InFACt
Introducing Future Academic Collaboration
InFACt is a bilateral research initiative of members from HU Berlin and the University of Zürich (Switzerland). Both universities are strategic partners. The reserach collaboration is lead by Claudia Derichs (HU Berlin) and Bettina Dennerlein (University of Zürich), and co-lead by Dr. Sarah
Farag (Zürich) and PD Dr. Andrea Fleschenberg (Berlin). The wide
r network consists of a range of colleagues from Europe, Asia, and the Middle East & North Africa. The network initiative receives seed fun
ding for one year (10/2020 - 09/2021). Its main objective is to counter imbalances in global knowledge production and enable context-sensitive, participatory collaboration between scholars and non-academic actors from the said regions. The seed funding is meant to facilitate the formlation of a project proposal for a major research consortium that extends the strategic Swiss-German partnership and includes institutions from a number of European, Asian, and Middle Eastern countries. Read more on InFACt here and keep yourself updated on public events.
WHO WE ARE AND WHAT WE AIM FOR
The networking initiative “InFACt – Introducing Futures of Academic Collaboration” aims to provide a platform for academic exchange among critical, de:postcolonial, feminist scholars, joining our long existing scholar (activist) networks and research collaborations spanning the regions of MENA, South and Southeast Asia as well as Europe. InFAct takes a practically oriented approach in reconstructing and rewriting how we (re-)produce knowledge in terms of research methodologies and research ethics. We explore the following set of guiding questions in an open discussion:
•Identification of challenges: What kind of obstacles and problematics are we facing within academia when conducting participatory research and producing transformative knowledge? How can we challenge hegemonic paradigms in academic knowledge production and translate epistemic decolonisation effectively into our own research practices, speaking to our differently positioned histories of thought, intellectual grids and structural conditions across global inequalities?
•Working towards solutions: What are best practices for structuring collaborative research processes, which allows both for a reflection on our positionalities in the Global Norths and the Global Souths as well as for spaces of translation between the differently produced, contextualised experiences and knowledges?
Translating into practice: How are we to transfer such spaces of translation into transformative practices, which open up new avenues for transdisciplinary research methods and reflections on research ethics? What kind of transfer mechanisms such as teaching formats can we design, which speak to critical academic endeavours as well as to situated political contexts and struggles outside academia?
InFACt Podcast Series
Decolonizing Business Studies:
Local meaning of women empowerment through entrepreneurship and innovation, the case of Pakistan
(by Dr. Faiza Muhammad Din, Dr. Salma Amir and Dr. Salman Khan)
click here for podcast script in pdf file
Activitiy Log:
