The African Studies Group brings together researchers and postgraduates from a range of departments at Lancaster University who have a shared interest in African Studies, broadly conceived.

Authors & the World is an interdisciplinary research hub that brings together Anglophone and non-Anglophone writers, translators, publishers, editors, reviewers and researchers from a broad sweep of disciplines in the Arts and Humanities. Staff in Lancaster associated with the hub come from the departments of European Languages & Culture, Contemporary Arts (LICA), English & Creative Writing, Linguistics & English Language, Politics, Philosophy & Religious Studies, and the HighWire Doctoral Training Centre.

Our programme of research currently has three main emphases: literary celebrity (begun in 2014), translation (begun in 2015), the digital (begun in 2016). All of our work is underpinned by in-depth analysis of a variety of different cultural contexts and a wide range of genres and media.

You can follow our debates and access the materials we generate online at www.authorsandtheworld.com, on our Facebook page ('Authors and the World'), and via twitter: @AuthorsWorld.

The Transcultural Writing, Practice and Research Network links creative practioners, academics and Lancaster University’s postgraduate student community to extensive research activity in creative transcultural practices and their impact on society. We research and promote writing and artistic practices across cultures and study their transformational impact on society and global relations.

The network encompasses research-as-practice, action-research projects, study of historical and contemporary creative practice, the innovative application of digital technologies and the interrelationship between writing, art and social change. We promote critical, pedagogical and theoretical accounts of praxis with special emphasis on cultural exchange between practitioners and with social and political institutions.

Lancaster University China Centre (LUCC) provides an international platform to tackle global challenges through multi-disciplinary China expertise.

LUCC acts as a focal point at Lancaster University for people interested in China and its relations with UK and the rest of the world.

LUCC focuses on the big global challenges that face the world, where solutions cannot be found unless we take China’s role into account and combine tools and knowledge from a range of disciplines to understand it.

Informed by the highest quality academic research, LUCC’s activities deliver significantly improved understanding of China in its global context. The application of this understanding supports the improvement of living conditions, welfare and the environment in China, the UK, and internationally.

LUCC builds on Lancaster University’s position as one of the first British universities to undertake academic cooperation with China, and with a physical presence through the Lancaster University College in Shandong province, to collaborate closely and on an equal footing with partners in China.

LUCC provides resources for enhancing mutual understanding between China, the UK, and other parts of the world, for scholars, government, industry, charities, teachers, students, and publics.

Lancaster University China Centre

The Institute for Social Futures was founded in 2015 by John Urry and Linda Woodhead. ‘Social futures’ urges us to see the bigger picture and underscores the importance of the arts and social sciences for making sense of the challenges facing us. Our aim is to facilitate transformational research projects that would not ordinarily be possible for researchers working in their regular disciplinary / faculty context. In order to do this, we provide the time and energy for people to come together and develop research that links across different specialisms and faculties, as well as with partners around the world and outside academia.

Institute for Social Futures

Multilingual Creativities brings together a group of researchers from Lancaster, the UK and beyond who analyse the artistic, linguistic and literary forms of creativities attached to multilingualism and translation.

Our partners include INALCO and many researchers in the UK and abroad. At Lancaster, we work in close collaboration with ‘Authors and the World’ and the ‘Centre for Transcultural Writing and Research’. This research cluster has grown from the Multilingual French Identities project set up by Charlotte Baker and Delphine Grass in 2013.

Our activities include the organisation of an international conference in January 2014 (see http://www.lancaster.ac.uk/fass/events/multilingual-identities/index.php), the ‘Translation Lancaster’ event in 2015, and several publications, including two special issues co-edited Dr Baker and Dr Grass.

You can follow our debates and access the materials we generate online at multilingual creativities.wordpress.com.

Our work explores new ways of conceptualising identity, paying particular attention to the ways in which gender, race, ethnicity and class are performed in discrete cultural contexts. Our focus on the social impact of research into identity performance, broadly construed, means that some of our work takes practical steps towards improving the lives of individuals and communities in diverse regions of the world. In particular, we are interested in developing medical humanities approaches to pressing issues around public health and wellbeing.

'Poetics of Resistance' explores how narratives, in the broadest sense, are used to social effect in a wide variety of cultural contexts. Our work is defined by a desire to reconceptualise power hierarchies by working closely with a broad range of social actors. In so doing, we model new ways for oppressed voices to be heard and for urban spaces and places to be opened up to aesthetic innovation with the potential for political change.