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Amsterdam Institute for Humanities Research (AIHR) currently has a vacant Postdoc researcher position as part of the broader field Cultural Heritage and Identity. Within this field the focus is on material and immaterial heritage (including digital heritage), and on cultural heritage and societal change. The postdoc will be part of one of the following research schools within AIHR: Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis (ASCA), Amsterdam School for Heritage, Memory and Material Culture (AHM), Amsterdam School of Historical Studies (ASH) or Amsterdam School for Regional, Transnational and European Studies (ARTES):
https://aihr.uva.nl/research/research-schools.html.
What are you going to doThis postdoc position is connected to the Decolonial Futures research priority area (RPA), currently in development at the University of Amsterdam. The RPA brings together scholars from the humanities, social sciences and law to develop theories and methods that account for colonial pasts and enable more just decolonial futures. The RPA innovates theoretically by approaching colonial pasts as not completed, but embedded in the present, and decolonial futures as not yet-to-come but prefigured in the present and past. It also develops new methodologies by connecting approaches from different disciplines that make room for marginalized communities and perspectives.
We are looking for a postdoc who will contribute to the RPA's research line on "Justice: Past, Present and Future" by approaching cultural heritage from a critical humanities perspective. We would like the research of the postdoc to address and redress colonial legacies by examining how we can harness material and immaterial archives silenced, marginalized and fragmented by colonial violence (which tend not to be recognized as cultural heritage) to create new visions of a just global future and how we can mobilize these visions to work towards meaningful social change, for example through reparation and restitution. The focus may also lie on how these archives enable forms of research and teaching that challenge the monocultural modes of knowledge production from which the concept of heritage itself emerged. We are particularly interested in projects that explore the decolonial force of harnessing archives as-yet excluded from globally dominant notions of cultural heritage across at least two of the RPA's four thematic fields: (1) Museums, monuments & archives; (2) Ecology, sustainability & climate change; (3) Migrations, mobility & borders; and (4) Race, gender, sexuality, class & diversity.
Your tasks and responsibilities:
- conducting research, presenting intermediate research results at workshops and conferences and publishing at least two peer reviewed articles;
- participating in activities of the research school, department and research priority area;
- co-organising knowledge dissemination activities.