Practices of Collaboration

• Applicant: Dr. Moses März
• Subject Area: General and Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies ; African, American and Oceania Studies ; Political Science
• Term: since 2024
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 496295891

This project is designed as a connecting hub that fosters and studies the culture of collaboration within the research unit (RU). It provides a space for progressive reflection of the RU’s own collaborative practices and creatively explores modes of collective thinking, writing and acting that are informed by the work of the RU. The Principal Investigator (PI) pursues a postdoctoral research project as part of this project, which will study the transformative potential of postcolonial collaborations via a case study dedicated to the literary and organisational work of the Pan-African writer Ayi Kwei Armah. The project is designed to respond to the RU’s core ambition of imagining alternative ways of collaborating across the divisions upheld by global power structures, different epistemologies, as well as across the divisions of academia, activism and artistic practices. By asking what it would mean to actively translate postcolonial, feminist, queer, Indigenous and Black theories of collaboration into the specific setting of the university, this project actively mediates between theory and practice with the aim of developing relational and transformative practices of knowledge production. Three main objectives and a series of sub-projects are derived from this overarching ambition. (1) The first objective is to actively support and theorize the practice of collaboration within the RU and its individual projects. This will be addressed by conceptualizing and organizing regular research colloquia and informal meetings, annual workshops and two collective editorial projects, which will involve all members and associated researchers of the RU. (2) The second objective is to mediate the work of the RU across the divisions of academic, artistic and activist realms by making its research accessible and responsive to wider audiences. This will be done via a collectively authored website containing multimedia contributions and an edited volume based on the proceedings of an international conference. (3) The third objective is to exemplarily engage with, and learn from, marginalized traditions and concepts of collaboration, emphatically including non-Western practices and concepts. This aim is a crucial commonality and connector of all the projects in the RU, and it is at the center of the postdoctoral project, which will result in a monograph and a series of large-scale research maps that can be exhibited in academic and art contexts. The PI of this project is an early-career researcher with a track-record of mediating between scholarship, editorial work, art and activism. He will be joined by the designated spokesperson of the RU and a student assistant. The project team will work closely with the RU coordinator, to deliberately explore the nexus between scholarship and administration as a specific practice of collaboration.

• DFG Programme: Research Units
• Subproject of: FOR 5500: Collaborations: Assemblages, Articulations, Alliances
• Co-Investigator: Professor Dr. Dirk Wiemann