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ICIS States of Risk Postdoctoral Fellowship, 2007-09
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In much existing literature across diverse world areas, crisis, trauma, threat, or destabilization are conceived in relation to one or another delimited "state" and one or another assumed category of "risk." Often the concepts associated with these conditions imply core reference to a particular world area, restricted circumstance, focal population, or historical period, e.g., "political revolution," "civil war," "post-authoritarian conflict," "communal violence," "holocaust," "genocide," "banality of power," "terrorism," "humanitarian disaster," "extreme poverty," or "failed state."
"States of risk" invites perspectives that cross and recast received levels, forms, agents, and/or dimensions of non-western affective, social, or governmental states and their respective risks. The theoretical lens, analytic frame, and conceptual contour will vary depending on the implications of the specific empirical, ethnographic, historical, and/or case material. Application statements should focus on the substantive contributions and broader implications of the candidate’s doctoral research, post-doctoral directions, and future plans.
Though a "state" may be conceived as a formal body of national authority, governance, or political control, it also refers, in a broad and simple sense, to any identifiable attribute or condition of being – be it personal, experiential, structural, or organizational. In a combined or composite sense, "states of risk" articulate threats or likelihoods of destabilization across individual, group, and more formal organizational conditions or circumstances. This implies an interactive if not recursive effect between crisis, threat, or destabilization across different types or forms of affective, social, organizational, or governmental "states." The notion of "risk" expands correspondingly to articulate gambles or risky choices made across ranges of agents, groups, organizations, or authority structures under conditions of threat, crisis, or destabilization.
Viewed less abstractly, one or another state of risk puts other states or conditions at risk. For instance, the experience of unpredictable stress or violence can evoke if not threaten the breakdown of social order or organizational forms generally; reciprocally, perception of failing political institutions or infrastructure can evoke or threaten crisis and trauma in local communities or in personal experience.
Qualifications
- PhD received between September 1, 2004 and July 15, 2007
- Research excellence and teaching excellence
- Primary research involving place-based ethnographic, empirical, historical, and/or case study investigation within or about one or more countries in Africa, Latin America, Asia, or Oceania.
- Research areas of special interest
- circumstances of crisis, conflict, and/or warfare
- social, ethnic, racial, religious, gendered and/or economic stress or hardship
- humanitarian intervention, e.g., its perils and challenges, potentials, and/or trajectories, potentially including research concerning the operations or impact of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) or development projects
- post-conflict or post-authoritarian reconstruction, stabilization, and/or reemergence vis-à-vis local conditions
- putatively indigenous movements or other political assertions of local identity or rights vis-à-vis regional, national, or international structures, bodies, or organizations of influence, authority, or control
- the relationship between identity-based organizations or agents and the development or contestation of broader civil society
- "states at risk" – critical, theoretical, and/or applied understanding of crisis or disruption of state-level governance in relation to specific sub-state conditions and/or international impingements
- Depending on the project research, interests can articulate significantly with but should not be fully reducible to applied or practical concerns. Theoretical and analytic as well as methodological and empirical grounding remains important.