The complexity of interactions among global flows of people, media, and social practice that characterizes what we call globalization cannot be adequately or fully understood until it is grasped through the conceptual vocabulary of culture. Undoubtedly, some of the key elements of that vocabulary are media, performance, and identity. In early 1998, an interdisciplinary group of UW faculty and graduate students came together to form the Media, Performance, and Identity Research Circle to seriously explore the social, political, technological, and cultural implications of globalization.

Globalization has had profound impact on public life and belief systems in just about every conceivable corner of the world. For some, globalization is a utopian dream come true: The free global flow of information and culture leading to shared values, a common language, and harmonious international relations. For others, globalization represents a nightmare in which we end up living in a homogeneous global culture dominated by Disney, CNN, and Madonna. Of course, both scenarios oversimplify a process involving global and domestic markets, state policies and power, and local and international civil society.

What is fairly certain, however, is that globalization creates for many people crises of identity as floods of "foreign" cultural products, forms, and practices including films, novels, drama, music, and news compete with "domestic" media and culture for attention and influence. In this context, the continual process of assembling and re-assembling cultural identity attains unprecedented urgency.

As part of reconstructing and restructuring identities, people may assert who they are - as individuals, communities, or nations - through a wide range of media including television, literature, cinema, music videos, internet and other digital technologies, and draw from a vast range of domestic, regional, and transnational cultural sources. However, the public performance of identity is rarely uncontested. Countervailing forces such as the state, the market, and social movements, may constrain or enable expression with varying levels of intensity and effectiveness. Thus, we view media, performance, and identity as important sites of social, political, and cultural struggles over the local meanings and significance of mediated images and texts.