ADVANCED RESEARCH
SEMINAR 2026
CALL FOR APPLICATIONS
PROGRAM DURATION
FEB-JUN 2026
FORMAT
ONLINE / WEEKLY / ENG
5PM-8PM (UK TIME)
LIMITED TO 15 PARTICIPANTS
APPLICATION DEADLINE
DECEMBER 31, 2025
PHOTOGRAPHY ---ECOLOGICAL TURN
AND
THE
BERGIT ARENDS
SARA CALLAHAN
KARLA McMANUS
Within the broader framework of ARCHIVO’s 2026 annual program, Archival Entanglements: Researching Ecologies of Care, the ARCHIVO Advanced Research Seminar 2026 explores the intersections between photography, archives, and environmental thought. It examines how photographic and archival practices mediate relations between human and non-human worlds in contexts of ecological crisis.
Combining theoretical reflection with practice-based engagement, the seminar invites participants to consider archives as dynamic infrastructures and photographs as instruments that both document and reimagine ecological realities. It fosters critical inquiry into how these practices generate alternative modes of knowledge, cultivate ethical awareness, and promote gestures of care and responsibility. By emphasizing collaborative discussion and research-led exchange, the program equips participants with conceptual tools and methodological strategies relevant for scholarship, curatorial practice, and artistic intervention.
The ARCHIVO Advanced Research Seminar 2026 invites doctoral and postdoctoral researchers to submit a proposal based on their ongoing research. We welcome applications from researchers working in both Western and non-Western contexts, with the aim of fostering a diverse, inclusive, and critically engaged environment for dialogue and exchange. The seminar will take place from February to June 2026 through weekly online sessions, including lectures, webinars, artist talks, reading groups, and individual mentorship. Fifteen candidates will be selected to join the seminar cohort and further develop their research projects. Partial scholarships will be available for participants who require financial support.
FACULTY
BERGIT ANDERS
The Courtald
United Kingdom
SARA CALLAHAN
Malmö University Sweden
KARLA McMANUS
University of Regina
Canada
AND ADDITIONAL COLLABORATIONS FROM
GUEST VISITING LECTURERS AND ARTISTS
PROGRAMME
MODULE 1
PHOTOGRAPHY AND THE ENVIRONMENTAL TURN
INTRODUCTION TO THE ADVANCED RESEARCH SEMINAR 2026
.... DR. ANA CATARINA PINHO (coord.) . CONTENT The introductory module establishes the conceptual and methodological groundwork for the Advanced Research Seminar. It introduces participants to key debates surrounding the ecological turn in photography and visual studies, addressing how contemporary image-based practices engage with questions of environment and care. We will consider how photography not only represents ecological realities but also participates in the material processes it depicts, acting as a medium of connection and transformation. Across five sessions, participants will present their ongoing or proposed research projects to the seminar mentors, engaging in dialogue with peers. The module will also include a webinar and a reading group with visiting lecturers, providing a theoretical framework for the seminar’s subsequent modules. Through these activities, participants will be invited to reflect on how photographic and lens-based practices can contribute to rethinking notions of ecology, history, and the archive, setting the stage for the following sessions. SCHEDULE (UK time) SESSION 1.1 :: WED, FEB 4 — 5 - 8 PM SESSION 1.2 :: THU, FEB 5 — 5 - 8 PM SESSION 1.3 :: FRI, FEB 6 — 5 - 8 PM SESSION 1.4 :: THU, FEB 12 — 5 - 7 PM SESSION 1.5 :: THU, FEB 19 — 6 - 7 PM ABOUT ANA CATARINA PINHO Ana Catarina Pinho is the programme creator and coordinator of the ARCHIVO Advanced Research Seminar. Pinho is a researcher, lecturer, and visual artist working at the intersection of photography, visual culture, documentary, and the archive. Her research investigates how photography and archival practices shape cultural memory, with a focus on vernacular image cultures, historiographies of violence, and the visual regimes of propaganda and conflict. She is Invited Assistant Professor at Coimbra University, and a research fellow at the Art History Institute, at Nova University of Lisbon. Pinho is a member of the Global Art Archive research project at the University of Barcelona; and serves on the editorial board of Arte y Sociedad published by the University Rey Juan Carlos, Spain. As the founder and director of ARCHIVO since 2012, having established a platform that connects theory and practice within visual culture and the arts; the founding editor of the Archivo Papers scholarly journal and of the Reframing the Archive international conference, and has launched the independent publisher ARCHIVO PRESS since 2021. —
