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Paper short abstract:

Drawing on an EU-funded human microbiome project in Tunisia, I will analyse how geo-political disparities and Western hegemonic scientific frameworks hinder the development of an equal, ethical science and reproduce stereotypical conceptions, which hark back to a past of colonial subjugation.

Paper long abstract:

Microbiome research, together with metagenomic analysis, has significantly expanded our ability to study microbes and to explore their role in human health and diseases. As a scientific effort born in the Global North, the discipline regards the African continent as a mere sampling reservoir, involving local scientists and research centres only at a subordinate level (Allali et al. 2021). The asymmetrical collaborations between Western and African scientists raise several ethical issues concerning the extractivist nature of microbiome science, consent and information regarding biodata (Bader et al. 2023; Huttenhower, Finn, and McHardy 2023), and representational diversity within the discipline and in the academia (Mangola et al. 2022). I will focus on an EU-funded microbiome science project in Tunisia, specifically aimed at building capacities through the collaboration with European leading institutions. Collaborations are however often fictive: EU policy discourse often purports co-creation as a tool to achieve economic benefits rather than social justice (Ruess, Müller, and Pfotenhauer 2023). When it comes to Africa, moreover, an asymmetry in fundings and leading institutions shows how knowledge production continues to exist within a borrowed, hegemonic, post-colonial framework (Adebanwi 2016: 350). Thanks to an in-depth, prolonged ethnographic stay among Tunisian scientists, I will analyse how geo-political, economic, and epistemological disparities hinder the development of an equal science across a Global North and Global South axis.

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Paper short abstract:

ThIS paper aims at discussing the many decades of academic and scientific collaboration between scholars from ‘Global South’ and their fellows of ‘Global North’. It highlights the new challenges in various collaborative and cooperative research programs in the ‘Global south’.

Paper long abstract:

The rapid intrusion of digital technologies into research practices in recent years has revolutionized research methods, approaches, tools and techniques. Fieldworks and subjects of research have not either escaped these changes. How have the dynamics of cross-cultural and transnational research impacted the ‘North-South’ academic relations in recent years ? Drawing from my experiences of participating in collaborative research in a number of research institutions in Francophone Africa, South Africa and Europe, this paper will discuss the opportunities and challenges of deconstructing classic approaches and identify ways for re-imagining academic partnerships in ‘North-South’ relations in the digital age.

For decades, researchers and research institutions in the Global North have relied on their fellows in the Global South to carry out research activities within a cooperative and collaborative framework. These collaborations are often defined on the ‘Global North’ framework basis. The ‘Global South’ research fellows become consumers of the research design and implementers of the research activities on the ground. These activities consisted of organizing workshops, conferences and empirical data collection for the needs of their fellows from ‘North’. Despite the shortage, these institutions offer a minimum space for exchange between scholars from the ‘North’ and their fellows in the ‘South’. In this light, ‘North-South’ partnerships shifted from normative framework to individualized or personalized one. How does this individuality of collaborative research between the ‘Global South’ and the ‘Global North’ impact on the implementation of research in the South on the one hand and on research findings on the other hand?

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We reflect on a recent teaching project in which students and lecturers from Switzerland and Ghana jointly explored the heritage of the Basel Mission in Ghana, Switzerland, and Germany. Based on these experiences, we propose guidelines for collaborative teaching and student research partnerships.

Paper long abstract:

Our paper explores questions of north-south partnerships with regard to teaching. While there have been fruitful initiatives concerning collaboration in research, questions of teaching have received less attention. In our presentation, we reflect upon a collaborative teaching project on the heritage of the Basel Mission (BM) in southern Ghana and northwestern Switzerland/southwestern Germany. Based on our experiences as instructors, we propose guidelines for collaborative and reciprocal student research.

The Basel Mission, founded in 1815, developed into one of the largest German-speaking missions. Ghana was one of the first countries to which Basel missionaries were sent. In the BM's former places of work in southern Ghana, the traces of the mission are still omnipresent, in the form of schools and hospitals, cemeteries, churches, former homes of the missionaries and plantations. In Switzerland and Germany, this heritage includes the BM archive in Basel as well as local museums and memorials. Moreover, the BM features centrally in in family histories and religious self-identifications in all three countries.

