The conference addresses current conditions and modes of academic knowledge production in order to revisit the ethical, political and social visions of research and higher education articulated in the second half of the 20th century at European and African universities.

Researchers will scrutinize the academic discourses on the geopolitics of knowledge, gender and ethnicity, critical dialogues between the social, cultural and engineering sciences as well as the differences of and interactions between  epistemologies in the Global North and the Global South.

The conference aims to address, but is not limited to the following questions: 

•Whose knowledge and which methodologies are accepted, rejected or partly integrated into which knowledge systems? What are the discursive procedures that privilege, neglect or exclude certain epistemic processes?

•What paradigmatic shifts and/or breaks occur in South-North or South-South academic co-operations and discourses?

•To what extent does networked research contribute to changes in academic knowledge production in the respective (local/regional/national) contexts?

•In which ways are knowledge systems moulded and/or critiqued by e.g. orientalism or occidentalism and notions of modernity (western, multiple, other etc.)? To what extent are they linked to questions of race/racism? How are these intersections explored by gender and queer theories?

•What are the correlations of knowledge production with transversal politics or other conceptualisations of critical alliances?

•What are the effects of neo-liberal policies on knowledge production within co-operative academic contexts?

•What are the inter-/transdisciplinary implications of such a critical dialogue between social, cultural and engineering sciences?

•Against the background of ever more technologies and managerial decision making processes structuring daily life and social interactions: What are visions of the future or conceptualisations of a ‘next society’?

www.migknow.org