Content of the Doctoral Programme

The DP takes up an innovative methodological approach - with a view on 'Transmediterranean Entanglements' - that addresses the problems inherent in the concepts of connectivity and relationality. The concept of entanglement refers to 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 nor geared towards functionality, but are the result of coincidences, of plans and their failures, of overlapping and various layers of time. What gets tangled and entangled are the threads of various attributes and origin which arrive at unpredictable effects.

On the one hand, the approach is intended to account for the fact that connectivity in the above sense implies a limitation which no longer corresponds to the mobility, mediality, and hybridity of today’s Mediterranean. 

On the other hand, it accounts for more recent approaches in memory research which seek to overcome thinking in terms of identities (as laid out in the concept of cultural memory, for example), and to do justice to the dynamics of medial realities. The inner polyphony of memory objects will be examined, i.e. the interpretations, appropriations, and versions which are stored within them, their intertextual references, and in short, the entire chain of never-ending signifiers, through which the individual object is 'entangled' with other objects, as well as the use of these signifiers by the actors. This approach is fitting to the temporally, spatially, and thematically broad position of the new Mediterranean research in Graz.