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This special issue is meant to discuss the following issues: how can we collectively produce meaning? Whom should we research for/with? What should be the aims of our research? We are particularly interested in tackling the ways in which collaborative ethnographies are being constructed, from different perspectives, and how the multiple decisions affecting them are taken. With the aim of contextualizing the ethnographic experiences discussed in this volume, in this presentation we frame the historical emergence of collaborative ethnography and sum up the main contributions done by Anthropology. Then, we point out the main contents of the articles included in this issue, which is made up of six papers proceeding from ongoing researches, all of them collaborative, engaged and even activist in some cases, undertaken together with different actors in diverse scenarios. Our interlocutors have been Mexican women emigrated to New York, young Indigenous graduated at the Intercultural University of Veracruz, neighbors from marginalized neighborhoods in Lisbon, social move-ments and platforms for the right to housing in Spain. A great variety of contexts, perspec-tives and knowledge(s) emerge from this review: even though ethnography is central for all of them, it is accompanied by a plurality of knowledge(s) and practices — ranging from radio series to ethnomusicology — paving the way to diverse strategies of knowledge pro-duction — story telling, collective workshops, conversations. A set of core-issues is emerging overall, and we hope it may contribute to the discussion on the tensions, dilemmas and potentialities of collaborative and engaged ethnography.

In this paper, we discuss the transformations undergone by the academic institution at global and European level, arguing that contemporary University is both neoliberal and eurocentric. First, we highlight the changes that have affected research practice, conceived as an increasingly “fast”, individualist and depoliticized activity; the role (and the subjectiv-ity) of the researcher, constantly pushed to accumulate academic merits and achieve “excel-lence” and “impact”; and the growing precaritization of both working and life conditions. Then, drawing on our experience of collaborative ethnography with “Stop Evictions Grana-da-15M” (Spain), we propose possible “lines of flight” from this situation. Based on our fieldwork, we theorize collaborative ethnography as a way to decolonize research practices. We stress its potential to produce collective knowledge and promote (re)politicization pro-cesses and claim that collaboration can help overcome the (currently hegemonic) individu-alistic and depoliticizing logics in Academia.