From September 2023 to July 2024, students and lecturers from Switzerland (University of Basel) and from Ghana (University of Ghana; Akrofi-Christaller-Institute) explored this heritage in two hybrid seminars and ensuing excursions, during which students visited churches, schools, hospitals, and missionary homes, carried out research in archives and conducted oral history interviews. Based on these experiences, we reflect on questions of reciprocity with regard to funding, the recruitment and needs of students, research priorities, religious sensibilities, and different understandings of what it means to “decolonize” culture.

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Paper short abstract:

The project 'Mtu ni Watu - Disclosing Hidden Stories of Fieldwork' is a collaborative tandem project that brings together two researchers from Kenya and Germany and some research assistants to reflect on the assistant-researcher relations and present the findings to an academic and public audience.

Paper long abstract:

The project ‘Mtu ni Watu’ aims to change the perspectives in and on anthropological fieldwork and seeks to amplify those voices that normally receive little attention. To facilitate the views of our assistants – main agents in fieldwork who are usually rendered invisible in the representation of scientific results – they will also re-present the stories of our common research and elaborate on their own reflections of past research experiences. Their narrations are the source of an alternative reading of the research story. Two different settings are considered: the research ‘at home’ (Rao 2002) of a Kenyan anthropologist in Kenya, as well as the research of a white (German) person in a pastoral community in Kenya. We developed a scientific toolbox that deals specifically with the different aspects of assistant-researcher relations from different angles and thus providing early career researchers with insights into questions that often remain undisclosed behind the myth of fieldwork. The so-called Wawili-toolbox is designed in a website format that is openly accessible and illustrates the process of assistance from both the assistants’ and the researchers’ perspectives. The format allows us to elaborate on different aspects, have a multitude of speakers contributing, creating linkages between different stories, illustrations and personal vignettes.

In this presentation, we will revise the experiences we made in the project (that started in January 2024) and reflect on issues like workload, responsibility, the character of our (work) relations, funding, amongst others.

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Paper short abstract:

Collaborative ventures are recently at the heart of scientific knowledge production and base upon the cooperative work of scholars from the “Global South” and “Global North”. We discuss the unbalanced character of these relations, challenges in cooperative efforts, and future prospects.

Paper long abstract:

Departing from an ongoing interdisciplinary research collaboration between natural scientists working in Africa and social scientists based in Europe on the Square Kilometre Array Observatory (SKAO), this paper explores friendship as distinct and particularly valuable research relationship.

The value of interdisciplinary workshops differs amongst the different disciplinary communities and we are aware of geopolitical structures that feed into our intercontinental encounter. These differences matter. Despite or perhaps because of them, friendship keeps our interest in each other and in each other’s research alive irrespective of how it features in the narration of academic success, typically measured in terms of output, which we respect as an important mechanism of science in the making.

While astrophysicists around the globe are interested in knowledge about the universe, our astrophysicist friends in Africa merge this interest with an interest in development. As African studies scholars, we first responded to this interest with skepticism: our training foregrounded critiques of development and we were taught to conceptualize the problematic dynamics of betterment on the African continent. But the friendship with the astrophysicists has challenged our assumptions. In recognition of “development” having the potential to become a “common concern” (Stengers 2011), we embrace the path towards this common concern and acknowledge how our friendship with astrophysicists in Africa is influencing our academic judgment of what counts as relevant for us as individual researchers.

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Paper short abstract:

Exploring the complexities and politics of the North-South relationship necessitates bridging the gap in unequal epistemic relations with the West. This study advocates an urgent need for the development of an autochthonous body of knowledge to be used to investigate Africa’s reality.

