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Contribution short abstract:

African Studies does crucial work in transforming pragmatic knowledge about multi-disciplinary collaborations into theoretical perspectives that pave ways for new epistemologies and ways of formulating what academia means. European AS could do crucial work on epistemology - especially in Europe.

Contribution long abstract:

Multi-disciplinary scholarship and future alternative epistemologies

In a world where funding goes, increasingly, to large interdisciplinary collaborations, and most universities reward “internationalization”, African Studies, anywhere, need to carefully consider their role in multi-disciplinary futures. How to manouver for space to articulate locally relevant research agendas, while trying to generate funding to do anything at all? Funding mechanisms inevitably seem to move the question from if international – and thus potentially colonizing – forced networking is to be avoided, to more pragmatic questions of how to develop better practices for collaboration, and how to identify and avoid harmful, inequal partnerships. African Studies could be a driving force in developing such pragmatic, practical knowledge into theoretical perspectives that pave ways for new epistemologies and ways of formulating what scholarship means. The forced internationalization could also be harnessed to form genuinely different future universities.

This paper proposes that European African Studies has a role if it works towards new scholarly futures rather than staying with the past and present ideals. The most laborious task is within epistemology in European universities, including hard sciences. In most fields of science the critique of Eurocentrism is absent, or silenced, yet they are excavating data, eg. on pandemics, climate change etc. globally. Were European African Studies self-dismantled now, important reparative work remains undone. Hard scientists would not mourn the loss of critical voices. The paper is based on 4 year ethnography on collaboration between sociologists, gender studies and biomedicine.