Call for Participants: Collective Autoethnography

Knowledge is situated – this is a claim that is widely reiterated. But how exactly do the material and political conditions under which we work shape the knowledge we produce? How do precarious employment, dependence on wage labour, competition for funding, institutional hierarchies, and authoritarian threats shape our research practices, the questions we ask, and the knowledge we can produce?

These questions are relevant to all forms of research, but they become particularly salient in research that engages with the so-called Global South, in this case Latin America. The epistemic, political, and ethical challenges associated with such projects have been widely discussed. This project aims to bring into focus aspects that are often marginalised in these debates, such as material conditions, and to explore the situatedness of researchers and research in greater depth.

This group aims to bring together researchers institutionally based in Europe who work on and with Latin America to explore these questions collectively. Researchers at any career stage starting at PhD studies are welcome. Over the course of 18 months, participants will take part in at least three online and three in-person meetings. Funding to attend these meetings is secured for anyone without institutional support. We will discuss and decide together how to publish our insights.

These meetings will provide a space for collective discussion, exchange, and reflection on our research practices and the conditions in which they take place. We will examine how the political economy of academic labour shapes knowledge production, how unequal institutional and geopolitical relations structure our work, and what possibilities exist for organising and practising research differently. The approach is colaborative and aims to create a space for in-depth discussion, including theoretical work and collective autoethnography.

The group is part of the research project Looking Across Worlds for Environmental Justice, led by Angus McNelly (King’s College London), Annette Mehlhorn (Humboldt University of Berlin), and Fausto Quizhpe (Universidad Andina Simón Bolívar, Quito). The project explores knowledge production across different nodes connecting Ecuador and Europe. It brings together participants based in different locations and working in different institutional and political contexts, including Ecuadorian universities and political actors in Saraguro, Ecuador. The group’s focus on research conditions in Europe is situated in dialogue with these broader contexts.

The tentative timeline is as follows:

30.11.2026 deadline for applications 

07.12. 2026 feedback 

01.01. 2027 official start 

01.01.2027 – 01.06.2028 online and in-person meetings

If you are interested in participating, please send a short text outlining your motivation to a.mehlhorn[ at ]hu-berlin.de. Questions and comments are also very welcome.