Month: May 2023

French Institutes for Advanced Study: Fellowships 2024-25 (France)

Fellowships

Fellowships in 2024-2025, French Institutes for Advanced Study, seven locations in France. Deadline: 6 June 2023.

The French Institutes for Advanced Study Fellowship Programme offers 10-month fellowships in the seven Institutes of Aix-Marseille, Loire Valley (Orléans-Tours), Lyon, Montpellier, Nantes, Paris and Rennes. It welcomes applications from high-level international scholars to develop their innovative research projects in France. For the 2024-2025 academic year, FIAS offers 40 fellowship positions: 4 in Aix-Marseille, 3 in Loire Valley (Orléans-Tours), 10 in Lyon, 3 in Montpellier, 4 in Nantes, 13 in Paris and 3 in Rennes.

The call is open to all disciplines in the social sciences and the humanities (SSH) and all research fields. Research projects in other sciences and in arts that propose a strong interaction and dialogue with the SSH are also eligible. Some host IAS have scientific priorities that need to be taken into full consideration before applying.

The FIAS fellows will be free to organize their research while benefiting from the support and conducive scientific environment offered by the IAS characterised by a multidisciplinary cohort of fellows and by close relation to the local research centres and laboratories.

PHD Studentship: Reframing Postcolonial Discourse in East European Studies (UK)

“Studentships“PHD Studentship in Reframing Postcolonial Discourse in Eastern Europe, Queen Mary University of London and British Library, London, UK. Deadline: 8 May 2023.

Queen Mary University of London and the British Library are pleased to announce the availability of a fully funded Collaborative Doctoral Studentship from 1 October 2023 under the AHRC Collaborative Doctoral Partnership Scheme. This doctoral project seeks to advance postcolonial discourse in East European studies by focusing on the British Library’s unique Belarusian collection, the history of its development during the Cold War, and the collection’s evolution in response to Belarus’ ‘decolonising moment’ as it broke out of the Soviet fold in 1991. This project will be jointly supervised by Dr Natalya Chernyshova (School of History) and Prof Jeremy Hicks (Department of Modern Languages and Cultures) at Queen Mary University of London and by Dr Katie McElvanney, Dr Katya Rogatchevskaia, and Dr Olga Topol at the British Library. The student will spend time with both QMUL and the British Library and will become part of the wider cohort of AHRC CDP funded PhD students across the UK. QMUL and the British Library are keen to encourage applications from the widest range of candidates and particularly welcome those currently underrepresented in doctoral student cohorts.

Project Overview: Slavonic and Eastern European collections at the British Library are one of its strengths. However, despite the diversity of the collections, the British Library co-supervisors have identified postcolonial research and its application to curatorial practices as a priority approach to these collections, likely to reveal many meaningful gaps and contested interpretations. The project will explore the British Library’s Belarusian resources, i.e., resources relating to Belarus and its diasporas, as a case study through which to develop an analytical framework that could be subsequently applied by future scholars and information professionals to the entire Slavonic and East European collection. The project will investigate how the establishment of independent Belarus in 1991 affected the British Library’s policy and approach towards collecting, describing, and interpreting its Belarusian material. The challenges here are many, from navigating the politically charged waters of choosing the right spelling for transcription in the resources’ metadata to finding ways of bringing into dialogue two parallel depositories of Belarusian culture: Soviet-based and diaspora-based, the latter represented by the considerable collection of material at the Francis Skaryna Belarusian Library in London. The research will seek to identify what further work needs to be undertaken to lead the decolonisation of discourse on Belarus and will develop recommendations on how such work can be carried out.

UNESCO Futures of Education Update

“UNESCO”

Negotiating the Future of Education: The UNESCO’s Futures of Education-initiative and the OECD’s Future of Education and Skills 2030-initiative, Humboldt University, Berlin, Germany.

Researchers at Humboldt University (Germany) are studying the entire process of the UNESCO Futures of Education initiative, and they contacted CID to learn more about our involvement in that project. They were interested in our participation for 2 reasons: our focus group was uncommonly diverse, and we proposed a 10th point of action, rather than just discussing the 9 points that the draft proposal outlined. We suggested that

Learning to live together requires intercultural dialogue

and produced a poster showing the relationship between their 9 ideas and our 10th.

Here are further details about the research project:

“In the project “Negotiating the Futures of Education”, we want to analyse how visions of the future of education are negotiated and contested, looking at how narratives about the future of education are constructed by UNESCO and OECD in two currently running projects, Futures of education (UNESCO) and Future of education and skills 2030 (OECD). Our main focus is on understanding the micropolitical “backstage” processes involved in constructing these narratives. We are particularly interested in whether and how formerly marginalized voices and groups are integrated in the process and whether and in which ways these challenge reigning “orthodoxies” in the liberal education script. The project employs a qualitative approach, relying particularly on ethnographic methods, narrative and discourse analysis.”

When the report appears, this post will be updated to include a link.

NOTE: The Center for Intercultural Dialogue held three focus groups as part of the information gathering stage of the Futures of Education project, preparing what we learned as a report for UNESCO, in 2021. A few months later they requested concrete examples from around the world, and we prepared an addendum.