Project Details
Projekt
Postcolonial Neighbourhoods
Applicant
Professorin Dr. Regina Römhild
Subject Area
Social and Cultural Anthropology and Ethnology
Term
since 2024
Project identifier
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 496295891
Together with researching activists and artists, the project investigates the postcolonial texture of Berlin's urban society, which emerges from a contingent, post/migrant "throwntogetherness" of different migration movements and presences in the formerly colonial metropolis. A particular focus is on migration from the global and Mediterranean South as well as the post-socialist East, through which histories and after-effects of global colonial and crypto-colonial entanglements are reflexively actualized, mobilized and negotiated today in the space of the European city with the aim of a civic place-making of the actors. The project investigates these negotiations as civic struggles in immediate physical and social constellations of "postcolonial neighborhoods": public urban spaces of everyday use and encounter, where postcolonial controversies ignite, preparing the ground for possible articulations and intersectional alliances of differently positioned actors of antiracist, decolonial activism. In this project, the concept of "neighborhood" is developed beyond ist conventional meaning of "living together" into a postmigrant, postcolonial assemblage of "being thrown together" that turns urban spaces into potential sites of struggle and intersectional alliances for representation, recognition, participation and citizenship. Starting from two postcolonial neighborhoods in Berlin that have formed around the renaming debate of the former Mohrenstraße and at Nettelbeckplatz, which is also up for renaming, the project will investigate the aesthetic, epistemic and political articulations and intersectional alliances in these settings, while at the same time engaging in these practices of decolonization itself in a collaborative research capacity. The project will work on the basis of a "collective ethnography" that brings together urban actors as researchers with an engaged, public cultural anthropology/European ethnology. The project explores the possibilities and limits of such transdisciplinary collaboration in light of this postulate of simultaneously researching collectively and articulating and building anti-racist, decolonial alliances in postcolonial neighborhoods.
DFG Programme
Research Units
