doctoral students, 65% working time

Published on: 10.03.2026

The University of Bonn is an international research university with a wide education and research profile. With a 200-year history, approximately 31,500 students, more than 6,000 staff, and an excellent reputation at home and abroad, the University of Bonn is one of the most important universities in Germany and is recognized as a university of excellence.

 The project analyzes the formation of digital archives by Indigenous groups and actors in their own epistemological ways and in connection with their ancestral lands and environments, understanding that such formation is related to agendas of language revitalization and defense of their territories. Using the original concept of "Archival sovereignty," the research group analyzes the principles, agencies, and cosmopolitics related to archival formation by Quechua Cañaris peoples, an Andean Indigenous group. This concept poses a challenge to European/Western conceptions of the archive: (i) considering an archive as a space, a practice, and a process to gather and produce knowledge; (ii) considering Indigenous archives as founded on temporalities divergent from the temporality of the archives of modernity; and (iii) inspecting how Indigenous Andean societies understand and interact with the agential capacities of contemporary digital infrastructures. Archival sovereignty emphasizes the relational reproduction of Quechua knowledges and the role of other-than-human beings in knowledge and archival production, and allows to focus on projects of digital archives preservation from the perspective of Indigenous epistemologies, having as a main case an understudied Andean community. At the same time, this project aims to understand how Quechua Cañaris activists navigate other non-Indigenous archival regimes and participate in the restitution of historical audiovisual materials preserved at university archives. More information about the project and the department can be found here.

Deadline:

May 30th, 2026 

Reference number:

2026/106

Working time model:

part time

Starting date:

October 01, 2026

Duration:

temporary

Pay grade:

TV-L EG 13

Applications to:

wmara@uni-bonn.de

• Writing a PhD thesis,
• Conducting theoretically and ethnographically-grounded research, engaging with critical perspectives in the field of Andean studies, Indigenous studies, and the Anthropology of archives and media,
• Conducting ethnographic fieldwork in Peru on the topic of Indigenous communities, archives and epistemologies. The project includes two fieldwork stays of approx. 4 months each. Work methodologies also include elicitation of audiovisual materials, digital ethnography, and the collaborative production of a public exhibition and a multimedia website,
• Collaborating on developing a shared research framework for the research group, although personal interests can also be pursued by each PhD candidate,
• Presenting at academic conferences and other relevant fora.