Scholarly Contributions

Deconstructing Soft Power, Mapping Cultural Flows & Designing Futures

Most Recent Book

Geopolitics of Digital Heritage

Geopolitics of Digital Heritage (Cambridge University Press) analyzes and discusses the political implications of the largest digital heritage aggregators across different scales of governance, from the city-state governed Singapore Memory Project, to a national aggregator like Australia's Trove, to supranational digital heritage platforms, such as Europeana, to the global heritage aggregator, Google Arts & Culture.

These four dedicated case studies provide focused, exploratory sites for critical investigation of digital heritage aggregators from the perspective of their geopolitical motivations and interests, the economic and cultural agendas of involved stakeholders, as well as their foreign policy strategies and objectives. The Element employs an interdisciplinary approach and combines critical heritage studies with the study of digital politics and communications. Drawing from empirical case study analysis, it investigates how political imperatives manifest in the development of digital heritage platforms to serve different actors in a highly saturated global information space, ranging from national governments to transnational corporations.

To learn more, listen to book interviews conducted by Dave O'Brien on New Books Network and Samira Farah on Triple R Radio.

Explore all Books

Top-Cited Article

The Past and Future of Cultural Diplomacy
160+ Academic Citations

The Past and Future of Cultural Diplomacy (published in International Journal of Cultural Policy) features a comprehensive overview of the evolution of the academic literature on cultural diplomacy since its official inception during the midst of the Cold War, in 1959. It draws on mapping, chronology building, and thematic analysis of all scholarship published on cultural diplomacy in the Scopus database, the largest academic database in the world.

The research explores how the discipline has evolved, what geographies and thematic areas it covered in the past, and what the future holds for the field. These explorations start a conversation on cultural diplomacy as an independent academic discipline that has gained wider attention and reached a higher stage of scholarly maturity. The research findings suggest further trajectories for the development of cultural diplomacy as an academic enquiry, focusing on different diplomatic channels, modes of operation, structures, actors, meanings, and implications.

Explore all Articles

Top-Read Book Chapter

Researching Online Museums: Digital Methods to Study Virtual Visitors

Researching Online Museums: Digital Methods to Study Virtual Visitors
84k+ Global Accesses

As a foundational contribution to the Digital Humanities, Researching Online Museums (Springer) offered one of the first comprehensive frameworks to explore digital engagements in museum communities—a model that remains highly relevant today. It addresses the ethical considerations, methodological challenges, and expanding research opportunities associated with digital ethnography when studying virtual cultural audiences. Grounded in empirical studies of online communities at world-renowned museums, the chapter provides a robust structure for evaluating how contemporary publics interact with cultural institutions in virtual environments.

To capture the evolution toward participatory digital engagement, the chapter organizes online audience research into three interconnected methodologies: quantitative (analyzing visitor demographics and global distribution patterns), behavioral (evaluating user pathways, tracking data, and engagement levels across involvement, participation, and interaction), and qualitative (drawing on digital ethnography and computational sentiment analysis to decode underlying motivations).

Explore all Chapters

Industry Reports

Report for the UNESCO Institute for Statistics

Forthcoming Report for the UNESCO Institute for Statistics

Associate Professor Natalia Grincheva is leading an international team of researchers from the USA, UK, South Korea, and Singapore to author a landmark report commissioned by the UNESCO Institute for Statistics (UIS). The initiative was originally designed as a capacity-building resource for the International Workshop on Cultural Statistics, co-organized by the UN Statistics Division and China's National Bureau of Statistics.

The project responds to a critical global need: as culture gains formal recognition within the 2030 Agenda, national statistical systems require robust, comparable frameworks to measure culture's contribution to sustainable development. The report delivers a comparative analysis of national cultural statistics frameworks across four diverse contexts—the United States, United Kingdom, South Korea, and Singapore—selected for their globally influential cultural data systems and distinct governance philosophies. Moving beyond description, the research establishes a practical diagnostic toolkit enabling policymakers worldwide to assess their national systems against criteria of robustness, viability, utility, and sustainability.

Explore all Reports

Media Articles

Reflections on the 2025 World Expo from Osaka for the ENCATC Magazine

Reflections on the 2025 World Expo from Osaka for the ENCATC Magazine

The Mirror of Dreams decodes the 2025 Osaka World Expo as a strategic arena for negotiating competitive national identity and global soft power. Moving beyond simple showcases of technological innovation, the article analyzes national pavilions as physical manifestations of ideological arguments, where state actors reconcile past heritage, present realities, and future aspirations to script their place in global governance.

The analysis examines three key dialectical frameworks across six prominent national pavilions: the dialectic of cultural capital (contrasting France’s luxury craftsmanship against Singapore’s participatory co-creation), the dialectic of global power (comparing China’s 5,000-year civilizational authority against the United States’ space-frontier disruption), and the dialectic of sustainability (juxtaposing the UAE’s post-oil techno-solutionism against Indonesia’s performative harmony). The article conceptualizes the World Expo not as a simple mirror reflecting national brands, but as a "dreaming glass"—a refractive lens revealing how nations strategically script history and mask domestic anxieties to claim leadership in tomorrow's world.

Explore Media Articles

Connect on

LinkedIn

Watch on

YouTube

Write to

Click to reveal