Foto: © Anke Illing
Montag, 20. April 2020
Practising Partnership
urmila, 20:56h
Ich freue mich, dass die hervorragende MA-Arbeit von Anja Schwalbe "Practising Partnership. Making connections within a transnational education network" jetzt als Band 5 der Reihe "Berliner Abschlussarbeiten der Europäischen Ethnologie" erschienen ist.
Zum Inhalt:
Does a transnational cooperation project help overcome historical power relations when cooperating across borders and continents? Departing from this self-reflexive question articulated by a European education network striving at the time to expand its membership and become ‘more global’, this ethnographic study explores how exactly global cooperation comes about. Drawing on insights from the Ethnography of Infrastructure and Actor-Network-Theory, I examine the otherwise not-so-visible work practices of educators and administrators driving such a project forward – in this case study, an ERASMUS+ funded NGO project. I show how facilitators and administrators in the project are dealing with different kinds of invisible work when interacting with the frames set by funder’s rules, on one side, and each organisations’ administrative needs, on the other. As a crucial part of their involvement, practitioners have to tackle the recurring problem of establishing connection and staying connected. Based on these observations I analyse how the project as a form itself assists in making ‘the global’ through its own transient ways of connecting and disconnecting things, people and places. The project relates to partnership in a double sense: it represents a cooperation in itself and it is at the same time used as a vehicle to achieve the said. I suggest to call this the characteristic form of partnership-as-project in which inscriptions made in the past through budgets and proposals facilitate and simultaneously shape all efforts to cooperate as equals. This case study shows where and how (funding) infrastructures very concretely participate in constructing global relations, as they are entangled in the very historical structures that projects concerned with transnational cooperation seek to challenge.
Zum Inhalt:
Does a transnational cooperation project help overcome historical power relations when cooperating across borders and continents? Departing from this self-reflexive question articulated by a European education network striving at the time to expand its membership and become ‘more global’, this ethnographic study explores how exactly global cooperation comes about. Drawing on insights from the Ethnography of Infrastructure and Actor-Network-Theory, I examine the otherwise not-so-visible work practices of educators and administrators driving such a project forward – in this case study, an ERASMUS+ funded NGO project. I show how facilitators and administrators in the project are dealing with different kinds of invisible work when interacting with the frames set by funder’s rules, on one side, and each organisations’ administrative needs, on the other. As a crucial part of their involvement, practitioners have to tackle the recurring problem of establishing connection and staying connected. Based on these observations I analyse how the project as a form itself assists in making ‘the global’ through its own transient ways of connecting and disconnecting things, people and places. The project relates to partnership in a double sense: it represents a cooperation in itself and it is at the same time used as a vehicle to achieve the said. I suggest to call this the characteristic form of partnership-as-project in which inscriptions made in the past through budgets and proposals facilitate and simultaneously shape all efforts to cooperate as equals. This case study shows where and how (funding) infrastructures very concretely participate in constructing global relations, as they are entangled in the very historical structures that projects concerned with transnational cooperation seek to challenge.
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