Universities are infiltrated by power dynamics that marginalise the knowledge, perspectives and work of racialized researchers and interviewees. In this article, we reconstruct our reflexive process of thinking in the context of the leading question: How can we, as racialised researchers, collectively negotiate racial capitalism critical educational research in and with the white academic machinery.

Following Spivak (2020), we understand epistemic violence as the systematic erasure and deformation of non-white voices by colonial knowledge systems that determine who is authorized to speak and whose knowledge is recognized as valuable. In order to understand power relations not only one-dimensionally but multidimensionally, we follow Collins (1990) in understanding that power relations are intersectionally intertwined and manifest themselves through different forms of violence. 

In the case of German universities as places of teaching and learning, the example of the University of Hamburg, which was founded as a former colonial institution, illustrates how colonial legacies have been embedded in the institutional structures of today's universities (C. Çağlar & Akue-Dovi 2025; Gutiérrez Rodríguez et al. 2016; Mancheno & Al-Windi 2023). Black scholars such as Auma (in Piorkowski 2020), Kuria (2015) and Kilomba (2010) emphasise that white, Western, cis-male perspectives are centralised in the German academic landscape. Studies (e.g. Amiri 2020; Aslan 2017), special issues in journals (e.g. G. Çağlar et al. 2025) and anthologies (e.g. Heitzmann & Houda 2020) address powerful practices of racialisation that cement white dominance in German academia and massively restrict the ability of racialised students and researchers to act. This dynamics of exclusion are not limited to Germany and can be observed internationally, as Ahmed (2012) demonstrates especially for the British context. 

As racialised early-career researchers – a female researcher of colour and a Black researcher, this raises questions for us, like e.g.: What role do researchers and their methods play in maintaining white science? (How) Can non-white epistemologies exist in white universities? And is it even possible to conduct research without reproducing power relations? These questions have been on our minds since the beginning of our doctoral projects. 

To answer these questions, and in particular the key question listed above, we reflect on (2) power dynamics in academia (operating globally), such as (2.1) epistemic violence or epistemicide, (2.2) racial capitalism, and (2.3) researchers' standpoints and tokenisation. Building on this, we consider (3) methodologies of epistemic resistance (as well operating globally) such as (3.1) epistemic disobedience, (3.2) participatory research, and (3.3) epistemic humbleness: an epistemology of listening. The insights gained from the power dynamics and methodologies discussed form the basis of our methodological manifesto of Collaborative-Counter-Research (short CCR). 

Our position as racialised researchers makes the question of joint, resistant knowledge production a central one. The perspectives formulated in Collaborative-Counter-Research create an innovative way of thinking about scholarly collaboration in a white academic environment that both integrates and marginalises us. This experience of researching within and against the system gives rise to the need to constantly rethink our own practice – as a counter-movement, as knowledge based on solidarity.

In an ongoing dialogue about and involving theories from the intersection of critical pedagogical, (post-)colonial and intersectional feminist theories as well as Black epistemologies, we have focused our search for answers on the analytical consideration of race-class-gender and epistemic violence or epistemicide (de Sousa Santos 2014; Spivak 2020) and oriented the present article towards the guiding question: How can we, as racialised researchers, collectively negotiate racial capitalism critical educational research in and with the white academic machinery. This article is therefore less about analysing the state of research, presenting research results or an explicit method, and more about a counter-narrative full of impulses for epistemic resistance in white academia. We have deliberately incorporated different approaches and findings from racialised researchers, even if this may seem complex at first glance. It is precisely this combination of approaches that makes our counter-narrative original: it creates space for marginalised epistemologies while drawing on a pluralistic theoretical basis. Our methodological manifesto thus understands collaboration not only as collaborative research, but also as a conscious interweaving of different theories with the aim of questioning epistemic violence by not only addressing white academia, but critically confronting it.

(Post-)colonial, capitalist and patriarchal power relations are woven into every step of academic practice: from research design to the encounter between the researching self and the researched other, to the interpretation, financing and exploitation of knowledge. Our manifesto for collaborative-counter-research is a commitment to research that does not conceal the violent nature of white academia, but rather exposes it. We do not understand research as neutral observation or detached analysis, but as a practice that is always part of power relations. Research cannot be free of power – the question is not whether, but how it intervenes in power relations. In this sense, all scholarly activity is political. Our manifesto therefore does not formulate the claim to research about others, but with others, understands itself as an integral part of political activism, and is explicitly directed against the epistemic violence that structures white academia. In order to define the challenge of racial capitalism more precisely, we understand collaborative-counter-research not only as epistemic criticism, but also as an intervention in those university-specific logics of exploitation through which racialised subjects are structurally precarious and marginalised. Racial capitalism manifests itself in the German higher education system in various ways, including project-based employment, the economisation of diversity, competitive citation and career logic, and the extraction of experiential knowledge without institutional distribution of power and resources. Collaborative-counter-research challenges this order not by promising to overcome it, but through practices of collective knowledge production, shared authorship, and the conscious rejection of market-based performance logics. In this sense, our methodology aims to disrupt the conditions of reproduction of racial capitalism in academia – not through neutrality, but through withdrawal, solidarity, and counter-economies of knowledge. Thus, collaborative-counter-research (CCR) understands research as a relational, situated-political practice that not only analyses power relations, but also negotiates them at every step.

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