/ Research, Studies / Critical Urbanism Master Students
Swiss Coporate Coloniality
While other European countries violently scrambled to colonize the Global South, Switzerland capitalized on its position in the global hierarchies being put in place. It relied on colonial networks, not only for importing, exporting, and investing, but also for proselytizing and producing scientific knowledge.5 The Basel Mission, for example, was active in several countries of the Global South from 1815. Throughout this time, as the country’s entrepreneurs were building wealth and power through colonial exploitation, Swiss citizens had begun to “identify with the white subject of the European imperial space,” drawing “upon images of ‘blackness’ or ‘Africanness’ onto which the Swiss could project attributes they did not wish to be identified with.”6 By providing a foil against which a “self” could be rendered, colonialism contributed to both Swiss wealth and Swiss identity.
In the Fall semester of 2022, Master’s students in the courses Critical Cartography, taught by Dr. Shourideh Molavi, and The City as Archive, taught by Prof. Dr. Kenny Cupers, worked in groups to imagine what it would look like to research the planetary footprint of a company like Nestlé. Their work was supported by assistant F. Baranyk, whose background research on Nestlé was foundational for the development of the research themes.
In the Fall semester of 2023, a new group of students continued the research in “The City as Archive” course. This course explores methods of urban and environmental research through the lens of the archive. As a site of selective public and/or private memory, a physical collection of records, and a metaphor for holding knowledge, the archive is key to the production of knowledge. Whereas governmental and institutional archives gather much of the material for the narration of history, social movements and civil society organizations have created a range of alternative collections, including oral history and sound records. Historians tend to approach these existing archives as repositories of potential evidence, yet built landscapes and ecologies can themselves be understood as historically layered deposits, constituting archives in their own right. At the same time, the rise of the internet has exploded the notion of what constitutes an archive. Students in the course are introduced to archival methods for urban research, with a critical reflection on its political, ethical, and epistemological implications.