The summer school on Minor Cosmopolitan Justice and Aesthetics forms part of a larger research project on Minor Cosmopolitanisms that is concerned with establishing new ways of studying and understanding the cosmopolitan project against and beyond its Eurocentric legacies. Bringing together senior scholars and PD students in a Research Training Group located in Potsdam University in Germany, project members undertake research in conversation with scholars with various disciplinary backgrounds, located in universities and institutions around the globe.
Together with our partners at Macquarie University, the RTG Minor Cosmopolitanisms will host a summer school in Sydney, Australia from February 12-18, 2018 that will bring together artists, academics and activists to explore conceptions of justice and aesthetics crucial to a critical inquiry of the cosmopolitan.
While claims to universal human rights and justice have been a linchpin of Eurocentric Enlightenment cosmopolitanism, critics have pointed out the vexed relationship of universal human rights and cultural specificity to the end of articulating a multitude of alternative notions of justice. The production and dissemination of art across national boundaries has been crucial in establishing cosmopolitan trajectories of exchange and inquiry. At the same time, aesthetic practices have been complicit in neo-liberal capitalist logics of the market, which privileges a monodirectional proliferation of products, ideas, and knowledge from the Euro-American centre. Therefore, there is a tangible but also productive tension between justice and aesthetics in various post-/de-/anti-colonial discourses.
The Australian settler colonial state is a particularly apt space to investigate these questions. Artists and performers have greatly contributed to shaping a counter-discourse that addresses colonial and neocolonial strategies of displacement, marginalisation and oppression. These responses are part of a structural re-empowerment of Aboriginal artists among others, and contribute to essential debates on issues of sovereignty and restorative justice.
Tying in with these discussions, the Summer School will address the following questions:
How do aesthetic practices inhabit and inhibit various concepts of justice?
How do such aesthetic practices address issues of citizenship, class, education, gender, race, age, and ability?
In which ways do artistic traditions and canon formation relate to minor cosmopolitan justice? What do appropriation and integration into “major” power-sustaining structures do to those artistic practices?
How do Indigenous communities and groups relate to concepts of nationhood, sovereignty, newcomer, and land? In this context, what is the currency of non-statist sovereignty?
How can an aesthetics of nature be relevant to issues of justice? How is environmental justice negotiated, especially vis-à-vis Indigenous communities, and problems like dwindling biodiversity and ecosystem degradation?
How can different experiences of oppression and persecution be productively addressed in relation to each other? Where can those connections be rendered visible to support acknowledgment and restorative justice?

Application
We invite PhD candidates from Australia and the wider region whose projects touch upon the abovementioned issues to apply for participation in the summer school. To apply, please submit a short motivation letter, a short abstract of your research project, and a full CV before November 1st, 2017 to: sydneyschool@uni-potsdam.de.
Limited funding for participation in the Summer School is available for PhD students. Please indicate specifically if you are applying for a travel bursary.
For more information on the program please go to www.uni-potsdam.de/sydneyschool.
Contact Info:
Contact information
Sydney Summer School Organizing Team
University of Potsdam
Campus Neues Palais, Bld. 2
Am Neuen Palais 10
14469 Potsdam
Germany

sydneyschool@uni-potsdam.de
www.uni-potsdam.de/sydneyschool