Conviviality and Contamination

The project is an experimental exploration of Conviviality (and Diversity) by means of Contamination.

It involves literary writers and academic scholars with a strong South African affiliation and aims at producing a creative dialogue between the arts and the social (and natural) sciences, with an emphasis on writing, literary and academic, but also on writing´s convergence with bordering arts, i. e. visual art, architecture, music and film.The first part of the project is to be carried out individually, in parallel with co-applicant Thomas Hylland Eriksen, with the aim of deepening our long-standing collaboration on questions of globalisation, identity and conviviality along three principal lines:To contribute to the ´decolonisation´ of the discussion on conviviality by shifting the focus from the global North to the global South, more specifically South Africa, with its unique history and centrality in the discourse on diversity.To compare the processes leading to loss in diversity in both culture and nature through a common analytical lensTo deepen the reflection on the perils and possibilities of genre transgression and the convergence between literary and academic methods and formats.The third strand is the principal aim for the project´s second part, which will be centred around two ´contamination workshops´, at Malmö University and Bard College Berlin.

The project will result in a monograph and one or two co-edited volumes.