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PhD Candidate 'Socially Engaged Art and State Transformation in Lebanon and Palestine/West Bank'Closing date 31 May 2020Level of education Master's degreeHours 38 hours per weekSalary indication €2,325 to €2,972 gross per monthVacancy number 20-238Research at the Faculty of Humanities is carried out by six research schools under the aegis of the Amsterdam Institute for Humanities Research. The Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis, one of six research schools of the Faculty of Humanities, has a vacant PhD position as part of the NWO VIDI project IMAGINART—Imagining institutions otherwise: Art, Politics, and State Transformation, led by Dr Chiara de Cesari.ASCA is home to more than 110 scholars and 120 PhD candidates, and is a world-leading international research school in Cultural Analysis. ASCA members share a commitment to working in an interdisciplinary framework and to maintaining a close connection with contemporary cultural and political debates.Project descriptionFunded by the Netherlands’ Research Organization, the IMAGINART project explores the role of socially engaged art in reinventing failing public institutions and social structures. Whereas political and cultural theorists often claim that art serves to imagine society differently, this project uses ethnographic methods to examine how this works in practice. Focusing on creative institutional experiments in Hungary, Italy, and Lebanon/the West Bank, IMAGINART has two main aims. The first is to investigate these experiments’ impact on societal resilience, governmental policy, and state formation. The second is to assess their potential for developing 'concrete utopias' in response to state failure or transformation under (post)colonial, postsocialist, or neoliberal conditions.Within the broader framework of IMAGINART, this PhD subproject will focus on creative experiments with institutions in Palestine (the West Bank) and Lebanon. By means of extensive ethnographic fieldwork and critical discourse analysis, the researcher will analyze the ways in which socially engaged art has stepped in to fill the gaps left by failing or non-existent state institutions, paying particular attention to transnational dynamics and connections between fieldwork sites in Palestine and Lebanon. Read more.The PhD position is aimed at candidates who have completed or will complete their MA/MSc no later than 31 August 2020.More Informations