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.

Application deadline: 27 July 2025