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Contribution short abstract

This paper analyzes DGSKA congresses (2014-2024) revealing trends and exclusions in knowledge production. It argues that German academia's institutionalization of decolonial theory neutralizes its transformative potential, reproducing hierarchies. A shift toward anti-colonial praxis is proposed.

Contribution long abstract

Academic congresses function as resonance forums that allow us to empirically analyze trends, legitimations and exclusions in the production of knowledge. In particular, the German Society for Social and Cultural Anthropology (DGSKA) represents a privileged space to examine how German academia has processed, incorporated, and transformed the decolonial perspective. The period 2014-2024 is particularly significant, since 2014 marks the turning point when decolonial academic production reaches its historical maximum in publications and citations, paradoxically initiating its process of institutionalization and consequent depotentialization.

This paper proposes a critical analysis of a decade of DGSKA congresses as devices that reveal the limits and contradictions of the institutional appropriation of decolonial theory. My central argument is that while these academic spaces rhetorically embrace decolonial discourse, they simultaneously neutralize its transformative potential through mechanisms of selection, translation, and legitimation that reproduce geopolitical hierarchies of knowledge.

First, a critical mapping of how the “decolonial turn” has been incorporated into DGSKA conference agendas, panels and presentations during this decade is presented, revealing patterns of selection and exclusion. It then examines the tensions and paradoxes that arise as academic institutions in the Global North attempt to “decolonize” without substantially changing their power structures. Finally, a turn towards an anti-colonial praxis is proposed. In order to transcend the prevailing institutionalization of critical thinking within the European academic milieu

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Contribution short abstract

How to decolonize universities while working in this colonial, neoliberal institution shaped by intersectional inequalities? This contribution focuses on the resistant (everyday) practices of scholar activists within contradictory and precarious academic working conditions.

Contribution long abstract

Universities play a central role in the legitimization, production and circulation of knowledge. These processes are political and involved in various forms of (re)production of intersectional inequalities and colonial continuities. Moreover, the ongoing economization of universities worldwide, further reinforce these power asymmetries despite a supposed institutional commitment to social justice and diversity.

Decolonial and feminist social movements and (academic) activists have been demanding and shaping a transformation of the higher education system for decades. But how is it possible to advocate for a more just transformation of society and science within an institution whose foundations, logics and practices repeatedly contradict this concern?

In my doctoral project, I approach this paradox from the perspective of marginalized early career academics at German universities who try to advocate for a Decolonization of science and higher education as “scholar activist” (Collins 2017) while "deal[ing] with the dialectics of un/doing epistemic violence" (Brunner 2023) in their academic work. More specifically, the focus of the research lies on the resistant strategies and (everyday) practices that these actors develop in the conflicting academic field of ethical contradictions, (colonial) power asymmetries and unequal working conditions. The role that un/communalizing decoloniality can play in this context will be discussed for this workshop.

The project is based on a qualitative intersectional approach that includes problem-centered interviews and participatory workshops. The aim is to collect and jointly develop limits and possibilities for political interventions as well as everyday resistant thinking and action strategies within, outside and against the neoliberal university.

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Contribution short abstract

The academic environment of the Global North is lulled to sleep by the song of neoliberal sirens who promise to "take the other seriously" but end up preaching neoliberal individualism. I want to show some alternatives that can shed light on how to avoid falling into their gentle clutches.

Contribution long abstract

"Deleuze, Descola, Latour, Viveiros de Castro..." resonates in the heads of anthropologists like a mantra that will free us from the original sin of Anthropology, of essentializing the other. However, due to the concealment strategies that these scholars have used in their works, hiding that their theories come from Heidegger's philosophy of individualistic being, they do not realize that what they are doing is spreading academic neoliberalism to its most unthinkable extremes.

Ultimately, postmodernist anthropologists do not consider that the cultures they study base their epistemological perspective on community and reciprocity modes of production, especially regarding societies in the Global South. The individuals they study are part of a whole that is structurally dominated in a preeminent way under neoliberalism. Unfortunately, this topic is largely ignored.

The ontology of social being, initially promoted by Marx and later developed more deeply by Lukács, offers innovative responses to the neoliberal ontology that is currently in fashion, where it is possible to observe that very few researchers have investigated this possibility, considering that the theory of the value of dialectical materialism criticizes precisely the system that has currently reached its maximum development in the history of humanity: late capitalism.

