Convenor: Prof. Dr. Dr. Russell West-Pavlov

Collocations is a Doctoral studies programme of the University of Tübingen which aims to explore and simultaneously interrogate the ways in which contemporary knowledge is produced in a plural world. The Doctoral studies program was initiated as part of the excellence strategy’s mission to prepare for a global scope of action and to create global awareness on all levels of academic practices. 

The programme titled “Collocations” is based on the foundational belief that the various plural knowledge systems are mutually complementary in contributing towards generating a new environment of global knowledge production or in other words, “interknowledges”. The Collocations was formed with an aim to create a space within the University and thereby within academia to counter the extractive nature of knowledge production and the epistemicide that comes along with it. 

It aspires to achieve this through the PhD programme thereby gathering a select group of doctoral researchers from across a range of humanities disciplines to engage upon interdisciplinary research in collaboration with a range of international partner institutions in Africa (Wits, UP, UCAD) and Latin America (UFF, UNAM), as well as cognate programmes in Toulouse and Melbourne. The programme is located at the Faculty of Humanities and the Interdisciplinary Centre for Global South Studies where  supervisors and advisers come from the Faculties of Humanities, Law and Social Sciences. 

This doctoral studies programme seeks to interrogate the conditions of contemporary knowledge production in an increasingly plural world. Many of the challenges humankind faces today in midst of accelerated globalisation and looming scenarios of ecological devastation can be related to the expansionist mindset that emerged during European colonialism. What Spivak has called ‘the Western subject of knowledge’ is at the heart of a biased regime of knowledge production that universalizes Euro-American forms of knowledges and marginalizes other knowledge systems, thereby producing coercive scripts that determine the way the world is to be understood. It is only in the last few decades that academia has become more open to the diversity of knowledge systems that are needed to overcome the logic of extractivism and to counter the epistemicide that goes along with it. Recent years have witnessed a growing awareness of the sheer diversity of knowledge systems around the world: a multitude of local knowledges, pluriversal design (Escobar), ecologies of knowledge (Santos), ‘Southern Theory’ (Comaroff and Comaroff, Connell, Menon), or Indigenous knowledges from various continents. Scholarly attention needs to be given to the specific content of these respective knowledge traditions, in pursuit of what have come to be termed ‘interknowledges’. There are many examples of the ways diverse epistemologies enter into proximity and dialogue with each other, in particular in the realms of health, law, and the arts. This programme explores the ways these various plural knowledge systems might possibly be mutually complementary in the contribution they can make to generating a new environment of global knowledge production; it enquires about the vernaculars, idioms and media that might be conducive to facilitating communication between various knowledge systems.