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The Project "Reversing the Gaze" at the VAD-Conference
The project "Reversing the Gaze" is represented at this year's Conference of the Association for African Studies in Germany (Vereinigung für Afrikawissenschaften in Deutschland - VAD e.V.). Lerato Posholi and Ralph Weber convene a panel on "The politics and epistemic value of positionality" and Ralph Weber chairs the roundtable "Concepts without borders – reciprocating analytical perspectives" together with Elisio Macamo (Centre for African Studies and Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Basel), who is also a principal investigator of the project. The conference takes place on June 7-10, 2022 in Freiburg (Breisgau).
The panel "The politics and epistemic value of positionality" starts from the observation that it has become an unquestioned trend to assume that social location (positionality) determines epistemic location. The purpose of the panel is to critically examine the relationship between social location and epistemic location.
The roundtable "Concepts without borders – reciprocating analytical perspectives" aims to place the most important resource available to social scientists, namely the concept, under scrutiny by discussing the changes they undergo to be able to render phenomena intelligible in different settings.
About the conference
The 2022 Conference of the Association for African Studies in Germany is organised by the Africa Centre for Transregional Research (ACT) of the Albert Ludwig University of Freiburg. The conference will focus on the theme Africa and Europe: Reciprocal Perspectives and will address processes of co-production of knowledge as well as the mutual questioning of different ways of thinking. It takes place on June 7-10, 2022.
About the researchers
Lerato Posholi is an SNSF Fellow in the project "Reversing the Gaze: Towards Post-Comparative Area Studies" at the Institute for European Global Studies. She holds a PhD in Education from the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. Her research interests include social epistemology, decolonial theory and curriculum studies.
Ralph Weber is Associate Professor of European Global Studies at the Institute for European Global Studies. He specializes in Political Theory, Chinese Politics, and modern Confucianism. Currently, he is the President of the European Association for Chinese Philosophy and the Chair of the Section on Political Theory in the Swiss Political Science Association.