Nargess Khodabakhshi
Oil Fashion and Modernization: A History of Fashion and Dress in Iran, 1941-1979
Nargess Khodabakhshi examines the history of Iranian fashion and dress in the context of the modernization agenda of the Iranian state, from 1941 to 1979. She refers to this period as the era of "oil fashion and modernization" and argues that modernization projects, accelerated by rising oil revenues, drove the development of fashion in Iran during this period. Each chapter of her dissertation explores these developments with a different approach to the theory and definition of fashion. This dissertation rebels against the "Orientalism" of Western fashion and enables a decolonial reading of fashions in the Middle East region by manifesting narratives of non-Western dress and fashion based on local perspectives of history, culture, identity, and development.
Helena Schmidt
From poor image to poor images. Digital Didactics in Art Education
The dissertation From poor image to poor images. Digital Didactics in Art Education examines digital images in the post-digital present circulating on the internet regarding their use, reflection and their potential in art education in schools. Helena Schmidt starts from the "poor image" (Hito Steyerl 2009): This emerges from a transformation of the high-quality, rich image to the poorly resolved, circulating, reproduced, and compressed digital copy on the net since the advent of internet-enabled devices. The dissertation focuses on the field of tension between image and education by means of a multi-perspective and interdisciplinary analysis of the term as well as an empirical study situating the "poor image" in contemporary and future art didactics and education. The thesis was supervised by Elke Krasny.