Under construction
Abstract
Historical context
The early 21st century was defined by a shift toward security-focused geopolitics after the September 11, 2001 attacks, which launched the U.S.-led “War on Terror,” prolonged conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq, and a global counterterrorism effort that reshaped military strategy and international relations.
The 2010s brought the Arab Spring and its mixed outcomes: regime change in some states, civil war in others (most notably Syria).
Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea and the 2022 full-scale invasion of Ukraine intensified great-power rivalry. Over the same period, U.S.–China competition escalated across trade, technology, and security, producing new alignments and economic friction worldwide.
Economically, the 2007–2008 financial crisis produced a deep global recession, long recovery, and policy debates over austerity, regulation, and inequality. The 2010s saw slow growth under low interest rates and rising populist politics. The COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 triggered another global economic shock, supply-chain disruption and a rapid policy response of fiscal and monetary support. By the early 2020s many economies dealt with higher inflation, rate hikes, and a simultaneous push for green investment and industrial policy.
Technological change accelerated social and economic transformation: smartphones, social media, cloud computing, and data-driven platforms reshaped communication, commerce, and politics, creating new industries and new challenges such as misinformation, surveillance, and platform regulation. Breakthroughs in biotech (including CRISPR, a gene editor and mRNA vaccines), AI, and commercial spaceflight advanced rapidly, with generative AI and large language models becoming widely deployed in the 2020s.
Climate change emerged as a central policy and economic issue as extreme weather events became more frequent and the Paris Agreement (2015) framed international mitigation efforts. Energy transition and decarbonization influenced investment, trade, and geopolitics, even as fossil fuels remained important and adaptation needs grew.
Socially and culturally, the century saw globalization of media and the rise of social movements — #MeToo, Black Lives Matter, Occupy, and pro-democracy protests — that shifted public debates on inequality, justice, and governance. Migration, demographic change, and rising economic inequality contributed to political polarisation and democratic backsliding in several countries, while technological and scientific advances continued to reshape everyday life and work.
Cultural movements
Digital Culture and Social Media:
The rapid rise of the internet, smartphones, and social platforms (Facebook, Twitter/X, Instagram, TikTok) reshaped how people create, consume, and share culture. Attention is commodified: short-form content, viral trends, influencer economies, and meme culture drive taste and political messaging. Communities form across borders but often within algorithmic bubbles, accelerating cultural diffusion while intensifying polarisation, performative activism, and new forms of labour (creator monetisation, gig work).
Globalisation and Cultural Hybridisation:
Continued globalisation deepened cross-cultural exchange, producing hybrid aesthetics in music, food, fashion, and film. Non-Western cultural products (K-pop, anime, Nollywood, Afrobeats, Latin music) achieved mainstream global success, challenging traditional cultural hierarchies. Simultaneously, diaspora communities and transnational flows reshaped identity politics, producing creative syncretism.
Identity Politics and Social Justice Movements:
Movements for racial justice, gender equality, LGBTQ+ rights, indigenous sovereignty, and disability rights gained renewed visibility and influence. Hashtag activism (e.g., #BlackLivesMatter, #MeToo) and coordinated online/offline organising pushed policy shifts, workplace changes, and cultural reckonings. Debates over cancel culture (social ostracism), free speech, and institutional reform highlighted tensions between accountability, due process, and public shaming.
Post-Truth, Polarisation, and Information Ecology:
The 21st century witnessed crises in information trust: misinformation, deepfakes, and echo chambers undermined facts. Political polarisation intensified in many democracies, aided by targeted disinformation campaigns and attention-driven media economics. This produced scepticism toward experts and institutions while spurring grassroots fact-checking, media literacy efforts, and regulatory debates over platform responsibility.
Climate Awareness and Environmental Culture:
Growing visibility of climate science and extreme weather events fostered an environmental cultural shift: youth-led climate strikes, mainstreaming of sustainability in business and lifestyle choices, and eco-activism ranging from divestment campaigns to direct action. Environmental justice reframed climate impacts as linked to social inequality, prompting aesthetic and ethical changes in consumption, design, and policy discourse.
Surveillance, Privacy, and Digital Rights:
Widespread data collection by states and corporations sparked cultural concern about surveillance, privacy, and autonomy. Debates around encryption, algorithmic bias, facial recognition, and platform moderation led to activism for digital rights, calls for regulation (e.g., data protection laws), and countercultures that prize decentralisation, open source, and privacy-preserving technologies.
The rise of DIY and Maker Culture:
Affordable digital tools (3D printers, accessible software, online tutorials) and crowdfunding enabled DIY creativity and small-scale entrepreneurship. Maker spaces, indie games, self-published media, and open-source projects diversified cultural production, lowering gatekeeping and allowing niche communities to thrive and sometimes scale into mainstream success.
