UC Workshop

Abstract

Academic collaboration is often framed as a productive meeting of people for a shared purpose and oriented towards specific goals, often with measurable outcomes. Yet in practice, collaborations are characterized by messy entanglements of different goals, different (hidden) agendas, and outputs that are evaluated differently by the participants of a collaborative endeavour. This workshop, Unlikely Collaboration: On What Counts, brings together scholars from Europe and Africa, and from seemingly distant fields such as astrophysics and fieldworking social sciences, to critically reflect on what collaboration entails and what it ultimately produces. It furthermore asks what is considered “unlikely” and queries how today’s “unlikely” may probe into perspectives for tomorrow’s possibilities.

In anthropology and other social sciences that rely on fieldwork, collaboration has always been a foundational aspect of research. Ethnographic knowledge is inherently co-constructed, dependent on relationships between researchers and interlocutors. Such collaborations often operate across differences of culture, history, and power, revealing that what “counts” in collaboration is not always what can be measured or easily recognized. In the natural sciences, collaboration may seem more structured and outcome-driven, yet it too relies on long-term relationships, shared understandings, and unforeseen intellectual alignments.

This workshop invites participants to consider forms of collaboration that challenge disciplinary, geographic, and epistemic boundaries. By examining collaborations that might seem unlikely, slow to yield results, or difficult to quantify, we aim to explore their significance for those involved and for the production of knowledge more broadly. How do such collaborations “count,” not just in their outputs but in the relationships, experiences, and possibilities they create? What does it mean to collaborate across vast distances – physical, conceptual, or disciplinary – and what forms of value emerge in the process? Through this interdisciplinary and cross-continental dialogue, we seek to move beyond instrumental notions of collaboration and embrace its uncertain, generative, and ultimately meaningful dimensions.