ALMA Lecture Series 2023

This year's ALMA Lecture Series is organized by Arnold Bergstraesser Institute (ABI) in cooperation with the BMBF-network ‘Postcolonial Hierarchies in Peace & Conflict’, the Global Studies Programme (GSP), and Colloquium Politicum at University of Freiburg.

Colonial legacies continue to shape political change in and research on the Global South. In this lecture series, we engage with the manifold hierarchies at work in postcolonial settings. We ask how decolonial perspectives from Africa, Latin America, the Middle East and Asia can contribute to understanding and confronting postcolonial hierarchies in political arenas ranging from logistics and trade, food, artivism, feminism, to everyday academic practices of knowledge production and collaborative research. 

Post- and decolonial approaches challenge North-South power asymmetries concerning theory-building, research partnerships, and policy interventions, while pointing to different inequalities (and political contestations of these) within and across the Global South too. Despite growing recognition of the colonial legacies shaping these globally unequal patterns of intra- and transregional interaction, the need for in-depth discussions is still there.

This year’s ALMA lecture series takes up this challenge by gathering speakers with original perspectives on challenging questions: 

• How do race, gender and memory shape current understandings of power, contestation, and politics?
• What does it mean to think and ‘apply’ social theory through the lens of decoloniality?
• Which epistemic hierarchies affect the ways researchers, students, and lecturers think about and engage with scholars and scholarship from Africa, Asia, the Middle East and Latin America?

More information on the lectures: