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, ERRANS environ/s, Models, or Scale.

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 2025 on this website, our newsletter and other mailinglists.

Scales are used to quantify properties such as length and temperature, or also to measure popularity and affect. But as Alice discovers in Wonderland, a change of scale can also have dramatic qualitative consequences. It disrupts customary ways of perceiving, acting, and being — to the point of feeling as ‘queer’ to her as a caterpillar’s metamorphoses. Helped by the arguably inextricable intertwinement of different meanings and aspects of scale, Alice’s experiences continue to provide apt metaphors for the disorienting importance and effects of scale and scaling at a time of hyperglobalization and the so-called anthropocene.

Scale is indeed a highly ambiguous notion, even when one only considers the meanings deriving from the Latin or Italian scala, ladder. It simultaneously denotes the whole ladder, one of its steps, and the relation between two steps: The scale of a cartographic map is the ratio between a distance on the map and a distance on the ground, but any particular length also defines a scale, and the range of scales from the subatomic to the planetary scale is part of the spatial scale. Paradoxically recursive, scale combines and helps mediate quantity and quality, as well as subjective perception, objective material properties, and contingent construction.

See full project description