Paper long abstract:

Despite the perceived opportunities that have defined the North-South academic relationship, there is a renewed focus on a more balanced partnership between the two poles. Undoubtedly, the relationship has resulted in a Giant-Dwarf academic platform in which the ideologies of the Global North continue to dominate and shape the politics of knowledge production in academia. Over time, Africa and African researchers have continued to adapt, employ, and apply Western ideologies and theories to explain their continent's development processes, such as Modernisation theory, a scenario that has remained anathema to Africa's progress and development. However, to create a more equitable academic North-South relationship, there is an urgent need to construct an autochthonous body of knowledge that African intellectuals will employ to investigate and interrogate Africa's realities. Applying this indigenous strategy in several critical areas by African scholars will aid in achieving and maintaining sanity in the interaction with the West. African scholars should attempt to (1) decolonise knowledge and curriculum through the creation of indigenous theories that help to explain the realness of African situations; (2) decolonise funding through the internalisation of a 'culture of funding research' by African governments; (3) bridge the disparity of the rural-urban dichotomy, which has contributed to increased illiteracy and poverty rates (closing the poverty gap) and; (4) address infrastructural imbalances and political apathy toward academics in Africa. Without these steps, the Western hegemonic academic dominance will continue to prevail and Africa will continue to experience uneven epistemic interactions with the West.

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Paper short abstract:

This paper considers a dilemma. While research collaboration can contribute to diversifying knowledge production and to promoting different ways of knowledge, it can also become normative and reinforce institutional settings, where global asymmetric economies of knowledge production are played out.

Paper long abstract:

This paper offers reflections on a dilemma in “South-North” research collaboration. On the one hand, collaboration is usually expected to contribute to diversifying knowledge production, to promote multiple expressions of knowledge, and to embrace perspectives from different parts of the world. Bringing together scholars from diverse backgrounds can create space for producing new and original questions and findings. On the other hand, the institutional setting of research collaboration can be quite normative in what is considered as academic “output” and depend from what funding institutions expect. Funding rules and regulations can impact research objectives and processes, and requested workflows may privilege specific ways of agenda setting and reporting. While most collaborative research programmes which include “North-South” partnerships aim at lowering global asymmetries of knowledge production, they can become, at the same time, sites where unequal access to funding resources is experienced on an everyday life level and where conflicts over global asymmetric economies of knowledge production are played out. These constellations are not necessarily characterised by only binary North-South relationships, but by multiple power imbalances, which incorporate complex networks of negotiation. This paper asks which practical strategies can contribute to balance these institutional challenges, and it reflects on the limits in how to produce equitable research collaboration. The paper is mainly based on observations and experiences, which I collected in the past seven years as a member of two research programmes (German-Senegalese and Ghanaian-German), for which I was based in Dakar and in Accra.

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Paper short abstract:

This paper focuses on my experience of the Pilot African Postgraduate Academy (PAPA), which ran from 2020 to 2024 at Point Sud and has trained 15 young african scholars in basic research. It highlights the uniqueness of this programme in terms of collaboration in research.

Paper long abstract:

Debates in the context of knowledge production in Africa have contributed to the emergence of the idea that Africa is an ideal space to address issues of broader scientific importance, particularly in the social sciences and humanities. Most of the knowledge produced about Africa is produced by the researchers based in western universities and in a collaborative manner focused primarily on data collection. This has raised epistemological, methodological and political questions in knowledge production in Africa. Furthermore, how can we help to evolve the role of African researchers in this collaboration and increase the production of knowledge by researchers based in African universities ?

The idea of PAPA emerged in respose to the problems raised by the way in which African researchers have sought to address the methodological, theoretical and conceptual challenges they face. This paper examines i) the career development of young scholars and ii) the issue of cooperation, collaboration or partnership in research in Africa, drawing on the experience of research programmes and networks. It focuses in particular on the case of Pilot African Postgraduate Academy (PAPA), a postdoctoral programme distinguished by its basic research approach addressing epistemological, methological and political issues related to knowledge production in Africa. It aims at finding out to what extend North-South academic cooperation has influenced PAPA, and what challenges this initiative has faced and how it has responded to them.