Content of the doctoral programme

The DP takes up an innovative methodological approach - with a view to the 'Transmediterranean Entanglements' - that addresses the problems inherent in the concepts of connectivity and relationality. The concept ofentanglement describes the 'tangle' that forms when many threads come together in an unplanned way. It is therefore well suited to describing networks of relationships that are not based on planning and geared towards functionality, but are the result of coincidences, of plans and their failure, of overlapping different layers of time. What gets tangled and entangled are threads of different quality and origin that achieve unpredictable effects.

On the one hand, this approach is intended to take account of the fact that connectivity in the above sense implies a limitation that no longer corresponds to today's mobility, mediality and hybridity of the Mediterranean. On the other hand, it takes up more recent approaches in memory research that seek to overcome thinking in terms of identities, as laid out in the concept of cultural memory, for example, and do justice to the dynamics of medial realities. The inner polyphony of memory objects is examined, i.e. the interpretations, appropriations and versions stored in them, their intertextual references, in short the entire chain of signifiers that cannot be caught up with, through which the individual object is 'entangled' with other objects, as well as the use of these signifiers by the actors. Such an approach does justice to the temporally, spatially and thematically broad approach of the new Mediterranean research in Graz.