Institutskolloquium
Während des Semesters kommt jede Woche das gesamte Institut zusammen, um sich über neueste Forschungen und aktuelle Debatten auszutauschen – Studierende und Lehrende, Promovierende und PostDocs, Mitarbeitende und Gäste. Das Institutskolloquium findet jedes Semester zu einem anderem übergeordneten Schwerpunkt statt, der gegenwärtige Themen, Diskussionen und Kontroversen in der Gesellschaft oder im Fach aufgreift. Regelmäßig laden wir dazu auch internationale Gäste anderer Disziplinen und Universitäten ein, um uns über ihre jüngsten Forschungsperspektiven auszutauschen. Die Vortragsreihe steht allen Interessierten offen und kann sowohl vor Ort als auch online via Zoom verfolgt werden. Die Vorträge werden auf Deutsch oder Englisch gehalten.
Every week during the semester, the institute meets to discuss the latest research and current debates - students and lecturers, doctoral students and postdocs, staff and guests. The Institute’s Colloquium takes place every semester with a different overarching focus that addresses current topics, discussions and controversies in society or the discipline. We also regularly invite international guests from other universities, as well as disciplines, to share their latest research activities. The lecture series is open to everybody interested and can be attended both on-site and online via Zoom. The lectures are held in German or English.
Zeit: Jeden Dienstag von 14:30 bis 16:00 Uhr oder 16:30 bis 18:00 Uhr
Ort: Institut für Europäische Ethnologie, Anton-Wilhelm-Amo-Straße 40/41 (ehemals Møhrenstraße), Raum 408
Hier geht es zur Registrierung für die Online-Teilnahme.
Für barrierefreien Zugang nutzen Sie bitte den Eingang Hausvogteiplatz 5-7. Über den Innenhof gelangen Sie zum Erdgeschoss des Instituts, wo Sie den Aufzug zu Raum 408 nehmen können.
Weitere Anfragen zur Zugänglichkeit beantwortet gerne Elisabeth Luggauer
Time: Every Tuesday from 14:30 to 16:00 or 16:30 to 18:00
Location: Institute of European Ethnology, Anton-Wilhelm-Amo-Str. 40/41 (formerly Møhrenstr.), Room 408.
Please register here for online participation.
For barrier-free access, please enter through Hausvogteiplatz 5-7. The inner courtyard leads to the ground floor of the institute, where you can take the lift to room 408.
For further accessibility inquiries write to Elisabeth Luggauer
Institute’s colloquium SoSe 2025: 'Collaborations and Solidarities in Troubled Times'
organized by Alice von Bieberstein & Elisabeth Luggauer
Generating knowledge is always a collective endeavor. Fundamentally collaborative, academia and research means acting together and engaging in relations with various others against the background of historically evolved relations of political, economic and epistemic inequalities. This background, and the questions of positionality and responsibility it gives rise to, endow collaboration with ambivalence: positive and productive on the one hand, but also potentially problematic and unethical on the other.
Ethnographic research practices are characterized by collaborations with various research partners, both institutional, collective and individual. Historically, anthropology looks back onto a tradition of exploitative modes of knowledge production that were born from and reproduce(d) asymmetric power relations. Relations of race and gender inequalities and their broader national, colonial and imperial contexts were always part of this scene. Reflecting on individual and institutional implications within these structures has pushed anthropologists to situate themselves explicitly and pursue their research projects in solidarity with marginalized and discriminated communities (particularly in Gender and Queer Studies, Post-, De-, and Anticolonial Studies, Migration Studies, Peace and Conflict Studies and Genocide Studies). Today, the scope of collaboration includes all aspects of research, from the elaboration of a research question to fieldwork and the production and dissemination of results. The question of solidarity drives much of this process, particularly when research is conducted with social and political movements. Posthumanist perspectives (as in Science and Technology Studies, Political Ecology, and Multispecies Studies) push the field of collaboration beyond the human to include animals, plants, things, and elemental as well as ephemeral and anthropogenic phenomena, such as water or pollutants.
Thinking about (more than human) collaborations brings into view the institutional conditions and infrastructures that enable research and learning as well as related modes of governance. Funding derives from different public, semi-public and private sources. This subjects scientific knowledge production to logics of competition and changing funding priorities, which in turn shape the collaborations and solidarities in which scholars can engage. Power relations and hierarchies also mark the university as a community of researchers and learners, raising the question of solidarity between and across its constituent groups, particularly in the face of different challenges, concerns, attacks, and dependencies.
The troubles that encroach upon knowledge production and press with urgency are numerous: wars and processes of dehumanisation, extractivism and regimes of racial capitalism, climate crisis and the destruction of landscapes and ecologies that render places uninhabitable in ways that puts the idea of collaboration itself in question. Attacks on entire disciplines and academic fields, such as climate change research, gender and queer studies, post-/de-/ anticolonial studies, and the repression of political protest pose material threats to lively, diverse, critical and independent scholarship. State interventions and efforts to direct and control both research and institutional relations and collaborations are on the rise everywhere, including Germany.
We thus want to inquire into the politics and possibilities of collaboration and solidarity in the present moment. What should a politically relevant and publicly oriented anthropology look like right now? What are the institutional, collective and transnational spaces and relations of research and learning that we need to confront, reshape or build in our troubled times? How can we intervene, together, in pressing debates and polarising conflicts as critical scholarship is itself coming under attack? What should be our ethics of collaboration when more and more states pursue nationalist, fascist or even genocidal strategies that implicate higher education, particularly in the field of security research? How can we, through our ethics and practices of collaboration, ensure that we don’t contribute to the silencing of critical positions and voices.
With this series of lectures and round tables, we want to shed light and reflect together on the stakes of collaborating and being in solidarity in our troubled times. We want to discuss how engaging, hanging in, and sticking together in collaborations can mean being in solidarity. And we want to discuss the politics and ethics of institutional demands, expectations and modalities as they impact and potentially limit scholarly practices.