En doktorandtjänst i mikrodatorteknikens kultur-, media- och politiska historia vid universitetet i Luzern är utlyst:
This position is part of a project funded by a Starting Grant Fellowship of the Swiss National Science Foundation titled «The Microcomputer as a Medium of Transformation, 1980–2000». Project leader is Ass.-Prof. Dr. Gleb J. Albert. The team, consisting of three persons, aims at analysing the role of the microcomputer in the political, economic and social upheaval in the 1980s and 1990s in East and West Europe from the perspective of cultural, economic and media history.
The PhD position constituted the sub-project ”The Microcomputer as a Medium of Communication“. Based on archival sources, contemporary publications and oral history interviews, the PhD project should explore the role microcomputers played in practices of communication within the Eastern Bloc or across the bloc divide. Before the internet breakthrough, microcomputers were rather “black boxes” than communication machines. Nevertheless, microcomputers functioned as media of communication and knowledge transmission – either through means such as cassettes, floppy disks or modem networks, or, in a more general way, as machines that brought people in contact with each other over their (mis-)usage. With hundreds of thousands of Western microcomputers being in private possession all over the Warsaw Pact countries (and non-aligned Yugoslavia), and with domestic home computer models being produced in several of these countries, the microcomputer as a means of communication played a crucial, yet massively understudied role in the social and political transformations of the 1980s and 1990s.
The PhD project should constitute a case study on microcomputers as media of – ideally transnational – communication in two or more countries of the Eastern Bloc, or an Eastern Bloc country and the world beyond the Iron Curtain. The nature of the connections formed through such communication can be manifold – hobbyist (hackers, gamers etc.), political (dissident networks), religious, artistic etc. The geographical focus can be chosen by the PhD candidate according to his or her competences and interests in coordination with the supervisor. The project is situated on the crossroads of cultural, political and media history. The PhD thesis can be written and defended either in German or in English.
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Sista ansökningsdag: 11 mars.