Horkheimer Fellowship
To honor the legacy of Max Horkheimer – philosopher, sociologist and long-term director of the Institute for Social Research – as one of the key founders of Critical Theory, the IfS has been awarding the Horkheimer Fellowship to international postdoctoral scholars since 2023. The Fellowship’s aim is to support excellent scholars from all social science, humanities and cultural studies disciplines to pursue a research project at the Institute during a three-month stay.
The call for applications is issued annually.
Previous Fellows:
2024
Marcel Stoetzler
The concept of racialization and the dichotomy of antisemitism and racism
The project concerns the relationship of the concepts of »racism« and »antisemitism«. Antisemitism can be argued to be »a form of racism« (as had been common in most of the classic studies of racism) without thereby subsuming (and trivializing) it as »a particular« under racism as »the universal« as long as »race« is understood in an anti-essentialist (or anti-realist) manner as the societal process of »racialization« (as anti-racist scholars first proposed in the 1980s). Bringing the critique of antisemitism back into the study and critique of racism requires recuperating a broader understanding of racism as a social form that neither exclusively focuses on colour codes and the colonial context of their emergence nor is blind to its populist, seemingly anti-hegemonic or »anti-elite« forms.
Funded by the Otto Brenner Stiftung.
2023
Bruna della Torre
The New Organization. Digital Culture Industry, Social Networks, and Right-Wing Propaganda in Brazil
The project reframes Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer’s concept of culture industry and the Frankfurt School’s studies of propaganda (as well as its contemporary successors) to analyze how the digital apparatus of social media impacts democracies in the Global South, with a particular focus on the recent Brazilian experiment. The objective is to investigate the relationship between the rise of right-wing extremism and the »Digital Culture Industry«. Within this scope, the idea proposed in this project is to expand the analysis of this propaganda concerning specific themes refined by theoretical and virtual ethnographic research so far. This implicates investigating the agitation that circulates mainly on social networks related to the defense of freedom (of speech and to carry weapons), anti-feminism and the so-called »Gender Ideology«, the spread of conspiracy theories, and the mobilization of apocalypticism. The goal of this research stay at the IfS is to write a book project inspired by the studies carried out in the 1940s by Leo Löwenthal and Norbert Guterman entitled Prophets of Deceit: A Study of the Techniques of the American Agitator (1948), in which the techniques of anti-democratic propaganda and its contents are thoroughly analyzed.
Funded by the Otto Brenner Stiftung.