Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin - Kultur-, Sozial- und Bildungswissenschaftliche Fakultät - Institut für Asien- und Afrikawissenschaften

As an interdisciplinary and transregionally oriented initiative, co²libri envisages a multicentric perspective that integrates positions of Southern theory and praxis into the heart of our academic conversations. In this decentered research network cooperation, we are guided by a number of questions and concerns:

• How can we best practice conceptual collaboration between scholars in the social sciences and humanities based in the global north and south?
• What kind of collaborative visions and models of dialogical practice can we draw from, or conceptualize, and develop further – and how can we best go about in doing so?
• How can scholars and engaged activists collaborate to address and redress existing imbalances and inequalities, in academic research, in higher education, and in public knowledge production and dissemination more widely?
• And what kind of strategies can we envisage and make productive, towards a living dialogical practice of research collaboration and exchange between scholars and activists from global north and south?

At the basis of this is also the questions of how we can productively engage our existing relationships with colleagues and partners based in the south, also to reverse relational flows of knowledge production, and to learn from thinkers and theories as well as, potentially, from practitioners and activists. These are knowledge-related questions of high practical relevance, linked to different conceptual frameworks and intellectual histories as much as national and global politics, and different kinds of challenges of inequality feature prominently.

co²libri’s collaborative endeavor builds on long-standing active connections with partners in Africa, South and Southeast Asia, and the Middle East. Instead of setting an agenda from the north, it proposes to figure out ways forward through collaborative engagement, building on relationships of mutual trust. Using formats that facilitate substantial and open-ended discussion, we are re-thinking theory and method, academic practices, and research ethics, while keeping material inequalities in view.

We are working toward the implementation of various innovative activities and collaboration formats which all subscribe to the principle of dialogue on equal footing with scholars and activists based in the so-called global south. In a nutshell, co²libri aims at producing more adequate and more sensitive critical knowledge, and at applying a fresh view to approach, methods, and ethical standards. The group focuses on alternative frames of reference and theorizations of lived experiences. Hereby, the negotiation and formulation of what it means to take an adequate position, and a constructive role, by scholars based in the global north, within the current field of demands and expectations towards decolonizing and decentering scholarship, in dialogical exchange with academic partners based in the global south, is seen as a central task and obligation.