June 15–28, 2020
Applications are invited for two funded Postdoc positions (1.5 year) on Worlding Public Cultures: Museums in an Age of Decolonization, one at the Free University/Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (VU) and the other at the University of Amsterdam (UvA). They will be part of the Netherlands-based team for the NWO-funded Transatlantic Platform “Worlding Public Cultures: The Arts and Social Innovation,” led by Prof. dr. Wayne Modest (VU) and dr. Chiara de Cesari (UvA).
For details and how to apply please use these links: VU postdoc / UvA postdoc
Closing date to apply is June 28 and June 26, respectively. Starting date will be September 2020 or as soon as possible thereafter.
Worlding Public Cultures: The Arts and Social Innovation is a collaborative research project and transnational platform that facilitates multipronged dialogues concerning the global in the arts and culture. As such, it puts forward an understanding of the globalized world as historically constituted by open-ended processes involving lived interrelations and interconnections. Bringing together universities and museums across the Atlantic, from Canada to the UK, The Netherlands, and Germany, Worlding Public Cultures sees art, art history, and curating as world-making and activating practices that imagine the global otherwise. By conducting research on and for institutions of public culture, this project endeavors to foster social innovation. In particular, it aims to contribute toward building more resilient public cultures and institutions so as to best address contemporary challenges to pluralist democracies and open pathways toward decolonizing “universal” narratives and epistemologies.
The Netherlands-based T-AP research subproject is a joint VU-UvA collaboration. The subproject explores institutional change in relation to the conceptual framing of the overall project. In looking at “worlding and/as decolonization,” it focuses on projects and processes of institutional decolonization and transformation in the Global South, including artists and activists’ ongoing efforts to decolonize museums. The project will address the following questions: where have these decolonizing practices emerged and thrived? How do they operate? Who pushes them through? Under what conditions can they emerge? Under what conditions can they be successful? What artistic, activist, and curatorial strategies are being mobilized to change institutions in response to the question of enduring colonial legacies? The two selected postdocs will be working on these topics from different perspectives and case studies.