Dr. Nathalie Aghoro will receive a three-year DFG funding for her project “Common Grounds: Social Justice and Cultural Practice in Shared Places”. In it, she investigates cultural practices in shared places that have an impact on the design and development of places in connection with civil society debates. The topic is of an interdisciplinary nature and roots in the scientific fields of American literary and cultural history, sociology and critical ethnic studies. Cultural practices of place stand for cultural and literary approaches to places, the social and aesthetic shaping of places and the local cultural expression of social debates. This can in particular be observed in shared places, thus public and publicly accessible spaces where social and political debates and controversies become evident and are negotiated on the spot.
Excellent research in American studies
![[Translate to Englisch:] Black Lives Matter](/fileadmin/_processed_/5/0/csm_2880px-Black_Lives_Matter_protest_against_St._Paul_police_brutality__21552673186__854a451b8e.jpg)
Examples investigated in Aghoro’s work include lyric approaches to the New Orleans at the turn of the twentieth century, murals in the first half of the twentieth century (including Muralismo and African-American murals) and collective memory architectures such as the “National Memorial for Peace and Justice” opened in 2018 by the Equal Justice Initiative in Alabama with the aim of creating a space where people can gather and reflect on the history of lynchings of African Americans in the US between 1877 and 1950.
Nathalie Aghoro a member of the DFG research training group Practicing Place at the KU.
Nicole Anna Schneider received this year’s doctoral thesis award from the Bavarian America Academy. Her doctoral thesis investigates the role of press photos in the current Black Lives Matter movement in the USA. The interdisciplinary thesis titled "Visual Protest, Viral Images, and Virtual Participation: Protest and Photography in the Contemporary Movement for Black Lives“ takes a closer look at the photos of the current #BlackLivesMatter protests in the USA and sees photographers and their pictures as important components of the fight for black liberation.
The power of the pictures, Schneider says, reaches beyond simply showing the protests and documenting the movement. The photographs are becoming material and mobile discursive places in and by which the current situation of black people in the USA is being negotiated. In awarding the prize, the jury particularly honored the theory formation in the work and the innovative approach to the complex topic, which elaborated historical, socio- and aesthetic-political, as well as digital aspects of the movement and the photographs.