Africa and Global South – On the Possibility of Cultural Studies of Science

The project sets out a research agenda and academic programme to investigate the epistemic implications of International Research Collaborations (IRCs) and their interculturality in the meaning of science and knowledge production. By exploring IRCs as an instance of (science) research interculturality, the fellowship will design an advanced research agenda and assumptions on the conditions of the possibility of cultural studies of science.

When engaging in IRC, we assume that researchers originating and operating from African and European contexts represent different predicaments of academic, epistemic, methodological, and practical experiences and cultural values, working together for a common good (goal) of producing new knowledge and scientific discovery. In a context marked by rising decolonial discourses, the time is ripe for researchers to rethink science as a global institution which produces global public good by individual or collectives in local, national, regional, and transnational arrangements while acknowledging its social and cultural bases.

Evidence about the value of IRCs, particularly for scientific discoveries, is often based on academic research working under asymmetric conditions of knowledge production in the Global North ^[1]. There needs to be more research evidence on the quality of IRCs between Africans and Europeans and their contribution to national and global science. Often, Africans are portrayed in IRCs as playing “supporting roles, which may be necessary but not sufficient on their own to have set the far-reaching stage for global mega-science” ^[2]. While there is a surge in research about the fairness in geopolitical Global North (GN) and Global South (GS) scientific partnerships, particularly in the context of postcolonial and decolonial epistemological perspectives, a gap persists in the quality of the continuously expanding individual and institutional IRCs between countries in the GN and GS. There has been a renewed academic and policy interest in reviewing the character of knowledge partnerships between GN and GS amid calls for ‘decolonisation’, which we will revisit as we set a common research agenda. 

Researchers engaging in IRCs carry cultural repertoires of their life experiences in local and international academic socialisations (cultural capital – à la Bourdieu ^[3]), which informs their epistemic beliefs and situatedness (positionality) about knowledge and knowledge production. Our project will focus on examining the Euro-Africa IRCs – more specifically, German and selected Sub-Saharan African IRCs – through some of the following research questions:

• Does ‘culture’ play any (significant) role in the views German and African researchers engaging in IRCs hold about science and knowledge production?
• What views of science and knowledge production prevail in intercultural, intersubjective IRCs, particularly in a context marked by a rising quest for decolonisation of science and knowledge production?
• How do German and African researchers engaging in IRCs understand and interpret science and scientific knowledge production?
• What epistemic beliefs do German and African scholars hold before and after engaging in IRCs?
• What roles and functions do German and African researchers perform in IRCs?

^{[1] David P. Baker and Justin J.W. Powell (2024). Global Mega-Science Universities, Research Collaborations, and Knowledge Production. Stanford University Press.
[2] Op. Cit.
[3] Bourdieu P (1997). The forms of capital. In: Halsey AH, Lauder H, Brown P, et al. (eds) Education: Culture, Economy, Society, pp. 46–58. Oxford: Oxford University Press.}