Team > MA Valerie V. V. Gruber

Faculty of Biology, Chemistry & Earth Sciences
Research Group Social Geography

Research priorities

• Social and moral geographies of global inequalities
• (Post)coloniality and racism
• Inter- and transculturality
• Social arts and cultural projects
• Transdisciplinary coproduction of knowledges and artistic research methods
• Latin America and the African diaspora (in particular Brazil and Colombia)

Biography

Valerie V. V. Gruber is a research associate in the Africa Multiple Cluster of Excellence at the University of Bayreuth since December 2019 and a Junior Fellow at the Bayreuth International Graduate School of African Studies (BIGSAS) since February 2020. As part of her PhD project, she develops transdisciplinary methods of knowledge co-production and carries out Participatory Action Research on questions of a good life with young artists and community actors from the African diaspora in Brazil and Colombia. During her Bachelor's and Master's degree in International Cultural and Business Studies at the University of Passau (Germany), she specialised in the Ibero-Romance cultural area and gained professional experience at the BMW Group in Munich, Audi in Mexico and the Konrad-Adenauer-Foundation in Brazil, among others. Thanks to several grants and scholarships, she spent exchange semesters and research stays at the University of La Laguna (Spain), the Federal University of Bahia (Brazil) and the University of Valle (Colombia). Before starting her doctorate, she served as a lecturer at the Chair of Social and Population Geography at the University of Bayreuth. After that, she worked as a research associate at the Institute of African Studies, conducting a pilot study on creative industries in Africa on behalf of the Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ). Currently, she is dedicating herself to the following three projects:

• Research project “Moral Geographies of Re-Existence” as part of the Research Section Moralities at the Cluster of Excellence “Africa Multiple: Reconfiguring African Studies”
• PhD project “Moral Geographies of (Re-) Existence: A Comparative Analysis of Socio-cultural Projects from Afro-descendant Communities in Salvador da Bahia (Brazil) and Cartagena de Indias (Colombia)“ at the Bayreuth International Graduate School of African Studies (BIGSAS)
• Transdisciplinary project “DjumbaiALA: Dialogues of African and Afro-diasporic Knowledges in the Multimedia Age“ sponsored by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF)

Awards and Scholarships

Faculty of Biology, Chemistry & Earth Sciences
Research Group Social Geography

Publications