Project Description
Postcolonial Neighborhoods explores decolonial civil society struggles for participation and belonging in Berlin and beyond. The project researches and actively engages in these practices of decolonization. It is based on a collective ethnography that brings together urban actors—including artists, activists, and scholars—with a committed, public form of European ethnology.
A key point of departure was the Amo Collective Berlin which emerged in 2020 from a neighborhood initiative around the renaming of M*straße into Anton-Wilhelm-Amo-Straße.
Postcolonial Neighborhoods is based on the assumption that especially in contested public spaces that refer to colonial continuities many actors dock their decolonial 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 allying struggles and minor alliances across communities. We thus think of “neighborhood” not as a status but as a process. (How) do such processes of neighboring become acts of a joint, decolonial citizenship?
Postcolonial Neighborhoods works to decolonize academic and anthropological knowledge production by welcoming and making space for other forms of knowledge—gained in marginalized and contested places across our shared world—rather than extracting them. This helps us fill the gaps in academic knowledge created by epistemic violence against the Other. We hope to contribute to a new understanding of decolonial urban struggles as productive zones of conflict where convivial ideas of a shared future are being invented and provisionally put into practice.
Postcolonial Neighborhoods is situated at the Institute for European Ethnology Humboldt University Berlin.
Project Team
Organizing team:
Prof. Dr. Regina Römhild (Projektleitung)
Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung (Mercator Fellow)
CoLab 1 Modes of Intersectional Conversation Members:
Ingri Pavezi
CoLab 2 Mapping Postcolonial Neighborhoods Members:
Mathew Hansn
Josepha Jendricke
Nataly Han
Nnenna Onuoha
Nicole Pearson
CoLab 3 Members:
Selina Masakeni
Lena Luvia Mehta
Mariyama Mutala
Research CoLabs
The project is designed as an evolving four-year research process composed of seven thematic and collaborative Research CoLabs. Each CoLab consists of up to eight participants working together over the course of a year. The 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 boundaries between scholarship, art, and activism are productively blurred—and generate something new. Rather than conducting research ‘on’ someone ‘elsewhere,’ we practice a form of research as 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.
CoLab 1 Modes of Intersectional Conversation explores how we speak across difference and build solidarities in research tied to postcolonial, antiracist, and postmigrant struggles.
CoLab 2 Mapping Postcolonial Neighborhoods grew out of a collective mapping practice which links the presence of the Peace Statue Ari in Berlin to broader geographies of gendered violence, survival, and collective remembrance.
CoLab 3 Exploring Structural Coloniality interrogates the institutional architectures that reproduce colonial asymmetries and experiments with counter-structures grounded in PoC- and migrant-led practices.
More to follow.
Events and Publications
Planned Events
Past Events
Making Space for Ari - Launch of the ARI MAP. Neighbouring postcolonial, postmigrant struggles in Berlin | Members of CoLab2, Project Team & guests.
Open Workshop & Public Assembly. 8.7.2026, Zentrum für Kunst & Urbanistik ZK/U Berlin
Postcolonial Neighborhoods | Regina Römhild
Presentation
10.9.2025, Summer School IRTG Transformative Religion. Religion as Situated Knowledge in Processes of Social Transformation
University of Stellenbosch, South Africa
Gesellschaft (Mit-)Gestalten. Kritische Reflektionen zur Public Anthropology | Regina Römhild
Panel Discussion, moderated by Katharina Schramm und Mihir Sharma
30.6.2025, Final Workshop of DFG network “Public Anthropology”, Institute for European Ethnology, Humboldt University Berlin
Postcolonial Neighborhoods: A new experiment in collective ethnography and transacademic collaboration | Gabs Dumfahrt Pérez, Nataly Han, Nicole Pearson, Regina Römhild, Eryn Staiblin
Presentation
24.6.2025, Public Colloquium, Amo Salon, Institute for European Ethnology, Humboldt University Berlin
Postkoloniale Nachbarschaften. Ein transakademisches Forschungsprojekt im Kontext der DFG-Forschungsgruppe “Collaborations: Assemblages, Articulations, Alliances” | Gabs Dumfahrt Pérez, Regina Römhild, Eryn Staiblin
Presentation
3.6.2025, Research Lounge, Tieranatomisches Theater, Humboldt University Berlin