A key insight running through the piece is that attending to affect — to the felt, embodied dimensions of social disruption — reveals what explicit statements and official records tend to conceal. As Dilger argues, an affect-theoretical lens makes visible how power imbalances and diverging interests are experienced and negotiated at the intersection of political, economic, and institutional structures, and how collaborative knowledge is produced through processes that are always also sensory, relational, and contested.

Drawing on over seventeen years of ethnographic research — on moral education in Tanzania, experiences of flight and arrival in Germany, the embodied dimensions of the pandemic, and decolonial engagements with ethnographic collections in Berlin — Dilger argues that collaborative and publicly oriented research is not simply a methodological choice, but a political and professional necessity. In times of rising authoritarianism worldwide, building sustainable knowledge infrastructures that extend beyond academic institutions is, he concludes, essential — not only in the Global South, but equally in the Global North, where spaces for "controversy, uncertainty, and experimentation" are becoming increasingly hard to protect.