PhD Winter School in Critical Theories and Narratives

Target group

Are you a doctoral student in Humanities or Social Sciences with B2 English proficiency? This course enhances analytical skills with critical theories and narratives and it is also open to candidates in Law, Health, Business, or related fields.

• Number of participants: Maximum 4 from each EDUC university.

Scholarships may be available for selected students from the EDUC Universities.

Application deadline: 15th of January

Topics covered and type of activities

Orbiting around PhD candidates’ own research agendas, the course is situated in cross-cutting areas of Humanities and Social Sciences, including culture, history, literature, human rights and languages, and from a broad range of scholarly traditions. The course will emphasize the entanglements between narratives of rupture, memory, and time, with critical theories from within and beyond the global margins and developed to address power, privileges, resistance, and persistent oppression in daily dynamics.

Narratives may be considered means of sense and meaning making. Both narratives and critical theories create awareness of and a language with which to understand phenomena such as exclusion, marginalization, bordering, identity, diversity, and racism, shedding light on unequal power relations within and between societies and cultures in diverse times and spaces. This course’s critical theoretical approaches to narratives might lead researchers to question traditional binary perspectives. Recognizing binary structures as constructions means shifting away from historical, social, and geo-cultural hierarchies of knowledge manifested in competing narratives related to power structures and categories that regulate our societies, such as those related to identity and belonging (e.g., gender, race, nationality, ethnicity, class, religion).

The course is structured in three main parts:

1. We introduce some of the most widely read critical theories to explore how these can account for cultural matters across regional, social, and historical contexts with a specific focus on narratives from the margins.
2. We discuss how different conceptual frames and modes of thinking can be enriched by critical dialogues and how this is translated into narratives. In doing so, we draw specific attention to how dominating narratives can be contested and even replaced by alternative narratives leading to transitional frames related to the pluriverse and critically situate the steady worsening of planetary ecological, social, and cultural conditions. 
3. PhD candidates shall present their own research in seminars, relating the course’s theoretical perspectives to their own research topics.

Time schedule and calendar

Online:

• 18, 19, and 20 February: 15:30 – 17:00 Oslo time (CET/CEST)

In-presence:

• Monday 23 February: 09:00-15:00
• Tuesday 24 February: 09:00-15:00
• Wednesday 25 February: 09:00-15:00
• Thursday 26 February: 09:00-15:00
• Friday 27 February: 09:00-15:00
• Saturday 28 February Free day

Deadline essay:

• 30 March

Social activities and collective/individual supervision will be offered after regular group sessions.

Overall workload, including personal working time: approx. 140 hours, equivalent to 5 ECTS

Changes may still be made depending on professors’ availability.

Accommodation

Participants are responsible for finding their own accommodation. Options include hotels, Airbnb and short-term rentals. The University of South-Eastern Norway is centrally located in Drammen, just a 30-minute train ride from Oslo.