Summer School

Introduction

The moral foundations and the political crisis of the contemporary world order have become an important topic of late in various disciplines of the humanities and social sciences. While the current problems of the international system led many scholars to examine the normative values of the inter-state system and global governance, the problems created by rigid borders, their formation and their challengers have been overlooked. Many scholars still take nation state borders, civilizational borders, racial borders or borders of other kinds as given facts in their analysis. When there is an attempt to overcome various national and cultural borders, we generally fall into the language of borderless and abstract globalism and regionalism. Yet, we neglect the fact that borders of various kinds are still being imposed, challenged and even dwelled upon in a world of nation states and globalism. As a result, existing scholarship has not paid sufficient attention to border making, border contestation and new border imaginations in approaching and understanding the moral and political roots of the contemporary crisis of global governance. The best way to understand the crisis partly caused by struggles over the physical, intellectual and cultural borders is to focus on these contestations. 

This focus on borderthinking will also help us to re-evaluate the state of humanities after attempts at decolonization through vigorous challenges, some of which the Summer Institute intends to contribute to. As modern social sciences originated in the era of imperialism, its categories and visions were shaped by the various borders of the colonial project. Anti-colonial struggles and decolonization processes challenged many of these borders, and redefined them, but these processes also reified some of the older borders and created their own borders. Some of the prominent explanations of the contemporary crisis as challenges to the modern Eurocentric or West-centered economic and political order by the rise of the non-Western world miss the complexity and ambivalence of the global experience that can not be divided into civilizational, national and religious containers. The idea of a legitimate and stable Eurocentric world order has always been a myth, as the various borders constructed by the economic, political and cultural power of Europe continued to be challenged, modified, negotiated and redefined by the multiple agencies of global actors. Similarly, the contemporary rise of Asian economies and polities became entangled with new visions of borders and its challengers. This Summer Institute aims to analyze many of the ongoing problems of global community, from economic disparity to political disempowerment and legitimacy crisis, with a focused attention to issues of border construction and deconstruction over the centuries since the European "discovery" of the so-called ”New World" and the conquista, since 1492, of what became “Latin” America in the second half of the nineteenth century.

The Summer Institute aims to generate conversation and critical thinking among engaged young scholars and citizen intellectuals in the ethics and politics of scholarship in order to approach border encounters and contestations from a global perspective. Despite the growing realization that we need transnational intellectual cooperation in tackling our shared problems, we do face rigid academic borders that prevent genuine conversation among scholars from different parts of the world due to national, cultural, civilizational and class borders in world academic institutions. The global public sphere of intellectuals and even intra-university cooperations also have to deal with various borders created by economic disparity, cultural attitudes, passport and visa restrictions or language barriers. Although there are many intellectuals in Asia and Africa who are knowledgeable about intellectual currents in European and American universities, there is no symmetrical curiosity about non-Western intellectuals on the part of American and European academic circles. A genuine global academia should also be able to challenge uneven power relations and various borders in the network of world universities. In that sense, the Summer Institute intents to be a platform to unveil the past and present of global un-justice.                                    

The Summer Institute approaches the concepts ‘Borders, Borderthinking, Borderlands’ in their immediate political and physical sense, but also as tropes of thinking. It aims to further the understanding of the mechanisms of inner and outer decolonization, as well as western modernity’s resistance to this decolonization. The Summer Institute considers the development and overcoming of physical, psychological, epistemological and spiritual borders and examine post-, anti- and decolonial constellations, e.g. Black Diaspora or transculturalism and trajectories influenced by Negritude, Black Consciousness, to name a few. The terms ‘Borders, Borderthinking, Borderlands’ are understood as the recognition of conflict lines for a radical revision of colonial modernity emanating from decentered locations. The Summer Institute reveals diachronic and synchronic linkages among anti- and decolonial epistemologies.

The Summer Institute explores the epistemic dimensions of the ‘Border’ concept. Its main terms ‘Borders, Borderthinking, Borderlands’ serve to focus on processes and significations of constantly reiterated drawing up of frontiers, as for example in the colonial differentiation between civilization and “savages”, own and other/alien, human and non-human, “white” supremacy and “black” enslavement. The Summer Institute aims to break up the opposition of a “good and true” western high culture and a primitive, superstitious rest of the world produced by this colonial differentiation. 

At the same time, the Summer Institute aims to subvert the globe-spanning eurocentric projection of power founded on this epistemic opposition, that is still active even after physical decolonisation, and that „to a large extent structurally precludes the participation of non-white human agency in the realm of subjecthood“ (Broeck 2006). The Summer Institute presents to its participants an understanding of ‘Border’ as a concept of politico-epistemic interweaving of power and knowledge as well as a material and violent reality, and will introduce ‘Borderthinking’ and ‘Borderlands’ as approaches to critical epistemology.

‘Borderthinking’ provides a methodological approach that does not conceptualize ‘Borders’ from a eurocentric perspective of inclusion/exclusion, but as spaces of mutual exchange, contamination and dissemination, in which the self-ascribed privileges of the West are laid bare and deconstructed. ‘Borderthinking’ is presented as „the recognition and transformation of the hegemonic imaginary from the perspectives of people in subaltern positions“ (Mignolo 2000). Besides the teaching of theoretical frameworks, close attention to cultural and artistic testimonies of the experience of ‘Borders, Borderthinking, Borderlands’ forms an important aspect of the Summer Institute.  Activities such as visits to historical sites, post-colonial city tours, attending local cultural events (etc.) form an integral part of the Summer Institute. 

The concept of ‘Borderlands’ expands the notion of  ‘Border’ from the perception of a clear and clean divide between different and independent entities, to an understanding of a common space of hybridity, changing localizations of transnational and transcultural identities, dynamic attributions and always-already mixed and mutually dependent positions. This expansion will enable the participants of the Summer Institute to generate a better understanding of contemporary global conflicts and developments, and will offer starting points for further progress in their own research.

The Summer Institute will not produce knowledge allowing for easy consumption or “informed” control of “the Other”. It engages its participants in a critical self-reflection on their own position, participation and agency within the matrix of power and knowledge-production of (neo-; sub-)coloniality, post-, anti-, and decolonisation, as well as the influence, role and potential of this position for and within their own work.  In order to achieve this, the Summer Institute demands participants to pro-actively integrate their own research into the Institute’s work-processes. Through this, a space for crosscutting, inter-sectional and trans-disciplinary work and exchange between the participants, their work and the Institute personnel is created. Decoloniality is offered as an option, as one among different possible methodologies to think through ‘Borders, Borderlands and Borderthinking’, to delink knowledge from western hegemony and to rethink the conjunction of ethics and epistemics always present in academic work.