What makes culture portable? How do cultural forms, objects, ideas and practices travel and adapt to contexts? What meanings arise from these forms in motion? What aesthetic strategies emerge from the pressures and challenges of transit? How do infrastructures — corporate, state, technological — shape or constrain cultural mobility? How do small forms — ephemera, fragments, micro-genres — travel, and what do they carry with them? How have local cultures responded to complex global challenges revealing local-global interdependences and responsibilities? How might the study of cultures in motion wield new social imaginaries and solidarities?

Contrary to past and present efforts to control cultural differences or prohibit mobility in pursuit of cultural stasis, the 2026-27 Society of Fellows theme, Cultures in Motion, envisions culture as dynamic, resilient and resistant to fixity. To approach culture as a living practice is to envision cultural systems as historically situated, mediated, contentious and connected to relations of people and power. Whether through migration, mediation, aesthetic adaptation or digital infrastructures — motion is how culture circulates. ‘Motion’ in this context is not only a matter of physical transit or speed; it is a condition of social, affective, symbolic transformation. The circulation of cultural forms produces new layers of meaning and transforms social relationships — complex, sometimes contested, always in flux. 

The Society of Fellows invites projects that engage with the reach of cultural circulation across time and space and methodological considerations of scale, and how cultural exchanges acquire or do not acquire larger significance. Cultures in Motion welcomes a range of creative and cultural forms, such as cartography, cinema, culinary arts, dance, language arts, literature, music, pedagogy, photography, media, theatre, visual arts and others.

The Society of Fellows seeks to support projects that investigate cultural exchange through arts and humanities disciplinary and cross-disciplinary orientations and/or community-engaged methods and practices.