MODULE 2
HISTORY DOES NOT NEED TO BE AS IT WAS
PHOTOGRAPHIC AND LENS-BASED PRACTICES AND METHODS OF THE ARCHIVE
.... DR. BERGIT ARENDS . CONTENT Through theoretical approaches and specific practices, we will consider the role of photography as documentary medium and as material photo-object in conveying environmental and historical changes in relation to the archive. The ‘archive’ is considered within an expanded field, which has three main constituent parts: the documentary and object archive as historical repository; the environment as archive of the earth, including its geological strata and fossil materials, biosphere and atmosphere; and the human body, memory and mnemonic processes as archive. The widened conception of the archive and diverse photographic practices will be adopted to re-consider artistic and curatorial practices. The teaching and learning will draw on my current research projects and exemplary artist’s case studies, particularly focussing on environmentally focused curatorial and artistic methodologies, including tidalectics, communities, and the Patchy Anthropocene. We will study artists’ methods in doing fieldwork, working with the camera and with temporary communities. We will study lens-based practices and the photographic object in relation to collections, collecting, and exhibiting Arctic Indigenous worldviews and cultures together with their interconnections to coastal zones, bodies of water, communities, and geopolitics. We will consider these within the contexts of colonialism and environmental extraction embedded within museum collections and corresponding artistic and curatorial interventions. SCHEDULE (UK time) SESSION 2.1 :: THU, FEB 26 — 5 - 8 PM SESSION 2.2 :: THU, MAR 05 — 5 - 8 PM SESSION 2.3 :: THU, MAR 12 — 5 - 7 PM SESSION 2.4 :: THU, MAR 19 — 6 - 7 PM SESSION 2.5 :: THU, MAR 26 — 5 - 8 PM SESSION 2.6 :: THU, APR 02 — 5 - 8 PM ABOUT BERGIT ARENDS Bergit Arends is a curator of contemporary art, museum professional, and academic with research interests in the intersections of research-based artistic practices, material culture, and environmental history within European and global contexts. Bergit’s monograph "Photography, Ecology and Historical Change in the Anthropocene: Activating Archives" (2024) is part of the Routledge series Photography, Place, Environment. Her doctoral research resulted among other in the award-winning publication Chrystel Lebas. Field Studies (2018). Bergit has curated many contemporary art projects for the natural history museums in London and Berlin. Bergit was British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at University of Bristol and the Courtauld Institute of Art, London, where she is now a Teaching Fellow. She is Curatorial Research Fellow in the UK Research and Innovation Network Plus ‘Shifting Global Polarities: Russia, China and Eurasia in Transition’. Bergit is also a Research Associate in the multinational CoastARTS programme, working together with artists to retrieve, to mobilise, and to shape new forms of environmental knowledge in relation to the dynamics of coastal zones. Selected recent publication: — Photography, Ecology and Historical Change in the Anthropocene: Activating Archives, London: Routledge, 2024. Seeing the Anthropocene through montage: John Akomfrah’s Vertigo Sea and Elizabeth Price’s BERLINWAL. Environmental Humanities 16(3), 530–553, 2024 https://doi.org/10.1215/22011919-11327300 [OPEN ACCESS] Joy Gregory and Philip Miller: Seeds of Empire in Black Anthropocenes. Third Text, 38(3), 293–314, 2024. https://doi.org/10.1080/09528822.2024.2394293 Making Plants Mobile. Transports of Delight, exhibition essay, Danielle Arnaud Gallery, 2022. http://www.daniellearnaud.com/PDF/Transports%20of%20Delight%20Leaflet%20Final.pdf Unequal Earth: Contemporary artists’ practices and environmental ideas in modernity. Ronald Grätz and Maike Weiβpflug (Eds), NaturKultur. Göttingen: Steidl, 2021. Decolonising natural history museums through contemporary art. In C. Rossi-Linnemann & G. de Martini (eds.), Art in Science Museums: Towards a Post-Disciplinary Approach. London: Routledge, 2020. —
