Calls

ICAS:MP - Associate Fellowships

The M.S. Merian – R. Tagore International Centre of Advanced Studies “Metamorphoses of the Political: Comparative Perspectives on the Long Twentieth Century” (ICAS:MP) now offers interested researchers who do not require a remunerated fellowship the opportunity to join our Fellow cohorts, preferably between September and March, subject to their fit into the ICAS:MP research framework and workspace availability. ICAS:MP prefers a minimum stay of two months. However, both the duration and start date of the association are negotiable.

Benefits:
Associate Fellows will have access to the centre’s resources, including office space, office supplies, administrative support and publication advice. They will also be integrated into the academic programme and network of ICAS:MP. Associate Fellows may request a certificate for their time at our centre.

How to apply

• Applications can be submitted at any time.
• Applicants should submit a formal motivation letter, CV, a brief project description explaining how their project aligns with the research framework of ICAS:MP, the proposed output and the intended duration of their stay. The ICAS:MP governing board will decide on applications.

For enquiries, please contact Dr. Laila Abu-Er-Rub (Akademische Koordinatorin, ICAS:MP). 

Cultural Science: Special Issue - “With or Without Agency? More-than-human beings in science and traditional figurations”

This special issue of Cultural Science will look at non-human and more than human agency, and why boundaries between actual agency and lacking, unfulfilled agency might not always be hard boundaries. Our understanding of agency has broadened in recent years, shaped by finer-grained descriptions in the biological sciences, and by concerns that historic Eurocentric dichotomies of causality versus choice, and mere teleology versus individual agency, may be obscuring our ways of thinking and making it harder to engage with indigenous cosmologies. Agency is difficult to pin down when lifeforms need to be discussed in relational terms, in the context of place, wider ecosystems, symbiosis and more-than-human cultures. Biology has already provided inspiring cases of quasi-agency, or what looks very much like the precursors of agency, such as reactive capabilities and even forms of problem-solving. A move of rejecting the concept of agency beyond the human, or at least restricting the agency concept to some subset of all animals, may still be tempting. Just as it is tempting to restrict the concept of culture in similar ways. Talk about agency and about cultures seem to go well together. However, it is not clear that we can engage in any such restriction without distorting our understanding of what human agency itself is like, and how it too involves a complex set of relations, a culture reaching beyond the individual (human) act. The aim of the special issue is to explore agency in more-than-human contexts, including being without agency. Authors may draw upon expertise in any agency-relevant field, from literature, art, philosophy, history, and religion, through to ethology and biology. 

Authors should send article submissions to these email addresses: lena.springer@kcl.ac.uk and Anthony.milligan@kcl.ac.uk,  cc’ing the journal editor carsten.herrmann-pillath@uni-erfurt.de.

Call for Papers: Cultural Science - A multidisciplinary journal for the study of more-than-human culture

Call for Papers

Cultural Science looks forward to publishing new work that may be critical, analytical and/or empirical, but is most often dialogical; interested in the production and translation of new ideas and knowledge, especially across perceived and disputed borders between systems, groups, and identities as well as academic disciplines.

Contributions to the journal transcend specialist topical foci while remaining on the firm ground of the respective disciplinary methodologies. Exemplary topical fields include:

• The study of non-human cultures in the biosphere and the role of naturecultures in the interactions between humans and non-humans;
• The role of digital media in the emergence of naturecultures;
• Explorations of human cultural creativity mediating biosphere and technosphere.
• Investigations into the emerging forms of cultural creativity of Artificial Intelligence.
• Research on interspecies media of cultural expression, such as interspecies art and play.
• New theoretical approaches to coevolution and cocreation of cultural media in the more-than-human world.

Fellowships for junior professors for the academic year 2024/25

Deadline: Applications are possible at any time!
Kontakt: apl. Prof. Dr. Bettina Hollstein

The Max-Weber-Kolleg for Advanced Cultural and Social Studies at the University of Erfurt invites applications for fellowships for junior professors for the academic year 2024/25. The fellowships are awarded by way of association to junior professors at the University of Erfurt, usually for 12 months. They usually begin on October 1 or April 1 of each year.