Theme:
Worldmaking at the Digital Threshold: Media, Memory and Cultural Futures in Times of (De)globalization
Dates:
September 14-23, 2026, Eldoret, Kenya
The Factory of Ideas 2026 is an international doctoral school that will bring together up to forty (40) PhD candidates from Africa, Latin America and Europe to critically engage with contemporary transformations in media, technologies and cultural production. Hosted by the Moi University African Multiple Research Centre, the school is grounded in South–South and South–North intellectual exchange, with particular attention to the historical and contemporary entanglements between Africa, Brazil and Germany.
Background
Across the globe, digital media and technologies are reshaping how societies imagine themselves, remember their pasts, and project cultural futures. These transformations unfold unevenly, generating both continuities and ruptures, and producing new tensions between globalization and deglobalization, inclusion and exclusion, creativity and control. The Factory of Ideas Doctoral School 2026 invites participants to critically interrogate these dynamics through interdisciplinary, comparative and practice-based perspectives.
Areas of Interest
Proposed doctoral projects may engage with, but are not limited to, the following thematic strands:
● Media, Technologies and the Politics of (De)globalization – This strand explores how media technologies mediate global connections while simultaneously enabling local, national and regional reconfigurations.
● Experiments in Worldmaking – Arts, Media, and Philosophical Futures Focusing on creative and intellectual experimentation, this theme highlights how artists, filmmakers, thinkers and communities imagine alternative worlds through media and technology.
● The Digital Turn and Social Tensions – This area examines issues such as gender, sexuality, and digital publics; age, youth cultures and intergenerational media practices; as well as ethnicity, nationalism, populism and digital mobilization.
● Memory, Archives, and the Mediation of the Past – Digital media are transforming how societies remember, archive, and curate their pasts. This strand investigates the shifting interface between institutions, publics, and emerging technologies of memory.
The school also welcomes critical reflections on research methodologies and creative practices suited to studying media, culture and memory in rapidly changing technological environments.
How to Apply
Please email your abstract and biographical note as a single Word document by June 15, 2026, to:
The Coordinator
Factory of Ideas 2026
Moi University
Email: moiamrc@mu.ac.ke
