Blog | Nations/Places

Earlier this year, researchers from subproject C07 on spatial conflicts and the platform economy spent six weeks in Cape Town, South Africa. In this brief Space-Vignette, Simon Pohl and Christina Hecht provide insights into the experiences they gathered – in relation to the project's research questions and beyond.

A thin line between ethics and aesthetics haunts these reflections on field research in an African city, approached through the positionality of a researcher from a European context. Based on some visual impressions encountered during the fieldwork, the researcher Francesca Ceola retraces the process of reorientation in a place geographically and culturally very far away from her habitat recognizing what she knows in what she sees. In doing so, she contests the abstraction of “going to do fieldwork” as separate from everyday scientific practices.

How does the Kenyan middle class live? Subproject A05 “Being Home” examines living spaces in Nairobi and their significance for identity formation, drawing on urban developments of its colonial past. Project leader Jochen Kibel and cooperation partner Makau Kitata talk to journalist Brenda Strohmaier about their first findings.

CRC 1265 researcher Eric Lettkemann unravels the intriguing dynamics between digital technology and public spaces. Uncovering contrasting approaches to the of hybrid reality game Pokémon Go, from cemetery bans in Germany to seamless integration in Tokyo, he discusses the social implications and future challenges of such locative media as we navigate an evolving world where the digital of physical increasingly overlap.

CRC 1265 Project leader Ignacio Farías in conversation with Brenda Strohmaier Cities and city dwellers not only contribute significantly to global warming, but they are also particularly affected by it. Using Stuttgart and the Japanese city of Fukuoka as examples, subproject C05 investigates how this very knowledge reaches the work of scientists, urban planners and politicians, and how it is being translated into concrete measures. Project leader Ignacio Farías, Professor of Urban Anthropology at Humboldt University, explains how a social science analysis serves survival in a broken world.

In the South Korean metropole of Seoul, queer people have been increasingly pushing their way into the public sphere for more than two decades. The Seoul Queer Culture Festival, for example, has made it to the forecourt of the city hall against quite a bit of resistance, and the first neighborhood pride event took place in the Mapo district in 2022. Sung Un Gang, a member of subproject B03, is interested in such space-appropriating changes in the LGBTQ movement. He is not only interested in already well-documented processes, but also in how queer people create new spaces and recode old ones through quite mundane everyday actions.

The environmental movement of Turkey has three decades of history. A culture of resistance was transferred from the first women's ecological resistance that attracted attention in the Bergama peasant movement to today's struggling women.[1] One of the areas of resistance discussed in this article is the Mount Ida (Kazdağları) Resistance, which is one of the most reported ecological struggles in the press in recent years in Turkey. [2]  Global companies came to this significant area, within the borders of Turkey's Marmara and Aegean regions, to search for gold with cyanide and destroy some regions with the state's approval. Resistance temporarily stopped the destruction and cutting of trees in the area.

This blogpost explores how counterpublic spaces act as intrinsically intersectional spaces shaped by power, history and emotion. In his celebrated 2019 book Afropean: Notes from Black Europe, Johny Pitts sets off by train from Sheffield on a five-month journey across continental Europe. Pitts’ mission seeks to explore the everyday life of black European experiences, beyond the “standoffish academic vernacular” (2019: 5) and to look for instances of “reverse colonialism” that highlight the long-term social and cultural presence and influence of blackness on European culture.