A Manifesto for Cultural Literacy

We are writers, scholars, designers, translators, artists… We are readers, thinkers and makers. Coming from diverse backgrounds, cultures and horizons, we embrace a view of the arts and humanities beyond nationalist or disciplinary boundaries, which allows us to co-construct a space for sharing and exchange.

We are weary of binarisms, universalisms and essentialisms, of the canonisations, categorisations and reifications of culture, of the oppressive demands for squeezing ourselves and the work we do into the tick boxes of neoliberalism, patriarchy and capitalism. 

There is a crisis

The humanities are in crisis—not because they lack inherent value, but because their “value” has been constrained by free-market corporatism and the algorithmic flattening of experience. Our organisations are stifled by top-down decision-making, excessive bureaucracy and the micromanagement of people. The contributions of the arts and humanities are assessed in economic and algorithmic terms. Researchers and practitioners are expected to focus not on their intellectual and creative endeavours, but on generating measurable outputs. We make a positive contribution within society, culture and the environment, yet the impact of the work we do cannot be captured by metrics alone. Under pressure from all sides, universities have become increasingly adverse to speculative thinking and this is having a detrimental effect on students and higher education. There is no room for error. There is little space for imagination and improvisation. Yet we must be able to fail, to go astray, to err in order to learn and grow.

Making stories matter(s)

Culture, in all its shapes – be it arts, crafts, story-making, orality — is a liberating site which allows us to challenge mainstream narratives and co-create meaning.  Making stories is a creative act. Storytelling is about being in the world and the joys of world-making. By telling and listening to stories and being moved by them we create connections between people, places and realities. By inventing, translating and reimagining stories, we can challenge narrow understandings of the world based on hegemonic systems of knowledge and rid ourselves of our own presumptions and biases. 

In the era of unreliable AI-summaries and quick answers to complex questions, we want to encourage taking the time to sit with a text, letting it work on you, embracing the slow and immersive process of engaging with ideas, trying – and perhaps failing – to understand. We must nurture a capacity to appreciate nuance and ambiguity. We must resist cognitive off-loading and de-skilling. Let’s investigate and remember that we have agency to influence: we can move, we can play, we can lead the dance with technology. The stories we make can give rise to a shared reality that is a map to a new world. 

Cultural literacy is praxis 

We understand cultural literacy, as a transcultural, plurilingual and relational praxis that enhances social cohesion, enabling us to become  interpreters and creators of social realities. This involves a shift from literacy as a tool to access canonical symbolic systems (reading, writing, mathematics) to a holistic, socially situated means to embrace affective, non-representational modes of expression and communication. In turn, this shift allows us to expand notions of literacy to the ability to attune, connect and resonate.

Culture manifests in the ever-shifting practices through which we wonder at the world and seek to better understand our place in it. Cultural literacy entails the ability to approach, read, examine, query and interpret these practices.

We acknowledge the power of performing, artmaking, writing, crafting, translating… weaving, stitching, painting, dancing… making texts of all kinds. The maker meets the material world and knowledge is generated in that friction. Culture as praxis brings into focus the relation between objects, people and stories through a willingness to be fluid, to become… We are comfortable with chaos, at ease with not having to explain why uncertainty, intuition, and feeling matter. We weave our work with unseen threads, embracing what cannot be fully known.

Culture is an act of empathy and imagination, a way of honouring the vastness of being and of human experience across time, language, and belief | Culture means understanding that every entity, gesture, word, colour, or sound carries traces of memory and meaning | Cultural literacy is the ability to feel, interpret, and connect with the stories behind the symbols we create and those we find | Cultural literacy is also a form of care: a commitment to learning, unlearning, and sharing knowledge responsibly | To be culturally literate is to listen deeply, to recognise the invisible threads that hold lived experience, and to use that awareness to connect rather than exclude