As part of the institute’s 150th anniversary celebrations, a newly redesigned information station was inaugurated in summer 2025. It is the outcome of a two-year participatory process aimed at critically reflecting on the institution’s legacy — initiated by protests from the student collective KritGeo, which called for greater transparency regarding the colonial entanglements of key figures in the institute’s history as well as an examination of structural continuities that persist to this day.
This process is now documented and critically reflected upon in the paper “Reframing disciplinary memory: A participatory reckoning with colonial legacies in geography at the University of Bonn”, published in the Journal of Historical Geography. The paper highlights how students and staff engaged in workshops, panel discussions, and open participatory formats to negotiate new forms of institutional memory culture, while also revealing divergent perspectives on history and responsibility. At its core is the question of how an institution deals with a historical legacy whose interpretation remains contested. The paper emphasizes that decolonization is not a finite project with clear-cut outcomes, but rather an ongoing and tension-filled process of negotiation — one that was not concluded with the inauguration of the new station, but in many ways only just began.