en
Nonprofit organization, Browse similar opportunities
The Internationales Kolleg für Kulturtechnikforschung und Medienphilosophie (International Research Institute for Cultural Techniques and Media Philosophy) invites scholars from the Humanities, Social Sciences, and Arts to apply for a non-teaching Postdoctoral Fellowship (2-6 months, starting from 1st October 2018).
The Internationales Kolleg für Kulturtechnikforschung und Medienphilosophie (IKKM) of the Bauhaus-Universität Weimar is one of ten Käte Hamburger Kollegs funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research.
The fellowship is open to junior faculty and excellent PhD recipients. Applications, based on a short exposé, should address themes close to the IKKM research programme on Operative Ontologies.
The IKKM’s first research program dealt with the relationship of people and things under highly technologized conditions. This research goal remains also during the second research program starting in spring 2014. It will however be altered quite a bit according to the outcome of the first research program. During this first program the ideas of agency theories such as Actor-Network-Theory (ANT), Science & Technology Studies (STS) and the anthropology of art were reconsidered in the frame of media philosophy and research in cultural technologies.
The second research program switches from concepts of relation to operation, guided by the leading concept of Operative Ontologies.
At first sight, this concept seems counterintuitive. Classical ontology for which being is something unchangeable can only think of this concept as a contradictio in adjecto. Operational thought such as systems theory is most of the time regarded as anti-ontological thinking. In contrast to contemporary tendencies to return to pre-critical metaphysics media studies and “Kulturwissenschaft” would agree with Cassirer’s ontology critical formula that science has changed substance based concepts with relational concepts. Operative Ontologies refer to current post-humanist and post-eurocentrist theories of culture and anthropologies which think of themselves as “comparative ontographies” and which document “différents modes d’existence”, “ontological regimes” or “dispositions of being” (Haudricourt, Viveiros de Castro, Descola, Latour following Souriau). Backed up by this state of the art the paradoxical nature of the concept of Operative Ontologies bares the potential to fertilize the ongoing discussion on the media technological constitution of the relation of humans and things.
The fellow will be expected to attend sessions of the IKKM Lectures and to present and discuss their work in the IKKM Lab. The working language is English. The fellowship either grants a stipend for the months spend in Weimar or reimburses the fellow’s home institution for the costs of a substitute. It has a period of appointment of up to six months. During this time, an office in the former Palais Dürckheim, as well as access to the infrastructure of the Bauhaus-Universität Weimar, will be provided. The IKKM will also assist with the logistics of the stay in Weimar.
Choose the country you wish to travel to study for free, work or volunteer
