International Summer Academy for doctoral and postdoctoral researchers
The Summer Academy is scheduled for September 21 - 28, 2008 at the Ottoman Bank Museum in Istanbul (www.obmuze.com). Twenty-four young scholars will be given the opportunity to present and discuss their current research on cities, pluralism and cosmopolitanism. Participants receive a stipend to cover travel and accommodation. The Summer Academy will be chaired by a group of scholars: Asef Bayat (ISIM), Edhem Eldem (Boğaziçi University, Istanbul), Ulrike Freitag (Centre for Modern Oriental Studies, Berlin), Nora Lafi (Centre for Modern Oriental Studies, Berlin), and Stefan Weber (Aga Khan University Institute for the Study of Muslim Civilisations, London).
In contemporary debates on societal pluralism the notion of cosmopolitanism has become the object of strong ideological investments. In its present form, cosmopolitanism is used both in a very loose historical sense and as a normative concept to project a global and better future. Critics claim that cosmopolitanism is a phenomenon that unites and organizes along the lines of certain visions of history and modernity that are rooted in colonial or quasi-colonial structures with strong allegiances to western-European models or to the ways of life of elites.
The Summer Academy intends to relate these debates on cosmopolitanism and similar notions to the historical experiences of cities in the Ottoman Empire, its successor and its neighbouring states - in the Balkans, Anatolia, the Arab and Muslim World. How did people of different cultural, ethnic, social and religious backgrounds live together in these cities? How are such examples of conviviality, conflict, migration, urban regimes of governance and stratification imagined and conceptualized? How were plural social relations organized and translated into space and material culture? To which degree were social groups of different strata and regional settings part of a 'cosmos' of interacting, interconnected and competing ideas and knowledge systems?
What is the role of local agency? Social History, and questions of spatial organisation, local agencies and vernacular modernities that emerge from scholarship on the cities of the Ottoman Empire and adjunct regions may offer perspectives of a cosmopolitanism "from below" that can contribute to contemporary debates and conceptions of the city, civil society, multicultural societies, migration, or cosmopolitanism.
Conditions of Application
The Summer Academy invites applications of doctoral and postdoctoral researchers in Art, Urban, Social and Cultural History, Sociology, Middle Eastern Studies and Political Science. The researchers' work should be clearly relevant to the theme of the Summer Academy. The working language is English. The application should likewise be in English and consist of
- a Curriculum Vitae,
- a five-page outline of the project the applicant is currently working on,
with a brief summary thereof,
- and the names of two university faculty members as referees (no letters of recommendation required).
The application should be received no later than 25 April 2008 and sent by email as one pdf file or in one word document to:
Georges Khalil
Europe in the Middle East – The Middle East in Europe
c/o Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin
Wallotstr. 19
14193 Berlin
Germany
Email: khalil@wiko-berlin.de
The Summer Academy is supported within the overall framework of the
research program 'Europe in the Middle East – the Middle East in Europe', which focuses on the diverse processes of transfer, exchange and interaction between Europe and the Middle East, and is funded by the Fritz Thyssen
Foundation and the Aga Khan University. For further information on the Summer Academy and the research program 'Europe in the Middle East - the Middle East in Europe' please visit www.eume-berlin.de; for information on the Institute for the Study of Muslim Civilisations of the Aga Khan University please visit: www.aku.edu/ISMC/.