Seven Fully Funded Four Year PhD Studentships: University of Göttingen
Position: Seven Fully Funded Four Year PhD Studentships
Organisation: University of Göttingen / Seven European Museums
Location: Göttingen and Collaborating Institutions
Closing Date: 30/04/2018
Job Type: A
Salary: Tuition Fees, Maintenance, Research Expenses for Four Years
Details:
Seven Volkswagon Stiftung Funded Doctoral Studentships
University of Göttingen:
- Department of Art History with Professor of the Materiality of Knowledge, Dr Margarete Vöhringer
- Senior research professors working in a range of disciplines and departments
- Zentrale Kustodie / University Museums
Collaborating Museums:
- National Museum of World Cultures, Netherlands
- Historisches Museum, Frankfurt
- Museum of the Second World War, Gdansk
- Haus der Europäischen Geschichte, Brussels
- Völkerkundemuseum der Universität Zürich
- Gustavianum, Uppsala Universitetsmuseum
- ZKM | Zentrum für Kunst und Medien, Karlsruhe
- Deutsches Medizinhistorisches Museum, Ingolstadt
"Exhibiting Knowledge / Knowledge in Exhibitions. An Epistemic History of Exhibitions in the Second Half of the 20th Century"
These studentships are open to applications from international students regardless of nationality.
They are advertised in English and German and these are the languages of the research colloquium.
The
stipendiary support payment over the four year period of the
studentship will be pro-rate at 65% of the German TV-L E13 position
salary.
Exhibitions
are spaces where society absorbs, negotiates, changes, and mediates
current and past knowledge. They are interpretative institutions
creating meaningful
reference points. They serve to affirm cultural and social categorises
and how societies perceive themselves. Thus, they play a decisive role
in the process of generating and negotiating knowledge in
knowledge-based societies.
The
planned Research Training Group will examine the interdependent field
on which knowledge and exhibitions met in the second half of the 20th
century. It will use
seven case studies to analyse this relationship based on history of
knowledge approaches. What kinds of knowledge, already circulating in
academic and social discourses, found its way into an exhibition? Who
are the people possessing and mediating knowledge?
How do exhibitions explain and interpret this knowledge? How do they
translate knowledge into spatial object arrangements? What are the
selection processes and how is knowledge changed in these processes?
We
assume that exhibitions are the results of multi-layered negotiation
processes visible for a short period of time. This involves a wide range
of visible and invisible
actors and is characterised by a multitude of explicit and implicit
contexts. Hence, in addition to the common study of written and
pictorial sources that originated from the conception, implementation
and reception of exhibitions, a comprehensive analysis
of the interdependencies between knowledge and exhibitions needs to
focus also on implicit and tacit knowledge, which is generally not
recorded in writing. Consequently, the seven doctoral students will
spend a year of their total four-year funding phase at
a cooperating museum in order to understand the complexities at work in
preparing exhibitions and also the effects of the exhibitions’ impact.
During this hands-on phase they cooperate in preparation of an
exhibition and by doing so gain another perspective
on the historical material they work with.
The
combination of theory and practice in the curriculum safeguards that
the seven doctoral students pursue an extended research approach. At the
same time, the practical
year enables them to gather skills and experiences during their
qualification phase and to establish networks important for their future
academic careers, but in particular their careers outside of
universities.
The
program will also further develop and expand the networks of
non-university institutions of knowledge transfer and structured
doctoral education by sustaining the
contacts of doctoral students established within the framework of the
Research Training Group.
- Exhibiting colonial knowledge: Museums of European colonial powers since the 1960s.
- Exhibiting migration? A history of knowledge of a thematic constriction.
- War – Remembering, Experiencing, Weeping: About knowledge production in WW2 exhibitions at the crime scenes.
- Researching and exhibiting Ethnology.
- The Viking – A myth: Design and backlash on museum communication.
- Knowledge of pictures: Visual argumentation in exhibitions.
- The 'show value‘ of human remains: Exhibitions as actors in the medical-ethical discourse.
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