Zoom Link to workshop and online keynote

Thursday, December 4

10:00–10:30 AM // Introduction & Welcome address
Anke te Heesen, Viktoria Tkaczyk (HU Berlin)
Anna Echterhölter (Vienna), Léa Renard (Heidelberg)

10:30 AM–1:00 PM // Session 1 // Chair: Lotte Schüßler (HU Berlin)
Frederico Ágoas (Lisbon, online): Taming Fire with Forests: The 1868 Report on National Tree Cover and the Colonization of Portugal’s Upland Commons

Coffee break

Martin Herrnstadt (Bremen): Mining Sciences, Extractivism and the Emergence of the Monographic Method as Applied Environmental Epistemology, 1830–1848

1:00–2:30 PM // Lunch

2:30–4:30 PM // Session 2 // Chair: Martina Schlünder (Charité Berlin)
Anna Echterhölter (Vienna): Mining and Plantation Data: Social Surveying Methods in the Wake of the Colonial Economy

Daniel Midena (Suva/Bavaria): Inquiries under Indirect Rule in early British Fiji, 1874–1914

6:15–7:45 PM // Keynote // Chair: Birgit Nemec (Charité Berlin/Vienna)
Matthew Eddy (Durham): The Bureaucracy of Bias: Public Health, Colonial Data and William Fergusson’s Statistical Re-Interpretation of Government Questionnaires in Sierra Leone, 1825–1830
/!\ Location for the keynote: Institut für Kulturwissenschaft, HU Berlin, Georgenstrasse 47, Room 0.07 /!\

Friday, December 5

8:30–10:00 AM // Online Keynote // Chair: Anna Echterhölter (Vienna)
Tahu Kukutai (Waikato): Māori Data Sovereignty and Repurposing Colonial Census Data in Aotearoa New Zealand
Zoom Link

Coffee break

10:30 AM–12:30 PM // Session 3 // Chair: Alejandra Osorio Tarazona (HU Berlin)
Svit Komel (Ljubljana): Survey, Property Transformation and Peasant Resistance in Carniola

Laura Lee Honsig (Vienna): “The Problem of Indian Administration”: 1920s Encounters of Risk and Possibility in U.S. Social Surveying of Indigenous Nations

12:30–2:00 PM // Lunch

2:00–3:00 PM // Closing session // Chair: Niki Rhyner (HU Berlin)

Léa Renard (Heidelberg): The Enquête as Encounter. An Interactionist and Relational Approach

Concluding remarks

Description
How to account for the social interactions and relationships between surveyed people and observers? By which process do observers extract knowledge from the lifeworld of the people they observe? What kinds of relationships, formats, and encounters mediate between observers and the population they observe? And: Under what conditions are observed people able to express consent or to resist knowledge extraction? All these questions take on quite different meanings when the data are collected in colonial settings. How well does the enquete format travel?

The workshop will approach the enquête in past and present constellations as a specific type of interaction and social relationship, the characteristics of which still require further elaboration. Building on the workshop “Data at the Doorstep” the emphasis now lies with the enquête format overseas. One hypothesis is that the particular relationships established by colonial enquêtes facilitate (intellectual) extractivism. In particular, we will examine the role of intermediaries, go-betweens, translators, “assistants,” and “helping” hands of all kinds who created zones of contact between the observed people and the observers, but who have been invisibilized.

Location
Center for Advanced Studies „Applied Humanities: Genealogy and Politics“
HU Berlin
Georgenstrasse 23, 10117 Berlin
6th floor