MODULE 3
TEMPORALITY, CARE AND ECOLOGICAL ENTANGLEMENTS
CURATING AS A CONCEPTUALIZED VISUAL PRACTICE
.... DR. SARA CALLAHAN . CONTENT Since the mid-twentieth century, shifts in the global art world, education, and institutions have transformed the role of the curator from a hands-on practitioner caring for objects in collections, to someone who organizes exhibitions and other cultural events through conception, selection, production, and mediation of artworks and other objects. This conception of curating can be described as an “epistemological technology” (Preziosi), something that creates connections between objects, images, processes, people, and discourses. The terms curating and the curatorial while ubiquitous, often remain both contested and elusive. Has curating become an overused buzzword, so broadly conceived as to become almost meaningless, or is it precisely what is needed to make sense of, and counter, today’s political and ecological polycrisis? This module unravels various tensions that trouble the contemporary notion of curating. For instance, curating is simultaneously embedded in strict hierarchies and network logics while also evoking and theorizing care and co-creation. Additionally, the coexistence of an increasing emphasis on curatorial methods and ideas relating to environmental concerns sits somewhat uneasily with the promotion of the star-curator who jets around the world, creating mega-exhibitions that enhances gentrification and art tourism to world’s urban areas. More fundamentally, the notion of curation can also be seen to be embedded within the notions of creativity, and the relationship between human vis-à-vis the environment that underpins the enlightenment project, with its nationalist, extractivist and oppressive logics. Yet another set of tensions involving curating is the sense that artists are under increasing pressure from administrative, marketing and commercial forces, where the curator is alternately perceived as advocate for the important of art and artists’ rights, or as a figure with whom the artist must share ever-dwindling resources, both monetary and attention-related. The module explores how curating and the curatorial cut across these and other tensions, paying specific attention to notions of temporality, care, and complexity. SCHEDULE (UK time) SESSION 3.1 :: MON, APR 06 — 5 - 8 PM SESSION 3.2 :: THU, APR 16 — 5 - 8 PM SESSION 3.3 :: THU, APR 23 — 5 - 7 PM SESSION 3.4 :: THU, APR 30 — 6 - 7 PM SESSION 3.5 :: THU, MAY 07 — 5 - 8 PM SESSION 3.6 :: THU, MAY 14 — 5 - 8 PM ABOUT SARA CALLAHAN Sara Callahan is an art historian whose resarch focuses on art and visual culture from the twentieth and twenty-first century. Her various research projects converge around the question of how artistic and other visual practices relate to theories, attitudes, and phenomena from non-art contexts, and how the present interacts and interferes with history in different ways. Callahan is interested in the way artworks identify and process the most pressing issues of the day in ways that engage knowledge and ideas from scientific, philosophical and political contexts, and she believes that by studying and understanding phenomena in the artworld, we can better understand the multifaceted aspects of the world around us. Callahan’s book Art + Archive: Understanding the Archival Turn in Contemporary Art was published by Manchester University Press in their series Rethinking Art’s Histories in 2022. She is currently finishing a monographic study that investigates how photographic motion studies have been activated in different discourses and visual culture since the late-nineteenth century. In addition, she is currently developing a project about clouds as a visual and conceptual motif in contemporary art; a study that ties nineteenth century studies of clouds to present-day artworks that engage with the cloud as technological and environmental concern. Selected recent publication: — “The Standardized, Mechanized, and Annotated Body. Fragmentation as Cultural Technique in Recent Video Works by Kajsa Dahlberg, Kalle Brolin, and Hanni Kamaly”, Journal of Aesthetics and Culture, 16:1, 2024 https://doi.org/10.1080/20004214.2024.2382875 “When the dust has settled: what was the archival turn, and is it still turning?”, Art Journal, vol. 83, issue 1, p. 74-88, 2024. Peer-review. