FOR 5500:  Collaborations: Assemblages, Articulations, Alliances

• Subject Area: Humanities ; Social and Behavioural Sciences
• Term: since 2024
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 496295891

Focusing on a wide range of cultural texts, artifacts, performances and practices, the projected Research Unit (RU) aims to systematically and exemplarily investigate emergent forms of social and political collaboration. It is itself a collaborative effort in which scholars of Anglophone literary and cultural studies cooperate with colleagues from the areas of sociology and anthropology expecting mutual benefit from the reciprocal enlargement of discipline-specific perspectives. The RU pro-ceeds from the assumption that many of the most pressing challenges of our contemporary world require social and political as well as artistic and academic practices and acts of theorizing that are both planetary in their scope and collective in their orientation. Among these challenges are the global ecological destruction in the wake of the global economic pursuit of "growth"; the rapid in-crease in social inequalities and financial disparities both within (even affluent) national econo-mies/societies and on a global scale; the unfinished project of decolonization and the concomitant subordination of most regions of the Global South; and the forceful rise of rightwing populist movements worldwide. These challenges require global solutions that include planetary practices, but also acts of theorizing that move beyond conceptions of the world as constructed in Western epistemologies. It is some of these emergent practices and theorizations that the RU wishes to explore. The individual projects will focus on specific locations and sites of collaboration but will be linked by a shared research paradigm that grasps collaborations through the matrix of assemblages, articulations, and alliances as well as through the dimensions of relational positionalities, in/commensurabilities, solidarities, and transformations. This theoretical framework enables a max-imum of interdisciplinary cooperation to mutual benefit in whose course the central concepts of the research group will gradually be worked out in more and more nuanced ways. The overall objectives of the RU are: 1) to further develop, nuance and pluralize the key concepts of the research model, especially in non-extractive collaboration with partners outside Western academic settings; 2) to develop a repertoire for the theoretical and, where applicable, empirical research of concrete new forms of collaboration; 3) to give impulses for the further developments of the participants’ disciplines. The group of Principal Investigators (Pis) has very successfully and productively cooperated for the past five years in the DFG-funded Research Training Group minor cosmopolitanisms, whose fund-ing was extended for a second period until 2025. To a significant extent, the project at hand emerged from the insights and inspirations gained within this collaborative setting.

• DFG Programme: Research Units
• International Connection: Brazil

Projects

• Coordination Funds (Applicant Wiemann, Dirk )
• From bystander to actor: literature, collaboration, and participation (Applicant Wiemann, Dirk )
• Oceanian Poetic Collaborations (Applicant Eckstein, Lars )
• Postcolonial Neighbourhoods (Applicant Römhild, Regina )
• Practices of Collaboration (Applicant März, Moses )
• Settler Decolonization in Country/on Land: Rehearsing Collaboration (Applicants Schwarz, Anja ;  Waller, Nicole )
• The Black Coalition for Rights: an intersectional alliance (Applicant Costa, Sergio )

• Spokesperson: Professor Dr. Dirk Wiemann