
Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Global Socialisms, University College London, London, UK. Deadline: 15 September 2024.
Applications are invited for the position of Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Global Socialisms within the framework of the ‘The Socialist Anthropocene in the Visual Arts’, a research project funded by UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) under the UK government’s Horizon Europe funding guarantee. The Socialist Anthropocene in the Visual Arts (SAVA) sets out to radically transform current debates on the Anthropocene, addressing the major lacuna in existing accounts by establishing the Socialist Anthropocene as a novel conceptual framework that asserts the constitutive role of the twentieth century environmental histories of socialism in the formation of new geological times. It is the first large-scale interdisciplinary research project that institutes the Socialist Anthropocene as a new field of study within the critical corpus concerned with challenging and decentring the West-centric discourses of the Anthropocene. The approach of the project is to reconstruct the histories of the Socialist Anthropocene through visual arts led interdisciplinary research, which entails analysing historical artworks and engaging with contemporary art practices that act as a catalyst to integrate the insights of multiple disciplines and as a critical agent to pose ambitious and expansive questions, challenging assumptions and engendering new cross-disciplinary paradigms to illuminate the specificities of the Socialist Anthropocene. The research incorporates insights from the fields of art history, environmental history, the history of science, anthropology and the history of global socialisms, along with the work of contemporary artists who contribute to the SAVA team as creative fellows. The distinctiveness, epistemologies, relationalities and potentialities of the Socialist Anthropocene are analysed through annual thematic streams. The focus of this cohort of research fellows and creative fellows will be on agrarian and botanical politics of socialism, animal husbandry and species under socialism and the cultures of the Socialist Anthropocene, from official to dissident and Indigenous approaches to the natural world.