Who are the postcolonial intellectuals, which of them are currently the most influential and how do they contribute to a new idea of “Europe”? This innovative international network challenges the traditional definition of the “intellectual” by emphasizing the role of migrants, artists, activists and social movements.
Postcolonial Intellectuals and their European Publics network (PIN) brings together an international and interdisciplinary network of scholars to investigate the role of postcolonial public intellectuals as crucial actors in renewing the function of the humanities and of democratic participation in Europe.

Researcher

NWO grant NWO Internationalization in the Humanities

The project (2016-2021) aims to investigate the relation between migration and digital technologies, in particular the way in which the ‘connected migrant’ contributes to new forms of European integration and cosmopolitan citizenship. The project explores digital diasporas in relation to issues of gender, ethnicity and affective belonging, focusing on how new technologies enhance new forms of connectivity between the homeland and destination countries, bus also across diasporas. The project pioneers a new interdisciplinary method that combines media studies, postcolonial theories, digital humanities and gender studies, drawing from the humanities and social science.

It proposes a comparative approach, based on qualitative digital methods, that focuses on Somali, Romanian and Turkish women migrants who have settled in some of Europe’s main cities (London – PhD1, Amsterdam – PhD2 and Rome – PhD3) and the way in which they keep digitally and emotionally connected to their homeland cities (Mogadishu, Bucharest, Istanbul – Postdoc). The project will chart how different forms of migration (labour, postcolonial and postsocialist) impact on the new European order at the local and transnational levels. www.digitaleurope.nl

Project Leader

EU grant ERC (European Research Council) consolidator grant

• dr. Claudia Minchilli
• dr. Laura Candidatu
• dr. Melis Mevsimler
• dr. Donya Alinejad

The project analyses concrete historical events such as the adoption of treaties by the various European states and their consequences, issues in political theory and political philosophy such as the notions of sovereignty, borders, and law, as well as their representations in a variety of media from literature to film and popular culture. The main aim is to develop theoretical and methodological tools, based on particular case studies, to discuss future ideas of Europe in a postcolonial and postimperial perspective. The project aims to significantly contribute to existing knowledge, and prepare the ground for future multi-disciplinary research, bridging some gaps in current discipline-bound scholarship, and asserting the importance of culture in general, and Humanities-based research in particular, for imagining models for a European polity.

Researcher

Utrecht University NWO internationalisering in the Humanities

• Prof. Graham Huggan; Prof. John McLeod; Prof. Max Silverman; Prof. Tobias Doering; Dr. Lars Jensen; Prof. Paul GilroyProf. Iain Chambers;

MIG@NET explores how migrant individuals and communities participate in the production and transformation of transnational digital networks and the effect of transnational digital networks on migrant mobility and integration. Transnational digital networks are studied as instances of socio-economic, gender, racial, and class hierarchies, where the participation of migrant communities entails the possibility of challenging these hierarchies. The participation of migrant communities - at times inclusive, joining in larger transnational digital projects, at times exclusive, creating separate and relatively closed transnational spaces - is investigated in detail through particular case studies in seven thematic areas: Border Crossings, Communication and Information Flows, Education and Knowledge, Religious Practices, Sexualities, Social Movements, Intercultural Conflict and Dialogue. The project addresses these issues through a tripartite conceptual and methodological approach: a) a critical approach to the separation between the digital and the real; b) a transnational approach to migration and c) an intersectional approach to gender.

 

Project Leader & Researcher

EU grant 7th European Framework Program

• dr. Eva Midden
• dr. Koen Leurs

• Panteion University (Greece); Symfiliosi (Cyprus); Fondation Maison des Sciences de l’Homme (France); University of Hamburg (Germany); University of Bologna (Italy); The Peace Institute (Slovenia) and the University of Hull (UK).

In this project, we focus on how new digital media practices involving the internet impact on the lives, identities, learning and socialization of migrant youth. Migrancy, central to this program, embeds many of the local and global paradoxes that also pertain to digital media with their compression of space and time. However the link between the two fields is still under-theorised and is in need of more situated and comparative research. The project aims to monitor, evaluate and assess the socio-cultural specificities of the interaction between youth and digital media in a comparative perspective (migrants versus native Dutch, Moroccan migrants in the Netherlands versus Mexican migrants in the USA, female versus male). The comparative research focuses on a) identity construction and global representations, b) development of new learning strategies and socialization patterns, c) new forms of digital literacy and youth networks, and d) differences and similarities of these dynamics in a cross-national comparison. The project aims to locate the study of the effects of digital media in relation to socio-cultural configurations mediated by nationality, gender and ethnicity. See for more information: http://www.uu.nl/wiredup/

Researcher

Utrecht University Utrecht Executive Board, High Potential Project

• dr. Koen Leurs

• Prof. dr. Mariette de Haan (UU
• SW); dr. Kevin Leander
• VanderBilt University
• USA. Dr. Fleur Prinsen (UU
• GW); Asli Unlosoy (UU
• SW)

During the past two decades an impressive inventory of postcolonial authors have been awarded prestigious literary prizes. How did non-western writers, or writers from former European colonies, suddenly command the notice and approbation of the judges in charge of awarding prestigious international prizes?
In this research project, I wish to analyse this shift in reception by focusing on four exemplary authors from the English speaking world: Salman Rushdie, V.S. Naipaul, Arundhati Roy and Derek Walcott. More specifically I will investigate the literary and marketing strategies that have allowed these authors to achieve international prominence and be included within the academic discourse. I will do so by offering a typology of the inventive literary techniques and contents deployed in these author's works (Midnight's Children, 1981; The Enigma of the Arrival, 1987; The God of Small Things, 1997; Omeros, 1992). Secondly, I intend collecting and critically interpreting the reports of judging committees and the reviews that appeared in the press and media. Finally, I will trace the institutionalisation of the selected authors in the curricula and research programmes of academic institutions in the U.S., Great Britain and the Netherlands. This will demonstrate that the understanding and reception of postcolonial literature is, on the one hand, linked to new global mechanisms of production and consumption which, on the other hand remain beholden to national discourses.
This research project will originally combine an analysis of globalisation with postcolonial theory and literary criticism. It will connect social and commercial issues linked to a rapidly homogenising consumer culture with shifts in the aesthetics of reception, that are increasingly challenging Western norms through a focus on local issues of place and ethnic identity. It will also be a novel critical study that is informed by a wide-ranging exploration of theoretical perspectives and literatures developed in the last decades in particular in the United Kingdom, The Netherlands and North America.

Project Leader & Researcher

NWO grant