Tahani Nadim
Stella Weitkamp
Baldeep Kaur
Nabil Hamdan
The case is divided into three movements: 1. A history of complicity; 2. Interventions in academia; 3. Archive of actions. Over the course of a day, we will study archival documents and contemporary activist literature that help us piece together German academia’s repeating cycles of complicity from South African apartheid to the ongoing Israeli occupation and genocide of Palestine. This exploratory workshop optimistically plans to expand the horizon of academic interventions against such complicity through archival methods and a future working group that can build upon the outcomes of our collaborative learnings.
The starting point are archival documents from the afas archive in Duisburg pertaining to the academic boycott of the South African apartheid government in the 1980s. These documents evidence German academia’s abstention from boycotting South African apartheid. The first movement involves a close reading of two sets of documents: selected historical documents from the era and current statements by national bodies representing German academia that censure the instrument of academic boycotts in the context of the ongoing genocide committed by Israel against Palestinians. A collective analysis of these documents will focus on how the relationship between academia and the state is imagined and addressed, and the role and responsibilities which academia assumes within a liberal international order. This includes a critique of the extent to which liberal (capitalist) democracy can be separated from state-sanctioned injustices.
The second movement will assemble a narrative of the same events based on additional documents, historical and contemporary. In this part, the analysis will examine past and present forms of organizing in order to (re)construct how else academia responds to the state and national interests. It will collect and map actions emerging from academic networks and student movements that sought to bring material sanctions against apartheid states. A key question in this study is identifying how instrumentalising the illegality of apartheid under international law has helped academics influence domains of politics beyond the production of scientific knowledge and inhibited the advance of structures of occupation and injustice that operate adjacently to apartheid.
In the last movement, an interactive and hands-on session invites participants to 1. imagine academic initiatives as sites and resources for interrupting state-sanctioned or state-condoned injustices, and 2. visualise how an archive of such initiatives can be organised that effectively conveys analyses, successes and failures across generations and geopolitical contexts. The creative makings that result from this phase will be collected in the form of zines, posters, and a curriculum on academic complicity and boycotts. We will also produce a report that synthesises lessons from the archival sources we will study in this workshop. Participants who are interested in de-exceptionalising and historicising boycott as an academic method are invited to join a longer-term working group that will result from this workshop.
The working language is English. The workshop materials will be in German and English. We will do our best to provide English translations of German documents. The maximum number of participants is 20. We invite academics from all career-stages, students and activists. Although no prior knowledge of archival methods is necessary, we appreciate some awareness of the political issues at stake.