Resurgence of Retro and Nostalgia:
A persistent nostalgia cycle influenced media, fashion, and design: reboots, retro aesthetics, and vintage commodification became cultural staples. This nostalgia often intersects with reinterpretation, remixing past forms for contemporary sensibilities, and sometimes functions as critique or escape amid rapid change.
Mental Health and Wellness Mainstreaming:
Conversations about mental health lost stigma and entered mainstream cultural discourse, shaping workplace policies, media portrayals, and consumer markets (wellness apps, mindfulness, therapy culture). At the same time, commercialisation of wellness provoked critiques about accessibility, efficacy, and the privatisation of care.
Art, Experimental Forms, and New Economies:
Artists adopted digital tools and distributed work through streaming, NFTs, and immersive technologies (AR/VR). While new economic models created opportunities, they also generated debates over value, ownership, and labour rights. Experimental practices blurred boundaries between games, art, and social practice, expanding what counts as cultural production.
Literary movements
The early 21st century continued to diversify literary production as digital technologies, global migration, and shifting social dynamics reshaped who writes, how texts circulate, and what subjects gain prominence. One major current is the expansion of global Anglophone and world literature. Authors such as Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Half of a Yellow Sun (2006), and Jhumpa Lahiri The Namesake (2003), Unaccustomed Earth (2008), from diasporas gained international visibility, blending local traditions with transnational concerns. These works often explore identity, postcolonial legacies, and the negotiations of language: mixing vernaculars, code‑switching, and hybrid forms that challenge national literatures and foreground cultural plurality.
Another defining movement is the rise of autofiction and memoiristic hybridity, where authors blur boundaries between autobiography and fiction to examine memory, subjectivity, and the ethics of representation. These include
Karl Ove Knausgård My Struggle (Min Kamp) series (2009–2011), Sheila Heti How Should a Person Be? (2012) and Rachel Cusk Outline trilogy (2014–2018). This trend reflects heightened public appetite for personal narratives and the porous line between lived experience and creative invention. Writers use the hybrid form to interrogate truth, performativity, and the social lives of selfhood in late modernity.
The digital turn produced new aesthetic and distributional modes: electronic literature, flash fiction, microfiction, and works shaped by social media’s brevity and immediacy. Writer include Lydia Davis Very Short Stories and flash fiction collections.
Twitterature, that is novels serialised on social platforms, are increasingly ephemeral examples across the 2010s, serialised online narratives, and multimodal storytelling that integrates images, hyperlinks, and interactive elements. This changed formal expectations, privileging fragmentation, ephemerality, and reader participation. Fanfiction and participatory cultures such as E. L. James Fifty Shades of Grey (originally a Twilight fanfic) and Harry Potter, fans further destabilised authorial authority and nurtured communal modes of world‑building and serial creativity.
Politically engaged writing also reemerged strongly, with protest literature, climate fiction (cli‑fi), and decolonial poetics addressing crises of inequality, environmental catastrophe, and ongoing racial and gender injustices. An examples is Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake (2003). Examples of cli‑fi/speculative fiction, Cli‑fi, imagines ecological futures and collapse in order to spur ethical reflection: Amitav Ghosh The Hungry Tide (2004) and The Great Derangement (2016, essay on climate and literature).
Ocean Vuong On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous (2019) uses intersectional themes in memoir‑novel form. Intersectional feminist and queer literatures retell histories and craft imaginaries that validate marginalised experiences while critiquing structural power.
Minimalism and maximalism coexist as stylistic poles.George Saunders Tenth of December (2013) is short fiction blending satire and empathy. David Mitchell Cloud Atlas (2004) has a maximalist, multi‑genre structure. Kazuo Ishiguro Never Let Me Go (2005) is both literary and speculative.
Many novelists embrace encyclopedic, digressive, and hybrid narratives, mixing genre elements, archival documents, and theoretical riffs. Genre boundaries themselves have blurred: literary fiction, speculative fiction, genre romance, and mystery increasingly cross‑pollinate, yielding formally inventive works that reach wider audiences.
Finally, the institutional ecology of publishing DIY presses, indie bookstores, self‑publishing, and algorithmic recommendation systems has transformed literary careers and canons. These include: Sally Rooney Conversations with Friends (2017), Andy Weir The Martian (2011), self‑published, later a mainstream bestseller. These shifts democratise access but also create new gatekeeping dynamics.
Art
Painting in the 21st century remains a vital, pluralistic field where traditional craft coexists with experimental approaches. Many painters combine historical techniques with contemporary concerns such as identity, politics, ecology, and technology, so that the work functions as both object and idea. For example, Kerry James Marshall uses oil painting to center Black histories and everyday life, reclaiming figurative representation for narratives long marginalised in Western art history.
