About FTRS

Ini­tial­iza­tion Project FTRS 09/2022 — 09/2023; pro­ject­ed: until 09/2024

In the light of ongo­ing changes in research and teach­ing in the social sci­ences such as dis­cours­es on inter- and trans­dis­ci­pli­nar­i­ty, mul­ti­modal­i­ty, tech­nolo­gies, research design, appli­ca­tion of find­ings to dif­fer­ent areas of sci­ence and life, the Acad­e­my of Art and Design offers com­pe­ten­cies in the the­o­ret­i­cal, method­olog­i­cal, and prac­ti­cal fields that can con­tribute to shap­ing these changes in a col­lec­tive effort to grap­ple with futures and futu­ri­ty.

In con­nec­tion with research and labs, our aim is to build an inter-insti­tu­tion­al Ph.D. pro­gram between the Acad­e­my of Art and Design (Uni­ver­si­ty of Applied Sci­ences and Arts FHNW) and the Depart­ment of Social Sci­ences (Uni­ver­si­ty of Basel) with a focus on Urban and Design Anthro­pol­o­gy, Inter­sec­tion­al Design, and New Mate­ri­al­ism Design. The ini­tial­iza­tion project aims at con­nect­ing exist­ing com­pe­ten­cies, course offers, sci­en­tif­ic infra­struc­tures as well as research inter­ests of the par­tic­i­pants of the two local insti­tu­tions and fur­ther experts at the inter­na­tion­al part­ner insti­tu­tions. The Ph.D. edu­ca­tion will com­bine social sci­ence the­o­ries and research meth­ods with design the­o­ries and design-led research. This will pro­vide Ph.D. stu­dents with a diverse set of skills for var­i­ous more-than-aca­d­e­m­ic career paths, as well as a grow­ing nation­al and inter­na­tion­al net­work expe­ri­enced in inno­v­a­tive, inter- and trans­dis­ci­pli­nary research.

A peer-net­work of experts in var­i­ous fields col­lab­o­rates in the new­ly emerg­ing meta­L­AB (at) Basel as part of the inter­na­tion­al meta­L­AB com­mu­ni­ty (Har­vard, FU Berlin). Such peer net­works serve var­i­ous pur­pos­es: low-thresh­old exchanges to devel­op new teach­ing for­mats, fos­ter skills build­ing, and col­lab­o­rate on shared research inter­ests in peer-work­ing groups; facil­i­tate coor­di­na­tion of super­vi­sion tasks among co-super­vi­sors and advisees: fos­ter a net­work of poten­tial Co-PIs and researchers with com­ple­men­tary com­pe­ten­cies for third-par­ty fund­ing appli­ca­tions.

A long-term strat­e­gy to pur­sue the project goals of devel­op­ing and imple­ment­ing the stud­ies-research-lab-struc­ture is to build from the ini­ti­a­tion project (and inte­grate it) into a larg­er frame­work with shared objec­tives in design, art, archi­tec­ture at the inter­dis­ci­pli­nary inter­faces to the social sci­ences (par­tic­u­lar­ly: cul­tur­al and social anthro­pol­o­gy, gen­der stud­ies, urban stud­ies), media stud­ies and dig­i­tal human­i­ties.