PhD and Postdoc fellowships on socially engaged art and state transformation

Applications are invited for two fully funded PhD fellowships (4 years) and one Postdoc position (2 years) on Socially Engaged Art and State Transformation in Hungary, Lebanon/Palestine, and Italy. They will be part of the NWO-funded Vidi project IMAGINART—Imagining Institutions Otherwise: Art, Politics, and State Transformation, led by Dr. Chiara De Cesari and based at the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis (ASCA) at the University of Amsterdam.

For details and how to apply please use these links: Hungary / Lebanon/Palestine / Italy

Closing date to apply is May 31. Starting date will be September 2020 (or as soon as possible thereafter).

Inquiries may be addressed to c.decesari [​at​] uva.nl. 

IMAGINART—Imagining Institutions Otherwise: Art, Politics, and State Transformation
Funded by the Netherlands’ Research Organization, the IMAGINART project explores the role of socially engaged art in reinventing failing public institutions and social structures. Whereas political and cultural theorists often claim that art serves to imagine society differently, this project uses ethnographic methods to examine how this works in practice. Focusing on creative institutional experiments in Hungary, Italy, and Lebanon/the West Bank, IMAGINART has two main aims. The first is to investigate these experiments’ impact on societal resilience, governmental policy, and state formation. The second is to assess their potential for developing ‘concrete utopias’ in response to state failure or transformation under (post)colonial, postsocialist, or neoliberal conditions.

Dr Chiara De Cesari, Associate Professor, European and Cultural Studies, University of Amsterdam