Postcolonial Hierarchies in Peace & Conflict
Think Lab 2 (second funding phase)
05-08 October 2026
Marburg (Host Institution: UMR)
Contesting Hierarchies: Utopia and Future-Making in a Postcolonial World
For the Postcolonial Hierarchies project’s second phase, we explore utopia and future-making from a variety of conceptual, empirical, and methodological perspectives within our bi-annual Think Lab. Across three days, weexamine how alternative futures are imagined and enacted in contexts shaped by colonial legacies and contemporary inequalities. The fourth and final day is dedicated to the General Assembly of the network, looking ahead at the remainder of the project duration and its future ambitions.
The Think Lab highlights utopia as a central theme. Building on our engagement with the ongoing legacies of postcolonial hierarchies, we turn to the ways in which these hierarchies are contested, negotiated, and transformed through visions of alternative futures. This topic configures in one way or another in the research of the network member, e.g. as societal actors challenging the state, or state actors challenging norms, scripts and orders on the global level. The program brings together network members´ and invited guest speakers´ research on migration and imagined lives, justice, film and literature, infrastructures, socioecological futures, and conviviality, alongside broader questions of temporality, memory, care, and the politics of imagining. Across these different perspectives, the contributions explore how futures are shaped by existing power relations, why hierarchies are (not) contested, but also how Utopian frameworks and practices centering joy can challenge dominant narratives, epistemologies, and temporalities. Besides a series of panels and collective discussion formats, the program features a film screening and two keynotes as well as a public book talk on utopia. Through interdisciplinary exchange across heterogeneousregional foci, we hope to reflect on and expand our understanding of postcolonial contestations and future-making, and to enrich our conceptual and methodological takes on utopia.
