Announcement of a Fellowship of the Project „CEDITRAA – Cultural Entrepreneurship and Digital Transformation in Africa and Asia“
at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz
CEDITRAA is a joint research project by Goethe University Frankfurt, Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz and Pan Atlantic University Lagos. With funding from the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF), it kicked off in April 2021.
As a truly multi-disciplinary team of researchers from economics, film studies, social and cultural anthropology, linguistics, African, Korean, and Chinese studies, we investigate how digitization is changing cultural production in sub-Saharan Africa and East Asia. The project builds on the assumption that cultural production evolves in spiral-like patterns by combining previous works serving as templates for the production of novelty. Focusing on music and film our research starts from Nigeria and South Korea, two countries with regionally leading industries and forms of cultural production that are no longer dominated by the products of the U.S. culture industry. What drives these new cultural industries with supra-regional reach and how do these processes relate to the economic development of their regions of origin? Focusing on the roles and activities of cultural entrepreneurship in local, regional and global settings, we approach this issue from various disciplinary angles and with a wide range of qualitative and quantitative methods.
The CEDITRAA team based at JGU Mainz now offers a postdoc fellowship for up to one month. We are particularly interested in research which deals with the following questions:
• How do novelty spirals in regionally specific constellations of form, formats and contents (1), legal frameworks (2), archives (3), and arenas of reception (4) evolve and contribute to novel cultural products in Subsaharan Africa and East Asia?
• How does digitization affect cultural production in Nigeria and South Korea? What kind of new cultural practices have evolved under digital circumstances in the cultural production fields of film, literature, and music?
• Which challenges do these processes pose for scholarship in African and Asian studies?
• Which new methods need to be developed to conduct research in area studies, and, in particular, which digital methods are suitable to enhance the development of area studies?
CEDITRAA is encouraging all researchers on the postdoc or professorial level wanting to engage with the Mainz CEDITRAA project to apply. The chosen fellow will have the obligation to attend the CEDITRAA meetings and events, give a public lecture and do a seminar meeting with CEDITRAA doctoral students and post docs to discuss his or her current research.
Funds are available up to 3.500 € to cover all travel and other expenses for a stay up to one month. Please submit a letter of expression of interest, a description of the topics you want to work on during your time at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz, and a short to CV to heike.spickermann@uni-mainz.de until May 27th 2022.
