About this series

The publication series ‘Performing Sustainability – Culture and Transformation’ includes published dissertations that have been written within the framework of the trinational Graduate School ‘Performing Sustainability. Cultures and Development in West Africa’. This cooperation between the University of Maiduguri (Nigeria), the University of Cape Coast (Ghana) and the University of Hildesheim (Germany) was funded throughout two funding phases (2016–2020, 2021–2025) by the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) with funds from the Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ). Throughout these two funding phases, three cohorts with 12 doctoral candidates each were funded. In addition to a full scholarship, the funding included two annual doctoral workshops, financial support for international conference visits, as well as a three-month research stay at the University of Hildesheim. Many dissertations were supervised as part of a Cotutelle-de-thèse, meaning that the work was supervised and defended both at the home university of the doctoral students (University of Maiduguri or University of Cape Coast), as well as at the University of Hildesheim.

In terms of their research foci, the Graduate School’s dissertations are concerned with the relation between culture and the 17 UN Sustainable Development Goals (also known as SDGs). The program applied a deliberately broad understanding of the concept of culture, so that it has not only produced theses in the research areas that are traditionally subsumed under the field of cultural studies (i.e. theatre studies, musicology, ethnomusicology, cultural policy, literary studies, media studies, dance studies), but also research works that explore the connection between culture and sustainability from other disciplinary perspectives, for instance through dissertations in the fields of philosophy, geography, political sciences, psychology, economics, and translation studies.

You can find more information on the project on its archive website: https://www.uni-hildesheim.de/en/fb2/institute/kulturpolitik/research/sdg-graduate-school/