Practices of Collaboration

Practices of Collaboration responds to the core ambition of the Research Unit (RU) to imagine alternative ways of collaborating across the divisions upheld by global power structures, different epistemologies, as well as across the divisions of academia, activism and artistic practices. By asking what it would mean to actively translate postcolonial, feminist, queer, Indigenous and Black theories of collaboration into the specific setting of the university, this project actively mediates between theory and practice with the aim of developing relational and transformative practices of knowledge production.

Three main objectives are derived from this overarching ambition. The first objective is to actively support and theorize the practice of collaboration within the RU and its individual projects. The second objective is to mediate the work of the RU across the divisions of academic, artistic and activist realms by making its research accessible and responsive to wider audiences. The third objective is to exemplarily engage with, and learn from, marginalized traditions and concepts of collaboration, emphatically including non-Western practices and concepts. This aim is a crucial commonality and connector of all the projects in the RU, and it is at the centre of the postdoctoral study preliminarily titled In Search of Companions: The Relational Political Practice of Ayi Kwei Armah.

This study systematically engages with practices and theories of collaboration that have been developed in the transcontinental Pan-African tradition by engaging with the life-work of Ayi Kwei Armah. This includes an exploration of modes of working together discussed in political theory that will be brought into conversation with the conceptual work of the other projects that are part of the RU. 

The project shifts the focus from Armah’s career as a canonical writer of postcolonial African fiction towards his relational political practice at large, which has been marked by a search for collaborators or companions willing to work for radical egalitarian social change towards African political unity. Combining methods from political theory, literary studies and artistic research, and contributing to the RU’s interest in concepts and practices of collaboration that are based on non-Western epistemologies, the focus will be Armah’s theory and practice of a mode of collaboration called Shemsw Maat, which derives from an alternative genealogy of political thought originating in pre-dynastic Nile valley society. 

Dr. Moses März is the Principal Investigator of this project. He is joined by Prof. Dirk Wiemann, the spokesperson of the RU, and Steph Joshua as student assistant. The project team works closely with Florian Schybilski, the RU coordinator, to deliberately explore the nexus between scholarship and administration as a specific practice of collaboration. 

Map Publications

Where the Maps Come From and Memories of a Time When All Successful Revolutions Were Made By the Message of the Poets oder Weitere Geschichten aus dem Untergrund, Mittel und Zweck, April 2025

Liberation Networks I and Liberation Networks II, in Brandfort, Liberation Capital [1977-86], Chimurenga (ed.), Chimurenga, April 2025, pp. 64-65 and 110-111

Notes on Charting OYOYO, in Till the Sun Rises: Bis Zum Sonnenaufgang – Entangled Internationalisms, Vinit Agarwal (ed.), Spector Books, 2025, pp. 36-41

Journal Articles 

‘Mapping Collaborators Dance. An Artistic Research Inquiry into the Decolonial Potentialities of the Surrealist Archive’. The February Journal, no. 05. (2025) https://doi.org/10.60633/TFJ.I05.116.

‘Subverting the Monolingual Paradigm: Mapping the Creolization of German – an Artistic Research Method’. Seminar61, no. 2 (2025): 93–101. https://doi.org/10.3138/seminar.61.2.4.