PostColonialities Lab is a space for critical thinking and collaborative research. Founded in 2023 by a group of postdocs based at different academic institutions in Berlin and sponsored by the Berlin University Alliance, it aims at offering an intellectual home bridging our interests and areas of expertise across universities, disciplines, knowledge formations, and genres of critique.

Our understanding of PostColonialities is that of an umbrella term encompassing multiple epistemological and methodological approaches to modernity, knowledge, society, and culture, to which colonial power and the ensuing inequalities and resistances are integral. Pluralizing coloniality and merging it with the “post” signals our attempt at reconciling post-, de-, and anticolonial approaches beyond a mere time concept. This reconciliation is in conversation with, and inspired by, key theoretical genealogies critical of colonialism such as Black Studies, Indigenous Epistemologies, Critical Area Studies, Gender and Queer Studies, Critical Race Theory, and standpoint theoretical approaches, including feminist and migrant situated knowledges. PostColonialities Lab is thus inter-, trans- and anti-disciplinary, as are the profiles of our members.

An important feature of our agenda is to foster horizontal exchange with researchers from, or situated in, the Global South and East, categories requiring constant scrutiny. We explore different formats for collaborative research within and beyond the university, interweaving knowledges as a way of engaging in mutual learning processes that go hand in hand with solidarity instead of solitary modes of knowledge production.

Please do get in touch if you have ideas and wish to collaborate!