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/epdf/10.1080/00043249.2024.2317690?needAccess=true “Strategies of critique in contemporary artistic archival practice”, invited submission in special issue of Archivo Papers Journal, vol. 4: Archive and Conflict, p. 29-50, 2024 (peer-reviewed) https://archivopapersjournal.com/ojs/index.php/apj/issue/view/9/3 “Please e take it & re-use it: Muybridge’s Animal Locomotion images at work in present-day visual culture”, Media Theory, vol 6, issue 1, p. 45-72, peer review, 2022. ISSN 2557-826X. DOI: https://doi.org/10.70064/mt.v6i1.672 https://journalcontent.mediatheoryjournal.org/index.php/mt/article/view/672 Art + Archive: Understanding the Archival Turn in Contemporary Art, Manchester University Press, in their series “Rewriting art’s histories”. Peer-review. 2022 https://manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk/9781526160287/ —
MODULE 4
SITUATED RESEARCH IN A ANTHROPOGENIC WORLD
PICTURING AND RESEARCHING ECO-PHOTOGRAPHY IN THE PRESENT
.... DR. KARLA McMANUS . CONTENT The story of photography has always centred the landscape and this narrative continues to be true today. Images of nature and human activity upon the earth are still powerful subjects that can transcend our local or individual concerns and raise important questions about power and responsibility. Yet there has been a major the shift from positivist interpretations of landscape photographs showing resource extraction and land appropriation that were common in the early days of the medium, including images of settler-colonialism, agricultural displacement and transformation, and nation building, to the viewing of landscape photographs as critical depictions of anthropogenic environmental, economic, and political domination. In this module, we will consider how various interdisciplinary techniques and theoretical approaches, including eco-Marxism and new materialism, eco-aesthetics and the sublime, eco-justice and racism, and critical animal studies, have informed the making and interpreting of a growing body of work by photographers concerned with the ecological turn. What ethical, social, and political concerns must we researchers consider when looking at and responding to photographs of ecological entanglement and transformation? How do we, as interpreters, situate ourselves in our works of analysis while speaking to a broad audience of readers and viewers who do not always share our positionality or methodology? Participants will be pushed to identify their own methodological biases and consider how their projects utilize interpretive models that inform the understanding of eco-photographs in the present, while sometimes reinterpreting the past through a contemporary lens. Through the discussion of key examples of ecological photography, and by considering the growing influence of ecocritical approaches to analysis of images, we will consider how artists, photographers, and cultural theorists are reflecting ongoing ideas about anthropogenic climate change and shaping a new way of seeing the photographic image. SCHEDULE (UK time) SESSION 4.1 :: THU, MAY 21 — 6 - 7 PM SESSION 4.2 :: THU, MAY 28 — 5 - 8 PM SESSION 4.3 :: THU, JUN 04 — 5 - 8 PM SESSION 4.4 :: THU, JUN 11 — 5 - 7 PM SESSION 4.5 :: MON, JUN 15 — 5 - 8 PM SESSION 4.6 :: THU, JUN 25 — 5 - 8 PM ABOUT KARLA MACMANUS Karla MacManus is art historian and visual theorist who specializes in the study of photography and the environmental imaginary. As Associate Professor in the Department of Visual Arts at the University of Regina, Saskatchewan, Canada, Karla teaches students at various levels on topics including the history and theory of photography and environmental art. Her scholarly output, in the form of curation, publications, and presentations, focuses on how historic and contemporary concerns, from wildlife conservation, to environmental disasters, to anxiety about the future, are visualized photographically. Karla’s current research project, “Flight