Moi University Africa Multiple Research Centre
Call for the Factory of Ideas Doctoral School 2026
Theme: Worldmaking at the Digital Threshold: Media, Memory, and Cultural Futures in Times of (De)globalization
Factory of Ideas September 14-23, 2026, Eldoret, Kenya Moi University Africa Multiple Research Centre (Kenya) In collaboration with
Federal University of Bahia (UFBA), Brazil University of Bayreuth, Germany
The Factory of Ideas 2026 is an international doctoral school that will bring together up to forty 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.
Theme
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.
Who Should Apply
Applications are invited from PhD candidates at different stages of their doctoral studies whose research engages with media, culture, technology, memory, or the arts. Candidates from Africa, South America, and other Global South contexts are particularly encouraged to apply.
Interdisciplinary and practice-based doctoral projects are especially welcome.
Important Dates
● Deadline for submission: June 15, 2026
● Notification of acceptance: July 10, 2026
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: