The Mahindra Humanities Center invites applications for one-year postdoctoral fellowships in connection with the Center’s Andrew W. Mellon Foundation seminar on the topic of violence and non-violence. The call to arms and the politics of non-violent resistance are often represented as polarities. There are, however, many gray areas that define the dialectical relationship between violence and non-violence. The Mellon seminar, in which the postdoctoral fellows play a central role, explores a different dimension of the interrelationship between violence and non-violence—as disciplinary formation, historical event, ideological or ethical discourse—each year.
Following on the themes of war (2014-15) and everyday violence (2015-16), the seminar will focus on slow violence in 2016-17.
We intend to focus on practices and processes of violence involved in large-scale historical and political transformations. The ongoing, incremental processes of slow violence may be manifested in the degradation of social and economic structures, the violation of cultural forms and practices, and the fraying of ethical and political systems. Slow violence endangers the security and sustainability of the quality of life.
We welcome applications from scholars in all fields whose work innovatively engages with slow violence in relation to areas such as:
environment
labor practices
human rights
privacy and security
migration
citizenship
civil society
cultural transmission
secularism
fundamentalisms
The aims of the seminar are twofold:
1) To study violence/non-violence in a comparative global context to advance our knowledge of their complex relationship and with a view to understanding the role played by violent and non-violent engagements in different historical, cultural, and political contexts.
2) To provide an occasion for a pedagogical inquiry into the construction of knowledges of violence/non-violence relative to the scholarly disciplines—to consider the double movement by which disciplines are both compelled to conserve their authority and impelled by historical and institutional change to open up to emergent, interdisciplinary forms of knowledge.
In addition to pursuing their own research projects, fellows will be core participants in bi-weekly seminar meetings. Other participants will include faculty and graduate students from Harvard and other universities in the region, and occasional visiting speakers.
Fellows will be joined at the Center by postdoctoral fellows from Germany, who will be coming as part of a collaboration between the Mahindra Humanities Center and the Volkswagen Foundation. Fellows are expected to be in residence at Harvard for the term of the fellowship.
Fellows will receive stipends of $65,000, individual medical insurance, moving assistance of $1,500, and additional research support of $2,500.
Applicants for 2016-17 fellowships must have received a doctorate or terminal degree after May 2013. Applicants without a doctorate or terminal degree must demonstrate that they will receive a doctorate or terminal degree in a related discipline in or before August 2016.
Applications must be completed by December 1, 2015.
For more information, please refer to our website:
http://mahindrahumanities.fas.harvard.edu/content/postdoctoral-fellowshipsFor the online application, please visit:
https://academicpositions.harvard.edu/postings/6459
