Our overall objective is to explore jointly, from different disciplinary perspectives, a series of issues in globalization, cultural interaction, memory, and identity formation. We will concentrate on the relationship between local and global, “here” and “there,” self and other, and on how their interplay historically has given rise to uniformity and shared cultures, but also to new, hybrid phenomena and interesting alternatives to standardization. This leads us to a number of questions. Is the world really getting flatter and homogeneous or, as “glocal” sociologists such as Roland Robertson and Zygmunt Bauman have claimed, are global processes making possible the intensification and diversification of the local? What are the outcomes of the individual and collective self’s exposure to a remote other’s cultural and political influence?  Further, what were and are the ethics of worldly exchanges in a continually globalizing world?  Our explorations will coalesce around three topics: translations — among disciplines and between cultures; reading across cultures; and collecting other cultures.