What is the Cultural Literacy Research Network (CLRN)?
The Cultural Literacy Research Network (formerly Cultural Literacy Everywhere—CLE) is an international, research-led association. Our aim is to promote high quality, interdisciplinary research into the relationship between literacy, culture, educational policy and social change and in so doing, to raise public awareness of what it means to be ‘culturally literate’ in a globally divided, technologically dominated world.
As an association, we bring together academics, educators, artists, policy makers and members of the cultural and creative industries through conferences, workshops, special events, funded projects, special interest groups and international partnerships leading to the dissemination and exchange of publications, work in progress and up to date information on cultural issues. We are particularly interested in exploring the synergies between theory and practice.
We welcome the participation of individual researchers, project coordinators, practitioners and cultural actors from a range of disciplines and culture-related professions.
What is Cultural Literacy?
Cultural literacy is an ability to view the social and cultural phenomena that shape our lives—bodies of knowledge, fields of social action, individuals or groups, and of course cultural artefacts—as being essentially readable. Hereby we understand reading as a multimodal and multisensory process. Cultural literacy engages with interdisciplinarity, multilingualism and collaboration. It is as much about innovation and creative practice—whether scholarly, artistic or social—as it is about analysis, and it very often brings these two methods together.
Developing knowledge and shared practices in the area of Cultural Literacy must be understood and promoted as a key strategic goal for a meaningful impact on society, by supporting individuals and groups in the continuous effort to achieve greater social justice and active forms of citizenship.
How the CLRN Works and What We Do
The CLRN is funded through annual membership fees and income through conference fees and occasional small grants. It is run on a voluntary basis by a Steering Group and Core Group of elected members.
CLRN endeavours to run a biannual conference in association with participating universities. Its year-round core programme of activities and events is organised by a range of Special Interest Groups, which operate in the following areas:
List of SIGs
- Migration and Cultural Literacy
- Music, Creativity and Translation
- Intermediality and Care
- Intersemiotic Translation / Experiential Translation Network
- Saṃvāda: A Discourse on Decolonization
- The Art Junction
Further, CLRN operates a small grants scheme which is open to all members, and a bursary scheme for its conferences.
A Little History
The Network was first set up as “Cultural Literacy in Europe” (CLE) in 2007 with funding from the European Science Foundation (ESF) Standing Committee for the Humanities with the task of investigating the following questions:
- What is the current state of the field of literary studies in Europe?
- What is the interdisciplinary field of ‘literary and cultural studies’ (LCS) and what are its relationships to other fields?
- How is LCS already active in European society, in the form of ‘cultural literacy’?
- How can we develop and extend the contribution of LCS to Europe and its challenges?
In 2009 an ESF-COST synergy was created to carry the initiative forward; between 2009 and 2011 it ran five international workshops. It was decided that LCS research is based on four key concepts: Textuality, Fictionality, Rhetoricity, Historicity.
The initial two outcomes were an ESF-COST Science Policy Briefing, published in January 2013, and a volume of seventeen essays, From Literature to Cultural Literacy, coedited by Naomi Segal and Daniela Koleva, which was published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2014.
The CLE organised its first international biannual conference in 2015. See past events for more information on all CLE conferences.
In 2021, the membership decided to change the association’s name to ‘Cultural Literacy Everywhere’ to take account of the considerable contributions CLE conferences had received from scholars with research interests beyond Europe.
Naomi Segal, who had co-founded and led the association since the beginning, decided to retire as Chair in 2024. Since then, Ricarda Vidal and Joanna Kosmalska share the post of Chair.
In January 2025, the membership decided to change the name to Cultural Literacy Research Network.