Global Partnership Network Graduate School

The Global Partnership Network Graduate School offers an outstanding opportunity for academically ambitious researchers from the Global South to pursue a structured PhD within an interdisciplinary and internationally connected research environment. The Global Partnership Network (GPN) offers a graduate programme in which our PhD students are co-supervised by professors from two GPN partner universities. The selected PhD students are based at the university of their first supervisor, but they also have the chance to spend six months at the university of their second supervisor. Our graduate school coordinator organises a regular virtual graduate programme together with the members from the different GPN partners – the partner universities as well as the partner civil society organisations (CSO). This allows a wide range of expertise in different theoretical and practical fields to be incorporated into our graduate school and further to establish a link between theory and practice. The prevalent online format allows a rich international and intercultural exchange without fuelling the already ongoing climate crisis too much via flights. As online exchanges can be intensive, shorter virtual workshops and seminars will be offered on a regular basis (approximately once a month). The overall orientation of the content being treated in the graduate programme is geared towards the three research clusters of the GPN: Cluster 1: Partnerships in development cooperation (focusing on gender and diversity and on protest and displacement) Cluster 2: Partnerships in the global economy (in the fields of agroecology and financial inclusion) Cluster 3: Partnership in knowledge production (Eurocentrism, alternative knowledge and Post-Development) Smaller peer groups will be built with those PhD and post-doc students who do research in the same cluster to encourage peer-to-peer learning across space and different cultures. The doctoral students will be encouraged to actively participate in the design of the graduate school programme and thereby shape parts of it according to their specific needs and wishes. We are pleased to announce that the family of Thomas Sankara has kindly approved our wish to name the GPN PhD scholarships after him. Applications are encouraged from academically ambitious researchers dedicated to critical inquiry and transformative practice who seek to contribute meaningfully to global academic and political debates—particularly within the thematic clusters of the GPN and in alignment with the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).