of Fancy or Fact? Producing, Circulating, and Viewing Ornithological Photography as Ecological Knowledge,” funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, explores how bird photography and its history in print has contributed to the dissemination of ecological knowledge and wildlife species conservation. In fall of 2025, Karla was a Sassoon Visiting Fellow at the Bodleian Libraries, Centre for the Study of the Book, in Oxford, where she researched the work of early twentieth century bird photographer Emma Louisa Turner. Her writing and research on photography and the ecological turn can be found in Les Cahiers de ARIP, Journal of Canadian Art History, Imaginations: Journal of Cross-Cultural Image Studies and Captures. Figures, théories et pratiques de l’imaginaire, and RACAR as well as numerous edited collections and exhibition catalogues. She is co-editor of “The Slide Lecture” a special issue of the History of Photography (2023). Selected recent publication: — “Narrating the Blind Field: Sites of Photographic and Ecological Knowledge in Rena Effendi’s Liquid Land.” Les Cahiers de ARIP, (October 2020). https://arip.hypotheses.org/4633 “The Future-Past, the Future-Present, the Future-Possible: The Chernobyl Exclusion Photographs of David McMillan,” in Through Post-Atomic Eyes. Edited by Claudette Lauzon and John O’Brian. Montreal; Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2020, 286-303. Inside/Outside : Images du TERRITOIRE dans la collection d’Artexte. Montréal, QC: Artexte, 2019. Catalogue Essay: https://e-artexte.ca/id/eprint/30396/ “Above, Below, and Behind the Camera: the Perspective of Animals.” In From Ego to Eco. Mapping Shifts from Anthropocentrism to Ecocentrism.Edited by Tina Pusse and Sabine Müller. Amsterdam; New York: Brill Press, 2018, 201-214. “How Anthropo-scenic! Concerns and Debates about the Age of the Anthropocene,” in Anthropocene: Burtynsky, Baichwal, De Pencier. Toronto, ON: Art Gallery of Ontario; Fredericton, NB: Goose Lane Editions, 2018, 45-56. —
APPLICATIONS
ELIGIBILITY
The seminar is open to doctoral and post-doctoral researchers.
Applicants must be currently engaged in ongoing doctoral or postdoctoral projects.
There's no geographical restrictions, but it is relevant to ensure availability to attend the programme sessions which are held between 5PM and 8PM, in the UK time zone.
PARTICIPATION REQUIREMENTS
Applicants must have a high level of written and spoken english.
Access to a computer with a stable internet connection, and a operational system that supports ZOOM (including sound, video, and screen sharing).
SUBMISSION OF APPLICATIONS
To submit your application, please provide the application form (point 1), alongside the required information (points 2 to 5) in one single PDF file:
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Application Form (download here)
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Project abstract (500 words max.)
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Indicative bibliography
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Writing sample (1500 words max.)
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Biographical note (150 words max.)
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Short CV focusing on the last five years (2 pages max.)
Submit your application to seminar@archivoplatform.com no later then December 31. Applications received after the deadline will not be considered.
Notification of results will be sent to applicants by January, 2026.
PROGRAMME FEES
APPLICATION FEE: No fee is charged
SEMINAR TUITION: 240 EUR p/ month
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Upon notification of acceptance, selected participants will be asked to complete their registration by submitting the full programme fee of 1,200 EUR.
If the programme fee is to be covered by a university or research institution, participants may request an invoice addressed to their institution. Further payment instructions will be provided upon acceptance.
SCHOLARSHIPS
ARCHIVO will offer a limited number of partial scholarships to candidates who require financial support. If you wish to apply for a scholarship, make the request through the application form.
INQUIRIES
For inquiries, please contact:
Ana Catarina Pinho
Seminar Programme Coordinator