Affective Ambiguities and Incompatible Value Frameworks: Sustaining Collaborations Within and beyond Neoliberal Academia

What is it about?

Collaborations between university-based anthropologists and the communities they seek to collaborate with are often shaped by frictions. These frictions – and the potential for conflict they imply – result from the largely incompatible value frameworks that govern such collaborations with regard to the motivations and expectations of the involved parties and institutions. They are also an outcome of the structural inequalities that these constellations imply with regard to the divergent availability of financial resources, time, and cultural capital. _x000D_ The authors explore the emotional and structural ambiguities that collaboration implies in the context of the highly asymmetrical relationships of power within and beyond academia. They argue that the thriving of collaborations depends primarily on the willingness of all involved actors to invest in the emotional, political, and socio-relational labor required for establishing reciprocal relations under conditions of vulnerability. Their argument draws on their own involvement in a collective of refugee women, lecturers, former students and activists in and beyond Berlin that is working together in the context of a collaborative publication, teaching, and video project.

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