Material and process experimentation is central to contemporary painting. Artists like Anselm Kiefer incorporate the unconventional material lead, straw, and ash into monumental canvases that evoke history, memory, and landscape. His textured, sculptural surfaces push painting toward objecthood. Similarly, Julie Mehretu layers ink, acrylic, and gestural marks to produce frenetic, cartographic abstractions that map migration, conflict, and urban development. Her works show how drawing, mapping, and painting blend into hybrid visual languages.
Digital aesthetics and new media have reshaped painterly practice as well. Cecily Brown’s gestural, figural abstractions suggest cinematic blur and photographic reference, while painters such as Petra Cortright and Michael Craig-Martin (who has engaged with digital culture) explore how screen-based imagery and internet culture inflect imagery and composition. Some artists engage directly with technology. Refik Anadol translates data into luminous, painted-like projections (blurring lines between painting, installation, and AI-driven visuals).
Global perspectives and vernacular traditions enrich contemporary painting. El Anatsui transforms discarded bottle caps into wall-hung, tapestry-like works that read like painted surfaces from a distance, bridging craft, sculpture, and painting. Ibrahim El-Salahi fuses Islamic calligraphic traditions with modernist painting to create lyrical, symbolic canvases that reflect postcolonial identity. These examples show how non-Western techniques and histories expand painting’s vocabulary.
Street art and muralism have also reasserted painting’s public role. Banksy’s stenciled political images, though often ephemeral and reproducible, demonstrate painting’s power to engage broad audiences outside institutional spaces:
In a different register, large-scale muralists like Swoon combine delicate linework with site-specific narratives to integrate painting into communities.
Finally, painting engages ecological and material concerns. Agnes Denes’s map-like works and Mark Bradford’s layered collages (built from found advertising materials) address urban ecology, consumerism, and social structures. Bradford’s surfaces function as painted topographies of social life.
Across these varied practices, 21st-century painting is defined by hybridity: painters draw on history, materials, technology, and global narratives to reinvent what painting can be.
Music
The 21st. century's music landscape is defined by rapid technological change, genre fluidity, and global interconnectedness. Digital distribution through streaming platforms like Spotify, Apple Music, and YouTube shifted how people discover, consume, and monetise music. This democratised release pathways for independent artists while altering revenue models. Singles and playlist placement often now matter more than full albums. Chance the Rapper gained prominence through free online releases and streaming rather than a major-label album, winning Grammy recognition while remaining independent.
Genre boundaries have blurred as artists freely mix styles, producing hybrid sounds that reflect diverse influences. Pop often incorporates hip-hop, electronic, and Latin rhythms. Indie artists sample R&B and ambient textures and electronic producers collaborate with singer-songwriters. Billie Eilish blends pop, electronica, and alternative sensibilities into minimalist, mood-driven songs; Lil Nas X fused country and hip-hop on "Old Town Road," which topped charts and sparked discussion about genre classification.
Social media and short-form video apps (notably TikTok) reshaped promotion and hit-making, with clips driving songs to viral popularity and sometimes reviving older tracks. Fleetwood Mac’s Dreams re-entered charts after a viral TikTok video, while Doja Cat and Olivia Rodrigo used social platforms to launch chart-dominating singles.
Production and consumption trends include the rise of bedroom producers and DIY recording enabled by accessible software. This widened participation and diversified sonic palettes. Artists like Grimes and Clairo started with home-produced tracks that led to major-label attention.
Globalization brought non-Western genres into mainstream consciousness: reggaeton and Latin trap (Bad Bunny, Rosalía), Afrobeats (Burna Boy, Wizkid), K-pop (BTS, BLACKPINK) achieved international success and influenced production styles worldwide. Collaborations across languages and regions became common, reflecting and reinforcing global musical exchange.
The industry also faced challenges. There were declining traditional sales, disputes over streaming payouts, concerns about artist compensation, and changing touring economics, though live performance remained a major income source for many artists. The COVID-19 pandemic (2020–21) temporarily halted touring, accelerating livestream performances and exploring virtual concert formats.
Architecture
The 21st century has seen architecture respond to rapid technological, social, and environmental change, producing buildings that blend digital design, new materials, and sustainable strategies. Architects now leverage computational design tools and parametric modeling to create complex geometries and optimized structures that were previously impractical. Examples include Zaha Hadid Architects’ Heydar Aliyev Center in Baku, where fluid, continuous surfaces express novel forms enabled by digital fabrication.
Sustainability has become central: energy efficiency, passive design, and net-zero ambitions shape building envelopes and systems. Green skyscrapers and retrofits demonstrate this shift. Norman Foster’s Bloomberg HQ in London uses advanced daylighting, natural ventilation, and energy-recovery systems to cut energy use, while projects like the Bullitt Center in Seattle aim for net-positive performance through solar arrays, rainwater systems, and strict materials selection.
