Blog

This blog article explores the elusive materiality of the Yellow Sand phenomenon: The sandy dust that originates in the Gobi Desert and travels above all of Asia, carrying hazardous components. What does it mean to ethnographically research something barely visible? What happens if we take Yellow Sand’s materiality seriously? How do we write about a phenomenon with no clear spatial or temporal boundaries? Here, CRC 1265 researcher Margherita Tess reflects on ethnography's communicative possibilities for dealing with hyper-objects, the atmospheric, and the refiguration of spaces in the Capitalo-Anthropocene.

The following blog aims to reflect on the notion of regionalization in the context of multistakeholder Internet governance by briefly highlighting the history of the Regional Internet Registries as a specific figuration between conflicting territorial and network logics.

The blog post reflects on the transformational changes in the Ukrainian society following the transition of the Orthodox Church of Ukraine (OCU) to the Revised Julian calendar. Analyzing the contested religious situation in the context of Russia's war against Ukraine, Olena Kononenko highlights both the general features of social-religious processes and the spatial differences of religious attitudes through the lens of personal experience during her last trip to Kyiv.

The process of writing and producing a movie plays out in an arena with diverging political agendas. From the production to the final outcome, films about irregular migration from West Africa are often distorted to fit certain narratives and agencies. Ata Messan Koffi, a Togolese researcher, film producer, and guest researcher at the CRC 1265, illustrates this dynamic by shedding light on his conflictual field of research.

By creating maps, researchers can gain insights into the social and cultural dimensions of urban, rural, hybrid, and mediated landscapes. Mapping can also be used to analyze historical changes, and to monitor ongoing changes and future developments. The objective of our workshop was to create space for transfer and exchange, especially about the interdisciplinary experience and body of knowledge produced in the first phase of the CRC. The different disciplinary backgrounds of the speakers demonstrate the transdisciplinary potential of mapping methods for the research of socio-spatial phenomena.

Eine Wiese in einem kleinen mecklenburgischen Dorf. Hier gibt es Enten, Gänse, Ornitholog:innen, Bienen, Schmetterlinge, Naturliebhaber:innen, Vogelnistkästen und einiges andere. Es klingt nach ländlicher Idylle. Carl-Jan Dihlmann und Ilse Helbrecht zeigen in ihrem Artikel „Ländliche Räume als relationale Gefüge. Argumente für eine ontologische Wende in der Ländlichkeitsforschung“ jedoch, dass bei genauerem Hinsehen ländliche Räume durchaus komplexer sind, als es der herkömmliche Fokus auf Naturnähe und Landwirtschaft nahelegt. Im Blogbeitrag stellt Carl-Jan Dihlmann das in der Geographischen Zeitschrift erschiene Paper vor und gibt Einblicke in die Entstehung eines wissenschaftlichen Fachartikels.

What is your favorite waterbody? What do you like about it? Chances are that you thought of a lake or a river, maybe even an entire ocean. For the collaborative workshop at the CRC 1265 on ‘water, flows, space, and other stuff’, Moritz Kasper and Afra Foli decided to use the notion of ‘waterbody’ to talk about slightly unorthodox containers of water: an urban river-turned-drain in Accra and bright yellow jerry cans in Nairobi.

The workshop „Space and Power from a Gender and Intersectional Perspective“ was part of the International Participatory Summer School on „Power and Space“, which took place from September 13th to […]