Studies in Remoteness inquires sensoria of absence, distance, and neglect that have emerged in relationship with colonial history and infrastructures of “global connectivity”. The project critically addresses global connectivity by turning to its flipside: Globality and modernity, with their webbed networks of communication, trade, migration, and flows of money, are not only characterised by access, awareness, and entanglement. Remoteness is constructed through global patterns of power centralisation, causing (the vast majority) of peoples, places, practices, and ideas to manifest within a globalized world as harbours of the ‘irrelevant’ and the ‘unknown’.

Studies in Remoteness further aims to systematically investigate practices and histories of art and culture at the frayed edges of so-called ‘visibility’ by investigating distanced relations as intersectional and thus informed not only by the contours of geography, temporality, and cultural difference, but by how these intermingle with power, class, privilege, politics, and importantly, practice. While rooted in subaltern studies and critical colonial studies, the project further aims to contribute to reception studies, attention studies, and infrastructural aesthetics – all of which variously investigate what it means to expose often subterranean, concealed, and/or unperceived lifeways, situations, and social processes to the witness of mass publics. The project further connects these nascent subfields in arts and media studies to social science research in Indigenous studies and the emerging field of rural studies. Potential project members include historians, scholars of performance, visual studies, and religious studies, social scientists, and artistic researchers.