Job: Postdoc position “Activism as a Traveling Aesthetic Form”
Ethnologie und Kulturanthropologie – Universität Konstanz
A postdoc position (100%) is available for a period of 2+2 years, beginning in October 2020. Applications (PDF) should include curriculum vitae, a list of publications, copies of academic certificates and a research outline for the following subproject:
Subproject “Activism as a Traveling Aesthetic Form” (Anthropology)
Using ethnographic methodologies, the anthropological subproject explores the case of political activism in present-day South Africa as a mobile assemblage of aesthetic forms. It does so by taking inspiration from approaches that, firstly, foreground the symbolic and performative aspects of “the political” and, secondly, highlight the affective dimensions of activism. At the same time, the subproject goes beyond existing research by paying close attention to the fact that activism as an aesthetic form, and as a form that moves people affectively, is not a purely local or “sedentary” phenomenon but one that can be shown to be mobile and embedded in complex transnational interconnections between different activist groups. The subproject sheds light not only on the mobile coproduction of activist aesthetic forms and activist affective-habitual forms but also on how certain structural features of these forms provoke highly charged affective states among those who use them.
Contact for proposals and questions: Prof. Dr. Thomas Kirsch. Reference number: 2020/071.
Application deadline: 15 June 2020.