meaning-making processes—but also subverting them. Additionally, this framework engages with multimodal ethnography itself as an aesthetic practice.