Workshop: Refashioning Collaboration

Workshop organized by the Centre for African Studies Basel and Basler Afrika Bibliographien

We are interested in thinking about collaboration as a particular modality of research and scholarship. A proposition formulated by David Scott serves as a framework for the conversations during the workshop. Reassessing the role of criticism, Scott expresses a deep discomfort with the authoritative postures of critical thinking – its will to power, its presumption of truth telling, its masculinist and imperial arrogance – and with a model of scholarship as solitary endeavour, the exercise of a singular, sovereign and penetrating mind excavating the roots of social ills. Scott proposes the idea of friendship as an alternative model of thinking, one that is inherently dialogical and collaborative, and one that works less in the direction of truth than of clarification. What friends do with each other, Scott tells us, is to clarify matters of mutual concern. Friendship as a condition and context of reflective scholarly thinking depends on an ongoing provisional and recursive practice assembled, notably, out of both speaking and listening. Friends are not only speaking but also listening selves. And listening is indispensable for clarification. Friends, understood in this way, are those who are able to cultivate a practice of listening as a dimension of thinking in each other’s milieu.

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