Postcolonial Neighborhoods
In Berlin, as elsewhere in postcolonial Europe, the long presence and ongoing influx of migrant movements from all over the globe have created a situation of bringing together diverse subaltern people and colonial histories on local grounds. This situation becomes the resource for the emergence of what we call “postcolonial neighborhoods”: Unforeseen constellations of differently situated actors meeting alongside claims of belonging, recognition and participation in the postcolonial city.
The project is based on the assumption that especially in contested public spaces that refer to colonial continuities many such actors dock their claims, thereby possibly becoming neighbors and allies. Together with researching activists and artists, the project focuses on how these claims are articulated in disputes over colonial racist continuities in the urban topography as well as in disputes over how to deal with (post)migrant and subaltern histories in national politics of memory and public formats of representation.
We aim at developing the concept of "neighborhood" beyond its conventional meaning of “dwelling together” into a postmigrant, postcolonial, and more-than-human assemblage of “being thrown together” (Doreen Massey) that turns urban spaces into potential sites of neighboring struggles and minor alliances. Do struggles over the renaming of streets, the return of colonial looted art or feminist struggles to occupy places for the remembrance of global feminicides become acts of a joint, decolonial citizenship?
In close transacademic collaboration, the project starts from, builds on and inquires into such postcolonial neighborhoods in Berlin that have formed around renaming debates, namely the former M*straße, today Anton-Wilhelm- Amo-Straße, and Nettelbeckplatz, today Martha-Ndumbe-Platz. The project will investigate the aesthetic, epistemic and political articulations and potential intersectional alliances in these setings, while at the same time engaging in these practices of decolonization itself: It will develop and work on the basis of a "collective ethnography" that brings together urban actors as researchers with an engaged, public European Ethnology.
A key point of departure was the Amo Collective , which emerged in 2020 from a neighborhood initiative around the renaming of M*straße.
The project is designed as an evolving four-year research process composed of seven thematic and collaborative Research CoLabs. Each CoLab consists of around eight participants working together over the course of a year. Our current CoLab participants bring artistic, activist, and community-based practices into the project. Many are themselves situated within ongoing struggles, shaped by experiences of marginalization, racialization, and refusal. The CoLabs are designed as spaces where the boundaries between scholarship, art, and activism begin to blur — and generate something new. Rather than conducting research “on” someone “elsewhere,” we practice a form of situated co-becoming — a neighborliness between positionalities and activist efforts within Berlin’s urban fabric.
A central element is that all CoLab participants are financially compensated for their labor, through DFG-funded honoraria. Participation also includes co-authorship as an ethical research practice, which moves beyond writing—to include multimodal forms like the Decolonial Flânerie public city walks, exhibitions and cartography.
Our project is closely linked to what we at the Institute for European Ethnology understand as Public Anthropology. This commitment is summed up in our shared credo: „Gesellschaft ethnographisch mitgestalten“ - “Co-creating society ethnographically.”
Public Anthropology, as we practice it, is not simply about “transmitting” academic knowledge to the public—or inviting actors to participate in a predefined research process. Rather, it is about genuinely collaborative research: creating spaces where people from civil society become co-creators of the research process itself (including research questions, methods, norms and forms of collaboration and representation, production and dissemination of results).
We started with the first two Research CoLabs at the beginning of 2025:
• Modes of Intersec-onal Conversa-ons, which explores how we speak across difference and build solidarities in research tied to postcolonial, anti-racist, and postmigrant struggles;
• Mapping Postcolonial Neighborhoods, which expands our inquiry into mapping — not as a neutral tool but as a critical, embodied, and political practice of urban cartography.
A third CoLab, dealing with structural coloniality as a key site of investigation, naming its effects in disciplines, institutions, and symbolic landscapes, will start soon.