A total of 12 doctoral positions are to be filled at the DFG Research Training Group 2227 “Identity and Heritage” starting from 1.10.2022. The qualification positions (6 at the Technische Universität Berlin and 6 at the Bauhaus-Universität Weimar) are part-time (65% working week, pay scale: TV-L 13), fixed term (3 years), and can be filled by applicants in the field of monument preservation, (landscape) architecture, art, cultural and media history, urban and spatial planning, archives and social sciences, or related disciplines.
The Research Training Group is a joint institution of the Technical University Berlin and the Bauhaus-Universität Weimar as well as the Universities of Applied Sciences Erfurt and Dessau. It supports critical research into the construction of identities and heritage based on buildings, historical sites and other material and discursive cultural traditions.
The topic of “identity and heritage” has recently gained in relevance. For neo-nationalist movements, aiming to distinguish and isolate their “own”, “identity” has become a combat term. “Post-factual” assertions of absolute and unmixable purity of origin and culture are increasingly finding their way into the media public sphere, especially in social networks. At the same time, global migration movements strike at the core of the identity and heritage constructs based on spatial and social belonging to a place of origin. Postcolonial debates on looted art and restitution are steadily gaining in breadth and explosiveness, changing our view of processes of acquisition and preservation. Postcolonial discourse also refers to identity constructs and identity politics thus becomes a field of social debate. Questions of interpretive power and participation, which are in constant negotiation, are articulated not least through contested representations in the public sphere. Against the backdrop of these social developments, which have by no means lost their explosiveness in recent years, the critical examination of the fundamental modalities and mechanisms of inheritance and transmission becomes all the more urgent.
The Research Training Group continues to focus on the connection between communities’ need for affirmation and the appropriation of cultural heritage, which is mobilised for history and identity politics. The aim is to critically historicise the overall concept of heritage-based identity constructions in national and other inclusive/exclusive social and political groupings. Furthermore, with the third cohort, we will focus more on the conditions, contingencies, and effects of inheritance, as well as the power issues and conflicts associated with it. How do political, territorial, dynastic, social and cultural gaps play out in the passing on or refusal of inheritance? Are claims and (self-) assertions of different inheritance claimants and possible inheritance refusers opposed to each other? Can there be an instance of compensation and what would this look like? Inheritance and the formulation of identity assignments take place in a social, political and cultural context that is in permanent interaction with the observable phenomena of material transmission and preservation or renewal. This applies to artefacts as well as to buildings, urban and landscape spaces. We would like to focus more on the relationships formed by such interactions, their contradictions, paradoxes, and interstices, in the research period beginning in 2022.
The objects, places and discourses to be researched are to be understood as media of formable bonds between inheritors and heritage that are movable in space, time and society. The ability to recognise and interpret historical materials, form and meaning remains essential in order to understand current negotiation processes within their material and historical context.
Thematic fields for the doctoral projects include: the right to heritage, participation, appropriation and interpretive power; loss and things lost, rejection, destruction; promises of stability, power constellations, cultural sovereignties; localisation and dislocalisation; discourses of reconstruction and homeland.
Research Training Group members are expected to participate actively in the events, colloquia and other activities of the group. They are required to be present at the respective places of employment (Berlin or Weimar) for two days a week. The Research Training Group supports the doctoral projects with grants for research and conference trips. Working languages are German and English; applicants should possess CEFR B2-Level German on application. Doctoral theses can be submitted in the German or English language.
All applications, consisting of a CV, copies of certificates, motivation letter, a letter of recommendation from a university teacher, an exposé of a relevant doctoral project (5 pages maximum) and the specification of the intended place of work (Berlin or Weimar) should be sent by email in a single PDF to the spokesperson of the Research Training Group, Professor Hans-Rudolf Meier (bewerbung@identitaet-und-erbe.org) by 1 April 2022.
Further information: https://www.identitaet-und-erbe.org/en/application-2022/.