At global dis:connect, we study dis:connectivity through six interrelated focal points. Absences highlight gaps and exclusions; detours reveal delays and circuitous pathways; interruptions expose breaks in integration. Laboratories identify contexts where dis:connective dynamics become especially visible. Cultural infrastructures examine the frameworks that enable or constrain artistic and cultural practices. Temporalities explore how different conceptions of past, present, and future shape – and are shaped by – connections and disconnections.
These approaches provide a flexible conceptual framework that encourages interdisciplinary methods and international exchange, allowing us to analyse the complex dynamics of globalisation in depth.
ABSENCES
Absence shapes globalisation as much as presence. It highlights gaps, invisibilities, and marginalisations that emerge even as global connections grow tighter and more diverse. At global dis:connect, we distinguish three forms of absence: active absence, loss, and invisible presence. Active absence occurs where connections would be expected but are strikingly missing, thereby shaping social and cultural dynamics. Loss – often invisible in quantitative analyses – captures the human and material voids created by migration, displacement, or exclusion. Invisible presence refers to actors or communities that remain conceptually absent yet influence global processes, such as historically marginalised groups whose cultural and political contributions become visible through alternative narratives. By studying absences, we explore the silences, gaps, and invisible forces that define globalisation.
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CULTURAL INFRASTRUCTURES
Cultural infrastructures encompass the tangible, intangible, and institutional frameworks that support artistic and cultural activity. They include exhibition and performance spaces, archives, libraries, educational institutions, digital platforms, festivals, and heritage sites, as well as funding programmes. Cultural infrastructures shape who can participate in cultural life and which narratives of globalisation are visible. By studying them, we uncover disparities in access, representation, and investment, and analyse how cultural networks mediate global connections. These infrastructures reveal both the opportunities and limitations of cultural participation in a globalised world.
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DETOURS
Detours are unplanned, often prolonged or circuitous routes that actors traverse in the course of global processes. They coincide with delays, waiting, and stagnation, making mobility uneven and unpredictable. Migration provides a clear example: journeys are rarely linear and often include obstacles, backtracking, or extended waiting periods. While large-scale migration is usually depicted as arrows from origin to destination, individual routes reveal temporal and spatial complexities, showing how detours shape experiences and historical outcomes. Detours also open unexpected encounters, new insights, and shifts in trajectories, demonstrating how non-linear movement is integral to understanding global processes and their human consequences.
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INTERRUPTIONS
Connections in globalisation are rarely continuous or uniform. Interruptions occur when established flows of goods, people, information, or capital are slowed, blocked, or temporarily terminated. Their significance lies in contrast to existing connections – they expose vulnerabilities, prompt adaptive strategies, and can reshape social, political, and economic processes. Historical examples, such as the global telegraph network in the 19th century, show that interruptions – whether caused by technical failures, theft, or conflict – were central to the development of global communication. By analysing interruptions, we capture the fragility, contingency, and unpredictability inherent in global integration.
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LABORATORIES OF DIS:CONNECTIVITY
Laboratories of dis:connectivity are concrete, manageable spaces where complex dynamics of globalisation – such as absences, detours, and interruptions – become observable. Islands, refugee camps, asylum centres, and border regions serve as laboratories, where social, political, and environmental conditions produce intensified or visible dis:connective phenomena. These spaces allow researchers to stabilise or ‘freeze’ processes temporarily, making them analysable, while also highlighting lived experiences, waiting, and contingency. Laboratories function both as sites of study and as microcosms reflecting broader global patterns of connection and disconnection.
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TEMPORALITIES
Dis:connectivity also operates across time, shaping and shaped by multiple temporalities. Globalisation interacts with divergent understandings of past, present, and future, creating complex relationships between continuity and rupture. Temporal dis:connectivities affect expectations, plans, and social practices. For example, the COVID-19 pandemic intensified reflection on futures in work, migration, and cultural life, highlighting how unforeseen disruptions reshape temporal horizons. By examining temporalities, we explore how historical legacies, present contingencies, and imagined futures intersect to structure globalisation processes.
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ABSENCES
Absence marks processes of globalisation as much as presence, invisibility as much as visibility. As the connections that drive technological and economic globalisation become tighter and more diverse, they broaden the resulting gaps and marginalisations.
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DETOURS
A detour is an undesired, often unintended, longer and usually more arduous route to a destination. Detours coincide with stagnation, delay and waiting. They come into sharp relief in the history of migration, which shows that detours and the impeded mobility they induce inhere in all migratory movements of the past and present.
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INTERRUPTIONS
Hardly any global connection is continuously, uniformly enduring. Most processes of integration are cyclical, sometimes gathering momentum rapidly, sometimes slowly, and sometimes losing momentum entirely. Connections might serve only a single purpose, but not others, or they can be utterly and radically terminated.
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LABORATORIES OF DIS:CONNECTIVITY
Laboratories of dis:connectivity are easily graspable and manageable units in which complex phenomena, such as interruptions and the absence of global connections, become visible in their concrete meaning. They can be ‘stabilised’ or ‘frozen’, so to speak, for the period of investigation.
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CULTURAL INFRASTRUCTURES
Cultural infrastructure refers to the tangible, intangible and institutional elements that support and facilitate cultural, particularly artistic, activities and experiences in a society. the term encompasses a range of components that contribute to the development, preservation and dissemination of cultural assets. It can include organisations, activities and spaces.
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TEMPORALITIES
Dis:connectivity applies not only to spatial phenomena but to ‘transtemporal’ relationships as well. Globalisation processes act on disparate spaces where there are often highly divergent understandings of the past, present and future.
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