Visiting Fellows 2026: University of Lucerne Summer School
DEADLINE: Tuesday September 30, 2025
About
The visiting fellows programme is designed to facilitate intellectual exchange between our members and the wider academic community. The scheme accommodates junior scholars who wish to spend a period of time in Lucerne pursuing work that overlaps with or otherwise complements scholarly activities currently being pursued at the institute. During their stay, fellows enjoy access to our specialist resources, and are invited to share and develop their ideas with our community of faculty, researchers and students.
Tailored to PhD candidates and postdoctoral researchers, the programme is open to all working critically, theoretically and innovatively at the intersections between law, the humanities and the social sciences. A leading aim of the scheme is to foster conversations that cut across borders both geographic and disciplinary. We strongly believe that the academic and international diversity of our fellows greatly enriches the intellectual life of the institute.
Fellowship at a Glance
Visiting fellows are provided with workspace at the university, some administrative support, a fixed stipend for accommodation and living costs, and economy travel to and from Lucerne.
During the period of their visit, fellows are invited to contribute fully to the intellectual life of the institute by participating in our programme of workshops, seminars, reading groups and colloquia. They are encouraged to interact with all our members, including our own PhD and postdoctoral researchers, and are invited to take advantage of activities on offer across the university.
It is expected that fellows are resident in Lucerne for the duration of their stay. Upon completion of their visit, fellows are requested to submit a short report of their experiences.
Self-Funded Fellowships
Applications for self-funded fellowships at the institute are accepted and assessed on a rolling basis. The scheme runs in parallel to the funded visiting fellows programme and is open to PhD candidates and postdocs who wish to make a genuine contribution to the research environment at the institute. Please note that our ability to accommodate self-funded fellows is dependent on the availability of resources at any given time.
Enquiries
Enquiries about possibilities for visiting the institute as a fellow are welcome at all times. Please contact Dr. Steven Howe (steven.howe@unilu.ch).
Critical Times 2025: University of Lucerne Summer School
DEADLINE: March 14, 2025
Theme: Disruptions
30 June to 4 July 2025
Ours is a time of disruption; a “disruptive age” as Bernard Stiegler terms it. Rapid technological change, the accelerating scarcity of biospheric resources, heightened political and economic volatility, social unrest and discontent –these are just some of the pressures that are radically (re-)shaping the modern condition, and which are making the experience of disruptiveness an “epochal signature” (Erich Hörl) of the twenty-first century.
The language of disruption is pervasive. At root, the term derives from the Latin disrumpere, meaning to break apart or to shatter; it refers to the action of “rending or bursting asunder”. But it also carries the sense of interrupting or jamming; of “breaking between” and “preventing something […] from continuing as usual or as expected”. To disrupt is to unsettle conventional frames and norms, flows and continuities – it is, in essence, a destructive act. And yet equally, it holds force as a generative move – one that not only calls into question what is entrenched and naturalized but which conjures the possibility of thinking and making things anew.
For this year’s Critical Times summer school, we invite postdocs, ECRs and graduate students from across disciplines to join us for a week of intensive exchange on the meanings, forms and effects of disruption – as event, as process, as mode, as gesture. Our aim is to open a space for thinking –deeply, critically and creatively – about how disruptive forces upset existing notions of law and justice, tradition and community, and about the possibilities they open for transforming our legal, political and cultural imaginaries.
Topics for consideration might include:
- How does the experience of disruptiveness impact the means and ways of ordering legal and political life?
- To what extent are rising “anti-democratic forces” engendering a“nihilistic disintegration of the social compact” (Wendy Brown)? What strategies are available to challenge these forces and to help re-knit the social and/or democratic fabric?
- How are shifting political dynamics – local, national and international –contributing to a dislocation of shared cultural values and dispositions? How might these effects be countered or mitigated?
- What is the work of media forms and practices in cultivating or resisting disruptive energies?
- How does the recent (re-)thinking of human and non-human agencies disrupt conventional notions of normativity and subjectivity – in law, politics and culture?
- What kinds of lawful relations are necessary to make our disrupted worlds newly livable and habitable?
- Which imaginative practices and resources have the power to disrupt entrenched narratives and deconstruct mythical understandings of the past?
- How might such practices and resources interrupt and transform our experience of time and space and with what artistic, political and legal implications?
- What aesthetic forms and representations might be enlisted to disrupt the“distribution of the sensible” (Jacques Rancière) and offer new ways of seeing and understanding?
- How might contestatory aesthetic and political practices catalyze change and produce a shift in hegemonic articulations of the im/possible?
Confirmed speakers: Shane Chalmers (University of Hong Kong), Başak Ertür (Goldsmiths), Julen Etxabe (University of British Columbia), Mónica López Lerma (ReedCollege), Desmond Manderson (The Australian National University), Greta Olson(University of Giessen).
Full programme details will be constantly updated here as more information becomes available.
Application details here. Deadline: 14 March 2025
Contact: steven.howe@unilu.ch