– starts in spring 2026 –
Thematic Focus
The Research Training Group 3105 takes up the challenge of critically testing the scope of the precarious – and derivatives such as precarity, precariousness, and precarisation – as categories of cultural and social analysis in the Global South. Grounded in an interdisciplinary approach at the crossroads of transregional studies on Asia, Africa, and Latin America, we aim to examine the social and cultural production of the precarious within broader dynamics of interdependence. We investigate how individual and collective social actors perceive and interpret everyday situations, social conditions, and interactional scenarios as precarious. Additionally, we focus on the cultural references they draw upon to make sense of precarity as well as the tactics, strategies, navigational capacities, and repertoires of resistance they mobilize to deal with the precariousness of their existence and the precarisation of their living conditions.
We build on a high degree of international interconnectedness with partner universities in the Global South and encourage our doctoral researchers to look beyond the conventional subject areas of their disciplines.
Qualification Programme
Our goal is to assist our doctoral researchers in learning to look beyond the conventional subject areas of their disciplines by taking up impulses from Global South Studies that contribute to the decentring of academic knowledge cultures. The qualification programme builds on a high degree of international interconnectedness with partner universities in the Global South and an interdisciplinary dialogue between humanities, social and political sciences, anthropology, law, and ethics. The specifically interdisciplinary dimension will be enhanced by the Module “Research on Theory and Methodology” and its delivery of figuration analysis as an innovative methodological and terminological toolbox for research on the precarious.
