Interested in researching the cultural imaginary of environmental violence in a vibrant interdisciplinary team? Join the ERC Consolidator Grant project “Ecologies of Violence: Crimes against Nature in the Contemporary Cultural Imagination [EcoViolence]” as a postdoctoral researcher.
Your job As a postdoctoral researcher you will be working on a subproject within the Consolidator Grant project EcoViolence (2024–2029) funded by the European Research Council (ERC) and directed by
Dr Susanne C. Knittel (Principal Investigator, PI) at the
department of Languages, Literature, and Communication. EcoViolence is an interdisciplinary, transnational, and comparative study of the cultural imaginary of environmental violence. The project’s aim is to understand how contemporary culture frames and remembers environmental degradation
as violence; how it can make visible the deep historical roots that tie eco-violence to other histories of violence, especially colonialism and genocide; and how it articulates and reflects on questions of guilt, responsibility, and implication. EcoViolence will bring together research in cultural memory studies and ecocriticism in order to develop an innovative ecological model for the study of violence, its memory and representation. Furthermore, the project explores how these representations harness affect and emotion to promote critical self-reflection. The project focuses on narrative and visual media and takes a comparative, multilingual, and media-specific approach.
This subproject Aesthetics of Eco-Violence will contribute to current debates on the role of art in representing eco-violence and in raising awareness about the multidirectional links between histories of human and non-human exploitation. The focus will be on three main facets of contemporary art production: first, art installations and memorials that use the materiality of objects and natural forms, such as trees, ice, rocks, or sand to defamiliarise cultural spaces and provide an aesthetic and affective encounter with otherwise abstract or remote processes of slow violence. Second, artists who employ investigative methods and archival research in order to track and visualise the entangled legacies of eco-violence, genocide, and colonialism. Third, artists and collectives whose work blurs the boundary between art and science and who utilise interdisciplinary methodologies, not just representing and mediating but rather actively participating in the production of scientific knowledge. The subproject will explore the interaction between art and activism, social and environmental justice, focusing particularly on how contemporary art reflects on questions of guilt, responsibility, and implication. The subproject will draw on recent scholarship in cultural memory studies, eco-aesthetics, and affect theory. Its approach will be transnational and transcultural, and the methodology will be comparative, visual analysis as well as discourse analysis.
You will have the following tasks and responsibilities:
- conducting research within the period of appointment;
- publishing peer-reviewed journal articles or book chapters;
- co-editing one special journal issue with the PI;
- helping with the organisation of workshops and an international conference;
- participating in project meetings, and closely collaborating with the other members of the research team;
- helping with setting up and managing project data;
- assisting with knowledge dissemination and other activities of the project;
- presenting research results at national and international workshops and conferences.
You will be embedded within the
Institute for Cultural Inquiry (ICON) and affiliated with the
Utrecht Forum for Memory Studies and the
Network for Environmental Humanities.