The highly competitive scheme, which enables researchers to undertake a significant piece of publishable research, recognises those who have already demonstrated research excellence in their fields but who have not yet held a permanent academic post. 

Dan's project, titled 'Visions of Life: The Creation of Postcolonial Screen Cultures in Africa', will explore how Anglophone African film-makers in the late 1950s and 1960s created new, African cinema for revolutionary ends. Through screens, these filmmakers sought to transform people's behaviours and aesthetics as well as their ideas of citizenship and emotional ties to political community. This project will uncover this forgotten history through the production of a film that both tells a story of this past and considers how visual art shapes politics today. 

Natalia's project, titled ‘Indigenous Sovereignties: A Study of Political Plurality in Ecuadorian Amazonia’, explores the politics of indigenous movements in the Ecuadorian Amazon, between grassroots initiatives, political parties, and international NGOs. Indigenous activists respond to discrimination, violence, and displacement by creating alternative visions of governance that engage with, oppose, or bypass nation-state sovereignty. Through in-depth and long-term ethnography, the project will trace the diversity of indigenous sovereignties and analyses them as theories of political plurality.

ODID's fellowships were among six awarded to candidates supported by departments across the Social Sciences Division. The fellowships are for three years.