6 April 2022

In Situ Graduate School (ISGS)
Textile And Dyes As Transnational, Global Knowledge

Deadline application: 15 April 2022
ISGS dates: Sunday 18 – Friday 23 September 2022
Location: Leiden, the Netherlands
Language: English
Website: https://www.iias.asia/textiledyes
Co-organisers: LeidenGlobal, Humanities Across Borders and the International Institute for Asian Studies

Call for applications

Our understanding of textile and dye crafts, both at the local and global levels, is invariably colored by colonial, national, and post-war UN approaches to ‘development and rehabilitation’. More recently, the neoliberal wave of institutionalizing art and culture through the frames of ‘heritage’ and/or ‘creative economy’ has begun to shape our ideas and sentiments about handmade textiles, clothing, and dyes.

This ISGS invites applications from Arts, Design, Social Sciences and Humanities graduate students (doctoral, including doctorate practice-based research, and research master's) and early-career professionals (up to 3 years after the completion of the PhD). All applicants must be committed to or actively working on projects that engage with the ISGS theme.

In this LeidenGlobal-HAB-IIAS In Situ Graduate School (ISGS) we will aim to interrogate prevailing, dominant discourses through other, less visible, and marginalized vantage points, whilst focusing on three sub-themes:

1. Circulations of textiles and dyes along less visible cartographies
2. Textile and dyes as sites of precarity and meaning
3. Testimonies of past and present subjectivities of cloth, clothing and colour

The In Situ Graduate School on Textile and Dyes will be held from 18-23 September 2022 in Leiden, the Netherlands.

In addition to specialist lectures, conversations, and a roundtable with diverse stakeholders, participants will also undertake local field trips in Leiden and other parts of the Netherlands. At the end of the ISGS, participants will make final presentations responding to each of the three sub-themes, and they will discuss the questions that were raised and the people and places they visited during the course of the project.

Jody Benjamin (Assistant Professor of History, University of California, Riverside, USA), Neelam Raina (Associate Professor of Design and Development , Middlesex University, United Kingdom) and Pedro Pombo (Associated Researcher at the Centre for Research on Slavery and Indentured Labour, University of Mauritius, Mauritius) will convene the ISGS with a series of studies in practice, using the environment of the city of Leiden and its surroundings where many textiles resources and specialists are located. Participants will be exposed to a range of textiles and dyes specialists, local spaces and sites of cultural engagement to test their methods and practices, enabling them to critically consider their personal research projects in this field.

Coming from different academic traditions with diverse theoretical and methodological expertise, the conveners shall foster an active atmosphere of open discussion, critique, and empirical inquiry. The goal is to facilitate participants’ existing projects in a related field of study through a combination of lectures, conversations, fieldtrips, and group work.

Application

We welcome applications from Arts, Design, Social Sciences and Humanities graduate students (doctoral, including doctorate practice-based research, and research master's) and early career professionals (up to 3 years after the completion of the PhD). The deadline for application is 15 April 2022.

The registration fee for participation in the In Situ Graduate School is 400 Euro, which includes participation in the ISGS programme, accommodation for seven nights, six lunches and two dinners.

Selected participants are expected to fund their own travel expenses. Limited (partial) scholarships are available.

For more information on the graduate school and how to apply, please go to the IIAS website

* The co-organisers reserve the right to modify the dates and general conditions of the ISGS should its logistics and safety of the participants be affected by the COVID-19 pandemic.