I will explain some key points of the ontology of social being in Lukács and how it could be adopted critically from an anthropological-ethnographic point of view.

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Contribution short abstract

This paper examines how student-led liberation movements in Dutch universities challenge narratives of institutional crisis and reform. It explores how strategies of generative refusal challenge institutional co-optation, creating “pockets of possibility” for alternative ways of being and relating.

Contribution long abstract

This paper examines how student-led liberation movements in Dutch universities challenge dominant narratives of institutional crisis and reform amidst a period of sweeping austerity measures and increasing campus securitization. Drawing on Savannah Shange’s (2019) concept of "carceral progressivism,” I explore how critiques of systemic injustice are absorbed by the university, repurposed as tools for institutional self-preservation, and weaponized against radical demands for structural change under the guise of inclusion. Far from conservative, the university turns out to be a "continuously complexly mutating entity” (Mbembe 2016, 32) where reforms succeed not despite, but through their collusion with disciplinary logics.

Drawing on ethnographic research with student-led liberation movements on campus, however, I highlight how carceral progressivism will always be "a formation on the move, vulnerable to encounter with its radical Other” (Shange 2019, 143). I explore how strategies of "generative refusal" (Simpson 2014) challenge the university’s co-optation of critical frameworks, advocating instead for a reimagining of knowledge- and subject-formation that transcends the academy’s onto-epistemological limits. Rather than repairing existing institutions as part of a linear, inevitable evolution toward ever greater forms of inclusion and universalism, these student movements invite us into space of relationality and world-making that exists beneath and beyond the institution’s reach. Ethnographically tracing these "pockets of possibility” within-against-beyond the university, I argue for a decoloniality that moves beyond reformist approaches, instead embracing abolitionist practices that dismantle harmful structures while nurturing possibilities for alternative ways of being and relating.

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Contribution short abstract

Does a decolonial digital access to cultural assets from colonial contexts provide a fundamental emancipation from Western-influenced knowledge and power formations? Or is it all about epistemic justice?

Contribution long abstract

The presence of extensive Mapuche collections in German museums and university collections can only be understood against the background of the late 19th century interplay between the Chilean government and the Propaganda Fide in the Vatican. This led to the foundation of the Bavarian Capuchin Province in the Araucanía and the presence of three different groups of German actors taking on various roles in the internal colonisation of “the Mapuche”: (1) German colonists on expropriated Mapuche territories, (2) Capuchin mission stations spread out between remaining Mapuche territories, and (3) the presence of German scholars at Chilean cultural institutions and museums.

In postcolonial provenance research, the paradigm of decolonising collections refers to contextualisation and indexing methods that incorporate the perspectives of representatives of societies of origin. Does a decolonial digital access to cultural assets from colonial contexts therefore provide a fundamental emancipation from Western-influenced knowledge and power formations? Or is it all about epistemic justice?

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Contribution short abstract

Social movement scholars often strive to make visible and learn from contentious branches of society, criticizing the hegemonic mainstream. As experiences from my fieldwork with Romanian activists show, however, this endeavor may be hindered by social movement studies’ own methodological frameworks.

Contribution long abstract

Academics studying political discontent often are fascinated with the potential for change that contentious actors convey, emphasizing „appearance“—the visibility of alternative social and political arrangements. However, this focus shouldn't only empower movements (which anyway bears a strange bias towards studying only the „nice“ movements!) but should also free academics from their own ingrained assumptions.

One issue is the term "movement" itself, being deeply rooted in a western historical trajectory of movement organisation, claim-making, and campaigning, which many of the digital/present, global/local, self-organized, leaderless etc. movements of our times escape. Another one is the attempt at reducing civil society to its mediating „functions“ in the „emerging democracies“ of the post-socialist space. Another one is the common approach of reducing protests to their policy making functions – sorting protests according to their issues, following structural paths of organizations and media in investigating them, and measuring the relevance and success of protest by participant numbers and policy outcomes.

Drawing from experiences from a political ethnography carried out in Romanian contentious politics spaces, I propose an analytical perspective that focuses on investigating tension instead – i.e., the very processes of dealing with the undecidabilities of the political. This way, forms of resisting hegemony become visible that otherwise remain hidden behind social movement studies’ „classical“ categories – and which oftentimes resist, and may liberate us from, these in themselves hegemonic categories per se.