Research results continue to be presented in written form; this is despite multiple alternative formats of representation having emerged during the last decades: participatory exhibitions and interventions, audio-visual formats, re-enactments, staged readings or documentary theater. While alternative terms, concepts, and methods have already been intensively discussed within several disciplines, the different mechanisms and challenges of collaborative work - depending on the participating research networks - have hardly been in focus so far. Therefore, there is still a great need to formulate concrete collaborations between academic and non-university actors and institutions. Formats that go beyond pure text require different settings for knowledge creation and especially for knowledge transfer. Practices of collaboration are characterized by interactions, (sensual) perceptions – beyond purely cognitive processes –, the exploration of opportunity spaces as well as the consideration of different institutional logics and structures, hierarchies and control systems. In addition to the mediation aspects, collaborations thus play a role in gaining knowledge. The meaning produced during inception of a project is therefore not a fixed quantity and maybe cannot be reproduced. It is formed at the moment of performance, perception or action settings and is situated communicatively as well as transformatively.
Collaborative forms of work and interactions between academic and artistic or educational institutions (or the non-academic public) must accordingly deal with knowledge production and transfer, as well as different formats, logics and (unwritten) rules of the cooperation partners. Accordingly, translations take place again and again, both on the content level and on the organizational level as well as during the mediation process. These modes of translation influence the results of such collaborative spaces and consequently ask for modes of reflection that methodological as well as conceptual. This particularly applies to the inherent transnational collaborations and the intercultural and structural coordination processes. Contributions dedicated to such projects, preferably from Eastern Europe, are therefore explicitly welcome – as are topics covering "translation problems" in relation to language, borders, narratives, cultures of memory and identity politics in explorative projects.
Proposals are invited from the humanities and cultural studies and their institutions, as well as from freelance artistes. Contributions should be assignable to one of the following areas:
Knowledge: specifics of creation and dissemination (research designs, methodological approaches, and evaluation or preparation of data) - analogous to the selected formats.
Formats: Conceptual considerations and methodological approach exemplified by specific projects.
Collaborations: Reflection of successful as well as conflictual or failed projects in their genesis, implementation and reception as well as especially the communicative processes during the collaboration.
Transfer: mediation processes between disciplines, institutions, national attributions, languages.
Please submit your abstract (about 3000 characters) including a short CV to k.schuchardt@isgv.de and ira.spieker@mailbox.tu-dresden.de no later than 15 February 2022.
We welcome contributions in German or English.
Organizers: Institute of Saxon History and Cultural Anthropology (Dresden) – sponsored by the Herder Research Council
Location: Villa Wigman (Dresden)
Date: 7th/8th July 2022