The Austrian Academy of Sciences is organising an international interdisciplinary symposium in Vienna on the topic of Colonial Knowledge Production, 15-16 September 2025. The symposium is part of a network initiative of the Austrian Academy of Sciences devoted to critically exploring its entanglements with colonialism. Currently, the focus is on the period between 1847, the Academy’s founding year, until the end of the First World War in 1918.

Background

In the public imagination, Austria is often thought of as having been detached from colonial expansion and thus exempt from the necessity to tackle its colonial legacies today – both outside and within academia. In reality however, Austrian scholars used extensive colonial networks for their research, and colonial ideology profoundly shaped their theories, methods and thus research results. Many of the so-called expeditions at that time were initiated and financed by what was then the Imperial Academy of Sciences and they contributed to vastly enriching the collections of museums and archives. Today, scholarship on Austria is not only confronted with the material and immaterial products of colonial knowledge production, but also with its conceptual and terminological remnants.

Symposium

The symposium Colonial Knowledge Production is a joint effort of the Institute of Culture Studies, the Phonogrammarchiv and the Austrian Archaeological Institute. It aims to strengthen the dialogue between existing or emerging projects on Austria’s colonial academic histories and corresponding endeavours beyond Austria. We want to provide a forum for exchange across disciplines, across a variety of institutions such as academies, universities, museums, archives or academic associations and across various forms of expert knowledge. The goal here is to develop a common epistemological framework and terminological ground for speaking about and better understanding colonial knowledge production in Austria. Just as importantly, we hope to give the critical engagement with academic colonial involvement more prominence in scholarly and public discourse.