Robert Crawshaw

BIOGRAPHICAL

Having studied Modern Languages (French and Italian), Comparative Literature, Education and Linguistics at the universities of Exeter, Paris and Cambridge respectively, and trained for a year as an editor at Oxford University Press, I was fortunate to obtain teaching and research posts in higher education, first at the Ecole Normale d’Instituteurs, Auteil, then at Nanterre University, before being appointed as a tutor of French at Exeter University and finally to a full-time lecturing post at Lancaster University.

Alongside my academic responsibilities in Modern Languages, I was director of European Relations in Lancaster University’s Management School between 1986 and 1995 and simultaneously policy consultant to DGXXII of the EU where I co-chaired the Task Force responsible for the transition from the original Erasmus Programme to its HE successor, Socrates.

Participation as PI or Co-I in a number of interdisciplinary UK Research Council and EU-funded projects in the fields of pragmatics and inter-culture followed:

https://www.lancaster.ac.uk/users/interculture/

https://www.lancaster.ac.uk/fass/projects/pic/

From there, I ran the first Annual Research Programme of the University’s Institute for Advanced Studies (2003-4) on the topic ‘Regions and Regionalism in the New Europe’, and then, as Head of the Lancaster’s Department of Languages and Cultures, undertook a Research Fellowship in cultural studies at the University of Konstanz (2010-11). This followed the earlier completion of the large-scale AHRC project ‘Moving Manchester’ Project (2001-2006) which I had initiated between 1998 and 2000.

Having retired from full-time teaching in 2017, I am currently a Senior Research Associate attached to Lancaster University, consultant on Research bidding for The Missenden Centre and co-ordinator of the Task Force Cultural Literacy and Social Futures for the Education, Cultural Literacy and International Research Programme.

As author of diverse publications in Languages, Linguistics, European Educational Policy, Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies, the focus of my current research is on the newly established field of Cultural Literacy. Recent papers include a study of the interrelation between the new technologies and the exploitation of emotion as a commercial and political instrument and an essay on French social philosopher Jacques Rancière’s mission to define the expression of a new social consciousness or sensibilité.

Meanwhile, the main output of the special interest group (SIG) for which I am responsible is a series of case studies on regional cultural initiatives designed to instigate social change.

RECENT PUBLICATIONS

‘Beyond Emotion: Cultural Literacy, Empathy and Social Contagion.’ in N.Segal and M.Maryl (eds.) Open Cultural Studies, 2018.
‘Determinacy, Distance and Intensity in Intercultural Communication’, in I.Kecskes & S.Assimakopoulos (eds.) Current Issues in Intercultural Pragmatics. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2017.
‘Underground Poetry and Poetry on the Underground’ Liminalities: A Journal of Performance Studies. 11, 3, 2015.
‘Translating the in-between: poetics of performance and the relationship between language, literature and society’, in D.Koleva & N.Segal (eds.) Cultural Literacy in contemporary Europe, Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2013.
Postcolonial Manchester, Manchester: MUP, co-author (with Lynne Pearce and Corinne Fowler), 2013.

WORK IN PROGRESS

Cultural Literacy and Creative Futures
May 2018
Sharing testimony in contact zones: ‘Many women, Many words’
February, 2020
Embedding the Archive: ‘Walking in Others’ Footsteps’
May, 2020

Recent Presentations:

‘Rancière’s RE-partage and the symbolic translation of shared experience’. Paper presented at the third conference of the Cultural Literacy in Europe Programme, Lisbon,
May 2019
‘Letting it all hang out: Art, Practice-led Research and the Performing Body’. Discussion paper for the On-line CLE symposium ‘Research in the Arts, the Arts in Research’ curated by The University of Łódź,
14-15^th May, 2020.