ICI Fellowships

Postdoctoral fellows are invited from across the globe to spend two years at the Institute to pursue their individual projects in varied disciplines, but also to shape, advance, and probe the Institute’s biennial project in a weekly research colloquium as well as by collaboratively organizing workshops, symposia, and conferences. Fellowships are usually advertised every other year for a particular project. Applications can only be considered when received during the application period.

The ICI Berlin formulates interlocking core projects that run over several years: Tension/Spannung (2007–14), ERRANS (2014–20), Reduction (2020–). The collaborative work within the fellowship programme informs, and is informed by, shorter-term foci, such as, Multistable Figures, Constituting Wholes, ERRANS, in Time, or ERRANS environ/s.

The ICI Berlin’s core project ‘Reduction’ explores the critical potentials of notions and practices of ‘reduction’, within and across different fields and approaches, from the sciences, technology, and the arts to feminist, queer, and decolonial approaches, inquiring in particular into the transversality of different economies of reduction and production, and into possibilities of escaping them.

The deadline of the last ICI Fellowship announcement has passed. The next announcement will be posted by mid November 2023 on this website, our newsletter and other mailinglists.

A model can be an object of admiration, a miniature or a prototype, an abstracted phenomenon or applied theory, a literary text — practically anything from a human body on a catwalk to a mathematical description of a system. It can elicit desire, provide understanding, guide action or thought. Despite the polysemy of the term, models across disciplines and fields share a fundamental characteristic: their effect depends on a specific relational quality. A model is always a model of or for something else, and the relation is reductive insofar as it is selective and considers only certain aspects of both object and model.

Critical discussions of models often revolve around their restrictive function. And yet models are less prescriptive and more ambiguous than codified rules or norms. What is the critical purchase of models and how does their generative potential relate to their constitutive reduction? What are the stakes in decreasing or increasing, altering or proliferating the reductiveness of models? How can one work with and on models in a creative, productive manner without disavowing power asymmetries and their exclusionary or limiting effects?

See full project description