Job: PhD positions "Minor Cosmopolitanisms" Uni Potsdam

The Research Training Group minor cosmopolitanisms (Graduiertenkolleg GRK 2130), funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG) and conducted jointly by Universität Potsdam, Freie Universität Berlin and Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, announces 12 positions starting on 1st October 2019.

Deadline: 01.03.2019

The Research Training Group (RTG) minor cosmopolitanisms establishes new ways of studying and understanding the cosmopolitan project against and beyond its Eurocentric legacies. The minor denotes a perspective crucially informed by post- and decolonial thought and builds on interpretations of cosmopolitan practice which have been variably qualified as “agonistic,” “black,” “creole,” “decolonial,” “discrepant,” “indigenous,” “rooted,” “subaltern” or “vernacular.” They bring into being cosmopolitanisms in a ‘minor’ mode unforeseen by dominant scripts and creating new subject positions within dominant discourses and geopolitics.

Specifically designed as a training programme for early career researchers, the RTG minor cosmopolitanisms offers an international framework connecting Berlin and Potsdam with partner universities in Australia, South Africa, India and the Americas to pursue PhD and postdoctoral projects in a diverse, decentral, collective and convivial environment. Projects within the RTG examine concrete critical, artistic as well as everyday practices which challenge the divide between cultural relativism and humanist universalism haunting the humanities and social sciences. They jointly strive to develop and promote an understanding of cosmopolitanism in the plural which combines visions of transcultural justice, peace and conviviality with an ethical commitment to difference and alterity.

Research projects will be clustered around five core thematic areas of training. These are: Bodies, Ecologies, Inequalities, Indigeneity, and Alternative Genealogies. Within these fields, projects should deal with (current and/or historical) theoretical approaches, literature and other media of artistic production, and/or everyday social and political practices in which minor cosmopolitanisms are acted out.

Candidates are invited to apply by proposing their own dissertation project within the thematic scope of minor cosmopolitanisms and within the fields represented in the RTG (Anglophone Literary Studies, Postcolonial Studies, American Studies, Cultural Studies, Gender and Queer Studies, Cultural Anthropology, History, Jewish Studies, Religious Studies, Political Theory, Sociology, German Literary Studies). For a detailed description of the thematic scope of the Research Training Group and a list of the formal disciplines in which applicants will be enrolled please consult the website .