Urban density and mixed-use programming address growing populations and changing lifestyles, producing transit-oriented developments and adaptive reuse projects that prioritize walkability and community. The High Line in New York repurposes an elevated rail into public green space, triggering neighbourhood transformation and influencing urban regeneration worldwide.
Technology-driven fabrication and prefabrication accelerate construction and lower costs while allowing customisation. Examples include prefabricated modular housing projects that provide rapid, scalable solutions for housing shortages, and digitally fabricated façades like the Institut du Monde Arabe’s dynamic brise-soleil by Jean Nouvel, which uses mechanical apertures to respond to light.
Cultural expression and identity remain prominent as architects negotiate globalisation and local context, producing works that reference regional materials and craft within contemporary forms. Tadao Ando’s minimalist concrete buildings, though rooted in local sensibility, illustrate how materiality and light can convey cultural resonance in modern work.
Finally, resilience and climate adaptation have emerged as priorities: architects design for rising seas, extreme weather, and long-term flexibility. Examples include the adaptive waterfront strategies in Rotterdam and floating or elevated structures in flood-prone regions, demonstrating how contemporary architecture integrates technical innovation with environmental responsiveness.
Cinema
The 21st century transformed filmmaking through technological advances, globalised financing and distribution, and shifting audience tastes. Digital cinematography and affordable editing tools democratised production: auteurs and indie filmmakers could compete technically with studios, while visual effects evolved from practical to seamless CGI that enabled expansive genre films and imaginative worldbuilding (e.g., Christopher Nolan’s Inception (2010) blends practical effects with digital augmentation; James Cameron’s Avatar (2009) popularised performance-capture and volumetric CGI).
Streaming platforms reshaped how films are funded, released, and consumed. Netflix, Amazon, and later services began producing award-winning features and acquiring festival hits, challenging theatrical windows and broadening access to diverse voices. Examples include Alfonso Cuarón’s Roma (2018) and Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite (2019), the latter also signaling global cinema’s commercial and critical crossover success.
Genre blending and formal experimentation became common: horror mixed with social critique (Jordan Peele’s Get Out (2017). Science fiction explored intimate human themes. Denis Villeneuve’s Arrival (2016), Ex Machina (2014) and animation tackled adult concerns: Wes Anderson’s Isle of Dogs (2018), Pixar’s Inside Out (2015). Filmmakers revisited and reworked cinematic history through pastiche and revisionism. Greta Gerwig’s Barbie (2023) uses self-aware satire and visual homage, while Todd Phillips’ Joker (2019) adopts a gritty, character-driven tone reminiscent of 1970s cinema.
Global cinema grew more visible and influential. South Korean film’s international rise culminated in Parasite’s Best Picture Oscar, while filmmakers from Africa, Latin America, and Asia found festival platforms and streaming audiences. This era also saw renewed attention to representation and industry accountability. Movements addressing gender, race and labour reshaped hiring, storytelling priorities, and award recognition.
Finally, the 21st century balanced blockbuster spectacle with intimate, low-budget storytelling. Franchises and cinematic universes (Marvel, Fast & Furious) dominated box office and marketing strategies, yet independent films, restored classics, and auteur-driven projects continued to receive critical acclaim and cultural impact, demonstrating an expanded, pluralistic cinema landscape.
Philosophy
In the 21st century, several defining trends have emerged in philosophy:
Interdisciplinary research
Philosophers collaborated closely with neuroscience, cognitive science, computer science, economics, and environmental science to rethink classic questions about knowledge, mind, and morality. Some of the more influential interdisciplinary philosophers are:
- Patricia Churchland, Braintrust: What Neuroscience Tells Us about Morality (2011) which dealing with neurophilosophy, moral cognition and the connection of neuroscience to ethics.
- Joshua Greene Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason, and the Gap Between Us and Them (2013) which applies experimental moral psychology to ethics and policy.
- Daniel Kahneman Thinking, Fast and Slow (2011). It is influential for philosophy of judgment, decision theory and behavioral economics.
- a growing interest in applied philosophy, such as AI ethics, technology ethics, bioethics, and environmental ethics, in response to technological and ecological challenges.
- revival of political and social philosophy around issues like justice, identity politics, migration, and global inequality, often focusing more on structural power relations and questions of representation.
- a methodological diversification: alongside analytic rigor, continental, pragmatist, and non‑Western traditions have gained visibility, as have postcolonial and feminist perspectives that critically reassess the canon and methods.
- a normative and epistemic sensitivity to uncertainty and complexity: debates about risk management, trust in experts, and epistemic justice are prominent, while traditional metaphysical questions, about consciousness or personhood, are being reoriented by new empirical findings and technological possibilities.
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