Centre for Culture, Community and Society (CCCS)

Centre for Culture, Community and Society (CCCS)

This is an interdisciplinary research centre concerned with exploring and addressing key challenges facing culture and community in the 21st century. Within the group research clusters are organized around:

• sustainability
• learning communities
• difference and diversity
• travel and tourism
• the cultural economy and globalization

This cross-faculty network brings together researchers from the fields of: education; arts and media; sociology; social policy; human geography; business; and science and technology.

Postgraduate students who are at the early stages of their career are encouraged to become fully involved in the activities of the research centre.

Collaborations include those with the Faculties of Business, Arts and Science and Technology. There are also longstanding collaborative links with staff in the School of Social and Political Enquiry, Monash University, Australia and with CUNY and the University of Georgia and Oklahoma State University in the USA with a number of joint applications for funding from the ESRC and the Australian Research Council. Additionally, there are strong research links with an 8 European country research project including Poland, Sweden, Spain and Germany.

Across the UK there are links with University of Warwick, Exeter, Keele, Sussex, London Metropolitan and UEL. Joint interests include research on social networks; power, elites and class; nanotechnologies; sustainability; tourism; and culture and learning. Work in the area of mobility and network capital includes research and writing on the sociology of travel and transport, and the use of social networks for peer support as part of the grieving process. Members of the group are editorial board members of the new journals Cultural Sociology, Tourism Consumption and Practice and Environmental Communication. In addition one member is editor of European Societies, another is an associate founding editor of the International Journal of Technoethics, and two others edit the internally hosted online journal Social and Public Policy (http://www.uppress.co.uk/socialpublicpolicyreview.htm).

Members of the centre have acted as special guest editor for the Journal of Risk Research, Health, Risk and Society, Sociological Research Online and New Genetics and Society and are on the Editorial Boards of Gender and Education, Policy Futures in Education and Widening Participation and Lifelong Learning. Other members direct the ESRC seminar series, New Perspectives on Education and Culture, and have links with the international Discourse, Power and Resistance conference currently sponsored by Plymouth University. They also have strong links with practitioner networks; for example, conducting research on equality issues in the cultural sector and acting as invited speakers for creative networks such as UKADIA.

Some of our recent research highlights:

Professor Jocey Quinn has received funding from the ESRC for the New Perspectives on Education and Culture seminar series, 2011-13. See: http://educationandculture.wordpress.com/

Professor Alison Anderson was invited to give a keynote address at the Third International Interdisciplinary Conference on Climate Change in Rio de Janeiro July 2011. Following this she was invited to join the international advisory board of the International Journal of Climate Change: Impacts and Responses.

Dr Marta Herrero has received funding from the British Academy for a two year study on the impact of globalisation on the organisational cultures of art businesses in charge of the sale and promotion of contemporary Chinese art. Dr Ling-Yun Tang, from the University of Hong Kong is co-investigator.

Dr Alison Green and Dr Adrian Barton held a recent successful conference at Plymouth University on 'Coalition Policy - Implications for Justice and Equality'.