MSCA Postdoctoral Fellowship 2025 – Free speech controversies and the arts, OsloMet University

Area of research for the project proposals

Successful candidates will be supervised by Professor Håkon Larsen. He is an experienced researcher with expertise in cultural sociology, theories of democracy and the public sphere, the Nordic model, and empirical studies of public debates and organizational legitimation work in the culture sector. He is a professor at OsloMet, a faculty fellow at Yale’s Center for Cultural Sociology, and a member of several working groups on the sociology of art, social theory, and cultural sociology in international and European professional associations. He is head of the research group Information, Culture, and Society at the Department of Archivistics, Library and Information Science at OsloMet.

Professor Larsen is currently analyzing the social dynamics of free speech debates in the arts and ask how civil society actors establish moral justifications for inclusion and exclusion; how managers of arts organizations are responding to such claims; and how controversies over arts management, artistic freedom and inclusive practices are fought out in public. In most Western countries, contestations over free speech have intensified over recent years. Critical voices have been arguing that cultural phenomena such as wokeism and cancel culture are threatening liberal democracy as we know it, and social movements struggling for the inclusion of minorities across societal sectors have responded to these critiques by pointing to contemporary and historical discrimination against specific groups. Many of these debates concern identity, history, and freedom of speech, and many controversies have been over how specific groups are represented in art works and the practice of arts organizations. 

The candidates are invited to address free speech controversies related to one or more art world in one or more European country. These can be studied via qualitative or quantitative methods, involving textual analysis and/or interviews/surveys. 

The candidates may want to address questions such as: 

• What characterizes debates over wokeism, cancel culture and minority inclusion as they relate to the arts in one or more European country?
• What characterizes the dynamics of debates on free speech in the professional journals related to one or several art worlds (e.g.  literature, visual arts or performing arts) in one or more European country?
• How do arts managers respond to these debates?
• What characterizes the attitude of arts managers and/or the general public in one or more European countries regarding controversies over free speech and minority inclusion in the arts, wokeism and cancel culture?

With this call for Expression of Interest, we invite researchers to submit:

1.       An application letter stating concisely why the proposed research project is solid, timely and innovative, why you are the best qualified person to carry it out, and also why our department is the perfect place for you to carry it out. 

2.       A CV (including publication list)

3.       A one-page project description (excluding references), that will be the basis for candidates with whom we will collaborate for developing competitive MSCA-PF proposals. 

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