Mission Statement
Allegra began as a small group of renegade anthropologists creating a voice for themselves in the margins of the neoliberal academy. Today, it has become a emboldening a large number of anthropologists and other academics to enliven the “dead space” between standard academic publication and fast moving public debates. Allegra maintains that this space is where intellectual innovation happens at its best. No great thinkers ever emerged from the quarantined space of academic disciplines where the polished aesthetic of writing for one’s colleagues (and national frameworks to evaluate excellency) takes priority over the viscerality of the issue at hand. Instead, from Rigoberta Menchù to Marx, bell hooks to Arendt, Fanon to Foucault and many others, they targeted their thinking directly at the conflicts and injustices they saw around them.
Allegra surmises that this desire to enliven the dead space is shared widely among anthropologists, many of whom (if not most) find themselves lacking institutional security. Material precarity, as such, is a further cause of the marginalisation of alternative perspectives. Hence, Allegra further recognizes an irony in today’s academia that plagues disciplined research (and, yes, we include anthropology in that statement): that the struggle for success within traditional academic publishing venues reproduces a steep academic hierarchy in which few people affiliated with high-profile universities command the highest citation rates and, with it, receive the greatest professional recognition. As a result, a political-economy of citational practices emerges that undercuts the breadth and depth of critical thinking inherent in the mass of marginalised academics.
Allegra seeks to provide its contributors with the chance to showcase their best critical thinking, replete with the originality of their own perspectives, on issues affecting the world today. As such, Allegra welcomes contributions in different formats that speak to pressing sociopolitical issues, broadly informed by the beauty of ethnography and the critical potential of anthropology. Allegra rejects the tyranny of metrics and hierarchical practices of gatekeeping, organising instead as a loose collective of like-minded and volunteer enthusiasts. In neoliberal academia, acts of kindness and support become radical; as such Allegra also does not follow the traditional double-blind model of peer review but opts for a dialogical, trust-based model of review to open up new spaces for the nurturing of ideas and the co-production of knowledge.
Legal Structure
Allegralaboratory.net is hosted by Programme Indépendant de Recherche (PIR), a Swiss non-profit association founded in June 2016. PIR is directed by Julie Billaud (President) and Alessandro Chidichimo (Vice-President). The association aims to promote independent scientific research, popular education and interdisciplinarity and create links of solidarity between precarious researchers. All donations received via Allegra website will be put on PIR’s bank account and will be spent on the site exclusively to cover costs of website maintenance and design; running costs (server fees and technical web support); All editors of the site work on a voluntary basis. Allegralaboratory.net neither pays for its contributions nor reserves copy-right for its content.
The website’s ISSN 2343-0168.
To cite our articles we recommend the following format:
Girke, Felix (2017, March 24): K’aissina! Father, Son, Taboos: Life-Lessons from Ethiopia. Allegra Lab https://allegralaboratory.net/kaissina-the-fraught-relation-between-the-father-and-the-firstborn-son-among-the-kara-of-southern-ethiopia/ (Accessed 18 October 2019)
Academic Slow Food Manifesto
More more more!
This constant pressure to write more.
More of what?
Slogans, catch phrases?
Analysis for tid-bit quotations?
The same-old, same-old?
They want to stuff our brain
with indicators,
guidelines,
readily-chewed soundbites,
impact and
expected outcomes.
That is not stuff of real scholarship!
That is the stuff of auditing,
of successful annual reporting;
Signs of yielding to extra-academic pressures.
We reclaim the space
for the real pursuit
of unknown horizons,
Of reflection, philosophising
and mind-wandering
We want words, imagination, poetry!
Things impossible to report,
but only thus with real meaning.
But, like slow food,
REAL research takes time
to mature.
It needs tender love and caring;
A space to freely grow.
Less but more
of something
immeasurable
and only thus of true importance.