(RM*: This item is not directly about colonial collections and restitution but its purport is certainly relevant for the organisation of many provenance research projects).
A university in the Global South may be designated as a partner while the grant is held in the Global North. Its researchers may collect the data while others determine the conceptual frame.
The communities involved may provide the empirical foundation of the project, even as theory travels in one direction and data in another.
Southern scholars may be present throughout the research process and yet remain peripheral to authorship, agenda-setting, funding decisions and scholarly recognition.
The problem is deeper than unequal participation. It concerns the conditions under which participation acquires meaning, authority and agency.
Emnet Tadesse Woldegiorgis (photo) argues that partnership is not simply a technical arrangement between institutions. It is also an epistemic space, a shared but contested terrain in which authority, recognition, responsibility and meaning are negotiated. Such a space can be genuinely co-inhabited. It can also reproduce hierarchy beneath the appearance of cooperation.
The politics of partnership often reveals itself most clearly in places that appear least political. Consider the seemingly mundane architecture of a research project. Eligibility rules, grant agreements, procurement procedures, reporting templates, ethics protocols, authorship conventions, data ownership and evaluation metrics are frequently treated as administrative matters surrounding intellectual work.
