Nojang Khatami Postdoctoral Fellow Resident at the Forschungskolleg Humanwissenschaften: October 2022 – July 2023 Research topic at the Forschungskolleg Humanwissenschaften: »Aesthetics, Agency, and Democratic Imagination« Project outline: The central question of my proposed post-doctoral project is: what innovative approaches can we take up to curb xenophobia and cultivate practices of solidarity in societies marked by deep diversity? In the current phase of my research, I aim to extend the theoretical knowledge of the political significance of artistic narratives in both historical and contemporary manifestations, and to suggest ways to apply this learning in societies across North America and Europe. This work entails reassessing the effects of aesthetic expressions on our consciousness and rethinking the conduits by which they can be put to work on our democratic imagination. I am motivated by questions such as: What do stories of the lives of others carry when they enter our minds? What effect do they produce when they engage us through artistic means? And how can we identify and nurture those narratives that enlarge our understanding of cultural others and develop them further in our institutions? These explorations, I believe, can be brought into fruitful conversation with critical theory, as aesthetic expressions across cultures are significant markers of the ways we become conscious of non-justifiable norms and respond to them through the practice of democratic agency. (Nojang Khatami) Research partner: Nojang Khatami follows the invitation of Rainer Forst, Professor of Political theory at Goethe University Frankfurt am Main, and the Justitia Centre for Advanced Studies funded by the Alfons and Gertrud Kassel Foundation. Scholarly profile of Nojang KhatamiNojang Khatami received his PhD in 2021 from the University of British Columbia with a thesis on »Rewriting the People: Narrative, Exilic Thinking, and Democratic Agency beyond the West«. Following his stay at the Forschungskolleg, he will become an Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at Fordham University’s Lincoln Center Campus in New York City.Website: Main areas of research: Comparative Political Theory, Democratic Theory, Decoloniality, Aesthetics, Cultural studies with a focus on literature and cinema
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