PhD Candidate Historical Representations of Diversity, Race, and ‘Dutchness’ in Sport, 1950s-Present

The Radboud Institute for Culture & History seeks a PhD candidate for a work package on Diversity in Sport within the NWA-ORC funded project (Re)Presenting Europe: Popular Representations of Diversity and Belonging. This project is a collaboration between several universities and societal and grassroot organisations in the Netherlands and Curaçao. The full project consists of work packages that will address dominant spaces of representation of belonging, both in the formal institutional space of education and healing, as well as informal spaces of sport, popular culture and urban arts. The goal of the project is a more inclusive understanding of Europe.
The PhD project forms the historical component of a work package on diversity in sport entitled Arenas of Belonging: Sport Heroes as Models of Aspiration, Inspiration, and Participation, 1950-Present. It focuses on the way in which sport successes have contributed to a sense of belonging in an increasingly diverse Dutch society, and how transatlantic entanglements with the Dutch Caribbean have played a role in constructions of race and diversity. It addresses how dominant assumptions about sport had integrative power, but also damaged, stereotyped and “blackened” athletes. Such popular representations created a new racial archetype of “the natural black athlete” that reproduced colonial myths or caused a “brawn drain” in the countries of origin. The PhD project will collaborate with a postdoctoral project that employs digital humanities methodologies to analyse tropes of inclusion and belonging in historical periodicals (such as Delpher). The outcomes of continuities/discontinuities of such tropes and stereotypes will be connected to outcomes of the second part of the work package that focuses on Present Heroes: Sporting role models and mediated meaning making amongst urban adolescents.As a PhD candidate you will write a PhD thesis, participate in the Graduate School for the Humanities, which includes taking courses for approximately six months, and provide six months of academic service to the Faculty of Arts at Radboud University. Your research will be embedded in the Radboud Institute for Culture & History (RICH), which focuses on understanding the complexities of Europe in a changing world, and of the changing world of which Europe forms a part. Within the project, you will collaborate closely with the work package team and the researchers of other work packages in the project that focus on popular music, urban arts and education. In addition, you will work with scientific and societal partners in Curaçao, where part of your research will take place. The resulting PhD will be a joint doctorate of Radboud University and the University of Curaçao.