Postdoc Working Groups
The Bayreuth Academy promotes working formats for postdoctoral academics based at the University of Bayreuth to convene international and interdisciplinary Working Groups. The Working Groups convene for one or two semesters and are designed to create space for the joint discussion of research results emerging from ongoing or starting projects.. Convening international working groups is part of a special postdoc qualification programme. Working Groups revolve around a specific topic suggested in the context of a call for working groups. The teams may nominate fellows and integrate those present at the Academy into their Working Groups.
Working Groups are expected to promote innovative debates across disciplines and areas by organising regular meetings with presentations and discussions to be attended by the conveners, fellows and guests, members of the Bayreuth Academy and interested Cluster members. Their activities may include accompanying events on the Working Group’s theme with a public impact (e.g., a conference, workshop, or outreach activities).
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- Find the Current and completed Postdoc Working Groups below.
- Call for Applications
Winter Term 2024/2025
Rethinking Accelerated Learning in the Global South
The primary aim of this working group (WG) is to critically examine the phenomenon of accelerated learning and its implications on educational practices, systems, and structures in the Global South, focusing on Africa and Asia. ...more
Winter Term 2023/2024
Digital Trans*formations in Africa: A Critical Space for Intellectual and Material Capital
The working group aims at being a space where to discuss, think and discuss digital transformations, including performative acts and vertents, across time and space in Africa and its Diasporas. We consider digital spaces and the initiatives they host and promote as possibilities that allow no discussions about the ways in which communities learn, understand and make knowledge. ...more
Holding Space for Critical Hope
The proposed working group will focus on sites of aesthetic resistance and their challenges against despair in Turkey and South Africa, as well as the diasporas; not omitting the complicated role that the Erdogan empire plays in African countries. ...more
Winter Term 2022/2023
Communities of Practice Revisited: Exploring potentials of CoP across Disciplines and Regions
The working group aims to revisit the concept of communities of practice (CoP). The CoP was coined by Etienne Wenger (1998) as a social theory of learning, where learning is understood as a process of social participation (Wenger 1998: 4-5). CoP can be ...more
Winter Term 2021/2022
Non-Western Actors and Security/Development Practices in Africa: Analyzing the Multiple Relational Processes Shaping Epistemologies on the Ground
Although the presence of non-Western actors in African countries is not new, how their
narratives and practices relationally mingle and contest with African visions, practices, and
agencies to (re)create epistemologies and approaches to security/development is currently
under-researched and undertheorized. ...more
Postdoctoral Working Group - "Afriofuturism"
Afrofuturist and Africanfuturist movements imaginatively construct interrelated futures with deep historical and spiritual roots shaped by the trajectories of human experiences in Africa and among its diasporas. ...more
Winter Term 2019/2020
SKAnning Space from Africa: Seeing and Becoming
Based in South Africa and extending across the continent, the Square Kilometer Array (SKA)
will become the world’s largest scientific instrument. Transcending borders of what was
previously possible to know about the universe, the SKA also enables new “becomings”: ...more
Shakespearean Pasts, African Futurities: Entanglements of Memory, Temporalities and Knowledge(s)
Fictional works proffer myriad ways of engaging with and (re)imagining futures through temporal emplotment(s) and the elucidation of the entanglements of literary life-worlds with the social realities that informs it and which it in turn refracts. ...more
Summer Term 2019
Postdoctoral Working Group - "Rural Futures"
How might we rethink the “agrarian question” today? How does advanced capitalism in its globalized, financialized form penetrate and reshape agrarian (and post-agrarian) life? And in this context, how do we approach the categories that scholars have used for describing and analyzing “the rural”? ...more