PhD in Practice by JJ

The PhD-in-Practice is a doctoral program for research in artistic practice, set up by the Institute of Fine Arts and the Institute of Art Theory and Cultural Studies. The program provides participants with the opportunity to pursue their individual research projects in a collective environment with a strongly trans-disciplinary and international focus. It provides a concept of arts-based research built upon critical epistemologies, as developed in the context of feminist, queer, postcolonial, ecological, post-Marxist and other political and emancipatory projects.

EMILY SARSAM

Emily Sarsam is an interdisciplinary artist, researcher, and cultural organizer based between Tunis and Vienna. Working with mediums such as composition, voice, fiction & poetry, performance, and publishing, her work mainly revolves around commoning practices in rural and agricultural contexts, as well as the impacts of colonialism and extractivism on food, farming and local cosmologies. She also researches and facilitates embodied learning environments and methods for art mediation in the form of workshops and creative learning programs. She is a co-founder of Broudou, a research collective and publication dedicated to the future of food in Tunisia, and part of Mouhit, an artist residency in Tunis, where she offers support in programing and artist mentoring.

Her PhD project looks at the collective efforts among small-scale olive farmers in Tunisia’s south in safeguarding natural resources and the social relations around their governance. By engaging in participatory research with small-scale farmers who suffer the effects of extractivism and dispossession hidden in discourses of modernity and development (Federici, 2019), she interrogates how local practices such as “Twiza,” and “Raghata,” help to imagine alternative forms of governance and economy. Across North Africa, the Amazigh word “Twiza” and the Arabic word “Raghata” signify decommodified work or care labor. Furthermore, she is interested in exploring how these concepts can guide the creation of agri-food systems grounded in food sovereignty, while also addressing the ecological and social harms caused by extractive, export-driven agriculture.

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