Speculation, Imagination, Collaborations

Doing Research Otherwise is the seminar series of the Deradicalizing the City project. While we investigate the intersection of urban (in)security and anti- radicalization policies, our seminar aims at reflecting on ways of anthropological inquiry that are traditionally enshrined within the social sciences, especially regarding sensitive objects and fieldworks. This seminar series builds upon recent calls to decolonize social sciences. Within this impetus, scholars have consistently sought to demarcate themselves from classical research models that build on a clear opposition between researcher and respondent, and/or which objectify research participants as other. Rather, experimenting with alternative and co-creative methods and techniques, studies have sought to think and imagine knowledge production as a collaborative process whereby both academics and non-academics act as stakeholders. This also implies the exploration of research epistemologies which abandon positivistic and scientistic conceptions of knowledge, and where the central objective becomes one of understanding the way a particular condition is lived and experienced together. Accordingly, the seminar 2023-2024 theme’s will be centred on the theme Speculation, Imagination, Collaborations. Speculation has in the recent years found a new entry point in the field of philosophy, social theory, and anthropology. Works like those of Isabelle Stengers (2020), Dona Haraway (2016), Saidiya Hartman (2008), Marisol de la Cadena (2015) or Anand Pandian (2019) have invited us to consider the ways in which the value of social theory, history or anthropological practices lies not only in describing the world ‘as it is’, but also ‘as it could be’. Therefore, the reflection of potentiality (Whitehead 1929) or virtuality (Deleuze 1994) opens social sciences to new ways of both inquiring into the contemporary (Rabinow 2007) as well as working with interlocutors outside the classical model of objectification and extractivism (Alcoff 2022).