The Käte Hamburger Kolleg / Centre for Global Cooperation Research is proud to announce the addition of four new fellows. From 1 September 2021 to 31 August 2022, Dr. Layla Brown, Dr. Emeka Umejei, Prof. Dr. Nicole Doerr, and Dr. David Shim will contribute their wide-ranging experience and research projects to the research groups Global Cooperation and Diverse Conceptions of World Order and Legitimation and Delegitimation in Global Cooperation. We look forward to learning from each other through fruitful collaborations and interdisciplinary engagement on the diverse research interests of the Centre. What follows are short introductions to these new fellows and their projects at the Centre.
Dr. Layla Brown
Fellowship Period: 1 September 2021 – 31 August 2022
Research Group: Global Cooperation and Diverse Conceptions of World Order
Project Title: Return to the Source: The Dialectics of 21st Century Pan-African Liberation
Dr. Brown is an interdisciplinary Pan-African Feminist scholar/activist trained as a Cultural Anthropologist focused on producing scholarship committed to life, liberation, and dignity for all peoples, most especially formerly colonized/enslaved peoples of African descent. Her academic activity entails a re-examination of prevailing conceptions of world order, particularly those that promote economic systems reliant upon exploitation and devaluation of life such as racial capitalism. Currently a Writing Fellow at the Johannesburg Institute for Advanced Study, Dr. Brown also holds a full time position as Assistant Professor of Africana Studies at the University of Massachusetts, Boston.
Deriving a guiding methodology from the practice of Cultural Anthropology, Dr. Brown’s book project Return to the Source: The Dialectics of 21st Century Pan-African Liberation also employs (auto)ethnography to critically examine existing alternative conceptions of world order by observing contemporary movements for Black self-determination. Her research at the Centre will represent an outgrowth of this project and seeks to gain valuable insight from collaboration with the Centre’s team of researchers as well as with a wider, interdisciplinary research community from around the world.
Dr. Brown also brings with her a personal history of engagement with social justice which has informed her approach to and understanding of the continued links between Pan-African ideologies and contemporary Black social movements across the Americas. She has had the opportunity to work with young people from varied socioeconomic backgrounds, worldviews, and cultural experiences and has taught widely on Africana Studies, including issues related to race, gender, and inequality amongst diverse populations.
Dr. Emeka Umejei
Fellowship Period: 1 September 2021 – 31 August 2022
Research Group: Global Cooperation and Diverse Conceptions of World Order
Project Title: US-China Decoupling: Clash of Two ‘Internets’ in Africa
Dr. Umejei has conducted academic research across the domains of political communication, global media, China, as well as the future of the Internet in Africa, digital journalism, disinformation and misinformation in Africa, and the role of media in conflict. His doctoral dissertation examined the influence of Chinese media on journalism professionalisation of African journalists through the framework of journalistic role conception and role performance. The findings of this project suggested that Chinese media expansion into Africa will result in a hybrid form of journalistic professionalisation in which Western and Chinese journalistic traditions coexist on the continent.
With teaching experience at the undergraduate and graduate levels at both the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa and the American University of Nigeria in Yola, Adamawa State, Nigeria, Dr. Umejei brings to the Centre a nuanced understanding of media economics, specialised reporting, social media dynamics, peace journalism, and online/digital reporting.
His project at the Centre, US-China Decoupling: Clash of Two ‘Internets’ in Africa, will analyse the tension between the US and China over technology as one of the top geopolitical risks of 2020, and will specifically explore the implications of the splitting of the Internet in Africa into the US versus Chinese versions for countries on either side of the divide. The study argues that the rivalry between the US and China in the technology space has diverse consequences for freedom of information.
Prof. Dr. Nicole Doerr
Fellowship Period: 1 September 2021 – 31 August 2022
Research Group: Global Cooperation and Diverse Conceptions of World Order
Project Title: Far-Right Visual Narratives and Transnational Digital Platforms: Contesting the Legitimacy of Liberal Democratic Discourse and Government
Prof. Dr. Doerr’s research focuses on visual digital politics, political mobilization via storytelling/narratives in transnational social movements, globalization, migration and democracy. As an EU-Marie Curie postdoctoral fellow at the Department of Sociology at the University of California Irvine, she specialized in narrative approaches to movement studies. This research combined understandings of North American approaches to cultural sociology and narrative migration studies with critical theories of transnational public spheres, democracy, and political mobilization.
Following her appointment to a professorship at the Department of Sociology, University of Copenhagen, Prof. Dr. Doerr founded the ‘CoMMonS’ research center on civic engagement and social movements. Through CoMMonS, which includes 35 researchers, she helped to set up a network of critical research on mobilization and protest such as the recent webinar ‘Social Movements in Times of Global Pandemic’.
In collaboration with the Centre’s diverse research community, Prof. Dr. Doerr proposes and exploration of the development of combined quasi-quantitative and qualitative research methods for digital image and critical discourse analysis of the media politics of right-wing extremist groups and right-wing populist mobilizations. Her research project at the Centre, Far-Right Visual Narratives and Transnational Digital Platforms: Contesting the Legitimacy of Liberal Democratic Discourse and Government aims to study how right wing activists collaborate transnationally on digital platforms by sharing visual narratives and anti-immigrant symbols contesting the legitimacy of liberal democratic discourse, governments, and institutions. The project plans to fill the gap in systematic research on the role of visual technologies and shared imaginaries of ethnonationalist citizenship enabling a stronger convergence, shared symbolism, and trans-national far-right collaborations delegitimating liberal democratic discourse worldwide.
Dr. David Shim
Fellowship Period: 1 September 2021 – 31 August 2022
Research Group: Legitimation and Delegitimation in Global Cooperation
Project Title: Visual Narratives of Climate Change – Exploring Climate Storytelling of Fridays for Future
Dr. Shim is currently a Senior Lecturer in the Department of International Relations and International Organization of the University of Groningen, Netherlands. His research has contributed to the study of visual politics in the field of International Relations and is located at the intersection of exploring the visual dimension of global politics and the political dimension of the visual.
Under the theme ‘Critique, Justification and Legitimacy in Global Cooperation’, Dr. Shim seeks to expand his research and contribute to the profile of the Centre by examining the visual politics of legitimation of transnational environmental movements fighting climate change through the lens of media such as film, photography, and satellite imagery. His project at the Center, Visual Narratives of Climate Change – Exploring Climate Storytelling of Fridays for Future, aims to show how visual narratives are central to, and productive of, strategies of legitimation in the contentious politics of climate change. Shim identifies the Fridays for Future movement as one of the most significant, yet underexplored transnational actors in the fight against global climate change and proposes to analyse it to better our understanding of the study of political storytelling.
Aligning closely with the Centre’s research network ‘Visuality and World Politics’, Dr. Shim’s contributions are likely to both extend and benefit from increasingly nuanced understandings of the power and potential of the visual on the global political stage.
