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- Convenors:
-
Lamine Doumbia
(Humboldt Universität zu Berlin)
Hauke-Peter Vehrs (University of Cologne)
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- Discussants:
-
Karim Zafer
(University of Cologne)
Katrin Sowa (University of Cologne)
- Format:
- Workshop
- Regional groups:
- Africa
Short Abstract:
In this workshop we want to explore to what extent research cooperations between Global South and Global North countries deal with the challenges of asymmetrical collaborations and seeking out new ways for joint partnerships and common knowledge production.
Long Abstract:
Collaboration in science and research is a field that is receiving increasing attention. In particular, the unequal preconditions for research and the asymmetrical conditions of funding, research and publication is subject to strong criticism. While institutions in the Global North often finance large projects and are endowed with immense budgets, the funding landscape in the Global South is more limited.
Sometimes, the funding requirements are bizarre. While research projects from the Global North are reliant on strong collaborations with scientists from the Global South, it is often either impossible or difficult to adequately employ these scientists in these projects.
We would like to look at individual and collective approaches to overcome imbalances (knowledge, power, funding, etc.) in the context of south-north cooperations, and discuss your ideas about necessary and possible structural reforms. Therefore, we invite a multitude of voices (senior researchers, emerging scholars, administrators as well as practitioners from African and German academia) to share your experiences and visions, and reflect critically on established African-German research cooperations. Hereby, we are not only interested to present the ‘success stories’ of good partnership, but would likewise like to learn from the challenges and failures of joint partnership, attempted commoning, as well as stories of resistance and uncommoning.
Finally, we want to extend our discussion towards the conditions of common knowledge production, the practices and ideas of common research, and the im/possibility of commoning international research projects.
Accepted contributions:
Contribution short abstract:
Astrophysicists collaborate. Anthropologists collaborate, too, but differently. This presentation spotlights a Malagasy astrophysicist in the UK who is an interlocutor of a German anthropological project and shows how questions of familiarity and strangeness emerge.
Contribution long abstract:
For astrophysics, just like for anthropologists, collaboration with actors across the globe is crucial. From any one place on earth one can only see that part of the sky that is above the horizon. Earth itself (the “familiar”) is in the way for an omnidirectional view into outer space (the “strange”) and so astrophysicists collaborate with people taking measurements in other places around the globe. Similarly, anthropologists need to collaborate with others in encounters that are shaped by dialectics of strangeness and familiarity. In an anthropological project about astrophysics in Madagascar, Malagasy astrophysicists are both tied into their global community of astrophysicists as well as part of collaborative relations between the anthropologist and her “field.”
In this presentation, I focus on Mbola, a Malagasy astrophysicist pursuing her PhD in the UK. She and her colleagues both in Madagascar and in the UK understand astrophysics as a commons to which scientists from all corners of the world should be able to contribute. Despite numerous practical hurdles that she had to overcome (unequal preconditions, scarce funding opportunities, family expectations), her everyday collaborative activities at work enact this understanding of a global scientific community. Mbola also collaborates with me, an anthropologist from Germany working on astronomy in Madagascar. This latter collaboration necessarily looks very different and follows much more a relational model of interlocutor – researcher. In this presentation, I deliberately juxtapose these forms of collaboration and I ask how Mbola’s experience of astrophysical collaboration shapes our anthropological conversations about strangeness and familiarity.
Contribution short abstract:
Drawing from my experiences, I examine how placing project leadership on researchers from Global South helps to challenge stereotypes and systemic inequalities in North-South research dynamics. I also examine how pre-existing personal and professional relationships foster successful collaborations.
Contribution long abstract:
A growing strategy for decolonizing collaborative research is placing researchers from the Global South in the role of principal investigators (PIs), particularly in projects funded by the Global North. Until 2024, I primarily served as a supporting investigator in projects led by Global North PIs, where funding originated. However, from 2024, I transitioned into the role of lead applicant and principal investigator for projects financed by Sweden and Germany, leading collaborations that include researchers from the Global North.
This shift in leadership has offered profound insights and new challenges. In this presentation, I reflect on my experiences as a Global South researcher leading such projects, focusing on two key aspects. First, I explore the potential of this positional shift to challenge stereotypes and address systemic inequalities inherent in North-South research dynamics. Second, I examine the pivotal role of existing personal and professional relationships in fostering successful collaborations.
Drawing from these experiences, I offer practical lessons to enhance awareness and build healthier, more equitable North-South research partnerships that transcend traditional notions of funding distribution.
Contribution short abstract:
This presentation aims at questioning the academic collaboration and elaborate on the points of how to understand it within the process of knowledge production. Dealing with knowledge production no matter the form is done only in collaboration and co-production.
Contribution long abstract:
Dealing with knowledge production requires an extremely meticulous holistic approach which is to also think outside of the academic box. The Africa Charter for Transformative Research Collaborations is the African Union initiative to strategically take agency in equitable collaboration. The charter draws on the consideration that rebalancing the collaborative structures is an imperative for Africa and the global community (Aboderin, Fuh, Gebremariam and Segalo, 2023). If collaboration in knowledge production is measured only within the academic spaces and lenses, the question of the role of none academic actors remains uncovered and the dichotomy of north-south is limiting the reflection (Molosi-France and Makoni 2020).
I was initiated in the best traditions of social anthropology at the university of Bayreuth. By travelling to a country, in the framework of the Lehrforschung, I was not familiar with, namely Ethiopia, where I conducted research in Addis Abeba which is also Amharic for “New Flower”. The vast majority of African students and scholars usually conduct their research in their home countries (Diawara 1985). While I acknowledge that you can be a stranger in your own country, there is no substitute in social anthropology for the challenge of adding to your research the important task of coming to terms with your own ignorance (Nyamnjoh, 2012). The experience of being a Sahelian in the higher altitudes of Ethiopia gave me a practical lesson in intellectual modesty, especially in the care we need to take not to assume that the world fits into our concepts.
Contribution short abstract:
The paper considers the notion of Knowledge Partnership Policy scripts beyond the Global North and Global South concepts. It proposes a new gateway towards a practical Global Policy discourse and practice which is pragmatic in nature in that it advocates for basic rather than applied research.
Contribution long abstract:
The paper considers the notion of Knowledge Partnership Policy scripts beyond the Global North and Global South concepts. It reviews the theoretical and practical implications of the current policy trend to include emerging and developing countries in international knowledge partnerships through the case study of German, South African and Mozambican capacity-building programs. Germany has historical knowledge of partnership policies, frameworks, and programs with various African countries. In such endeavours, these countries have expressed the desire to confront the legacies of traditional structures of inequality in international scientific, educational and development cooperation to embrace a more equitable and pragmatic approach. The paper examines the present-day countries’ global science and higher education policy discourses and practices against the standards and evaluation criteria proposed in such policies. The analysis aims to shed light on the underlying assumptions of the concepts and processes perpetuating traditional asymmetries in knowledge partnerships' global political economy. Finally, the paper suggests addressing the enduring legacy of unequal North-South knowledge policy scripts and institutional practices. It also offers a realist spectrum of decentred knowledge locations, with diverse purposes and traditions suggesting the need for a revised set of foundational assumptions on North-South cooperation and partnerships away from the obsolete capacity-building approach. The paper proposes a new gateway towards a practical Global Policy discourse and practice which is pragmatic in nature in that it advocates for basic rather than applied research.