The Forschungskolleg Humanwissenschaften: Events

Thursday, 15 June 2023, 11:00
Forschungskolleg Humanwissenschaften, Am Wingertsberg 4, 61348 Bad Homburg

Forschungskolleg Humanwissenschaften of Goethe University
Fellow colloquium

Francis Nyamnjoh (University of Cape Town)
»Decolonisation: Incompleteness and Convivial Scholarship«

Abstract
This lecture explores how understanding of and the pursuit of decolonisation (of research and knowledge production, anthropological, ethnographic or otherwise) could be enriched by conversations framed around incompleteness, mobility, encounters, debt and indebtedness, compositeness of being, and conviviality as responses to the dangers of the essentialisms that shape and have been shaped by colonialism and coloniality. Given the resilience of colonial education, the lecture proposes a framework of decolonisation that draws attention to equally resilient endogenous traditions of knowledge that are barely recognised and grossly underrepresented. The lecture argues for convivial scholarship that promotes conversations and collaborations across disciplines and organisations and the integration in the academy of marginalised epistemologies informed by popular universes and ideas of reality. Convivial scholarship is predicated upon recognising and providing for incompleteness – in persons, disciplines, organisations, and traditions of knowing and knowledge making. Critical to convivial scholarship is the extent to which we recognise and provide for incompleteness and mobility as universals and are ready to disabuse ourselves of the illusion of completeness championed by zero-sum games of violence and violation in which debt and indebtedness are outsourced to victims, while compositeness and conviviality are downplayed or caricatured.

The speaker
Francis Nyamnjoh is a Professor of Anthropolgy at the University of Cape Town. In June 2023 he is a fellow at the Forschungskolleg Humanwissenschaften, on the invitation of the Frobenius Institute for Research in Cultural Anthropology. He gives the Ad.E.Jensen Memorial Lecture 2023 on »Incompleteness, mobility and conviviality«.

Participation and registration
Closed event. For participation on site, please register in advance (contact: Beate Sutterlüty; email: b.sutterluety@forschungskolleg-humanwissenschaften.de).