Nostalgia is a shaping cultural force in the new millennium, and is impacting on a wide range of consumer behaviours and cultural productions.

The study of nostalgia is especially timely because technological advancements and the digital media environment are producing new dynamics between past and present, and determining relationships between individuals and communities. New technology presents a paradox: on the one hand, it has the capacity to stimulate nostalgia by bringing large numbers of globally diverse people together, but technologies can also create fragmentation and alienation from the present; our increasingly mediated relationship to the material world has led to perceptions of social and moral decline and loss of traditional values.

The study of nostalgia is important because it influences the behaviour of consumers, marketers, writers and other cultural producers, and because it underpins or connects with a range of trends in contemporary culture.

The ‘Nostalgia in the 21st Century’ project consists of six one-day seminars hosted at the University of Strathclyde, together with a writing competition, Glasgow Remembered: Food and Nostalgia. This competition will culminate in a family event on 13 March 2010, organised as part of the Aye Write! literary festival and also the ESRC Festival of Social Science.