Postdoc Position in the Anthropology of Art and Digital Media

As a postdoctoral researcher, you will work for the ERC project ‚The Anthropology of the Future: An Art World Perspective‘ (ANTHROFUTURE), led by Prof. Manuela Ciotti at the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology, University of Vienna. ANTHROFUTURE focuses on the art world as an interlocked digital-physical system and ethnographic site, using innovative multimodal methodologies to generate analytical and theoretical advancements on the future as a temporal category across regional contexts.

As part of the ANTHROFUTURE team, you will carry out a digital ethnography of artists and social media in South Asia and the Gulf region, including short visits to field sites. You will investigate visual content production on Instagram and TikTok, examining how art world institutions and professionals inhabit spheres transformed by the acceleration of the future into the present. You will capture and examine visual content produced by artists and develop case studies across age groups and regions. Based on these insights, you will carry out a data harvest from social media platforms with the aid of a web developer provided by the project.