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 current focus lies on ‘Scale’ (2024–26).

‘Shock and awe’ is typically a state of reduced capacity to act, move, or resist. Under very special conditions it can be experienced as vitalizing, but in the current conjuncture, it is most readily associated with military or terrorist strategies directed at foreign enemies or, more startingly, turned inward in the hands of disaster capitalism and aspiring autocrats. The effect of dumbfounding paralysis is even more potent with actions that appear themselves self-destructive: when subjects wilfully demolish what used to secure their prestige and power; when rising authoritarian regimes are supported in anticipatory obedience; or when climate change seems to be deliberately accelerated through arms and technology races. How can one not feel utterly disoriented, when it seems as if the world is so clearly oriented towards its own destruction?

For further details, see the full announcement.