Blog

From August 2nd to 12th, a group of Kenyan and German students conducted the fieldwork of their study project in Nairobi, Kenya. The main goal was to explore the food system in the urban region of Kasarani, a constituency of Nairobi. Various methods, such as mapping and interviews, were used to gain insights into the food security status of the local people and the different factors that influence it.

This blog post is a field report of the author’s trip with the University of California Irvine’s EcoGovLab to the Salton Sea in California. Based on this field trip a few miles from Desert Hot Springs, near the San Andreas Fault, the article focuses on the non-human dimension in the figuration of spaces in the Anthropocene and the challenges posed by harmful entanglements that require alternative research approaches and close university-community relationships.

The authors of this blogpost are migration researchers. While doing research on the unequal distribution of mobility rights around the world, they make use of the privileges accorded to them by the very same regime. Their position has allowed them to travel to six countries within the last year. Inspired by stories from their past and current fieldwork, the authors reflect on their research within an unequal mobility and migration regime, which has become much more than a mere research object to them.

During their two-month fieldwork stay in South Korea, researchers Jae-Young Lee and Sungwon Ryu aimed to investigate how the use of digital tools in new economies, such as tourism or e-commerce, influences residents’ spatial imaginations and practices. While accessing the field, the term “digitalization” proved to be a contested touchstone, challenging our understanding of “the digital” itself. This report sheds light on how this pursuit of a mysterious phenomenon shaped their research in the process.

What happens to scalar thinking when the analytical distinctions between global and local as well as human and non-human spaces no longer make sense, especially given the engagement with climate change and the planetary in the social sciences and humanities? These were the challenging questions that PIs Ignacio Farías and Silke Steets posed to the speakers and audience at the 5th international CRC symposium “Spatial Figures in the Anthropocene” on 5th and 6th October 2023. Scholars across regions and disciplines came together for two days of discussions, panels, coffee conversations, a metaverse animation, and a lecture performance to advance, share, and inspire thinking and activities on spatiality that address the anthropogenic impact on Earth.

How is power reflected in space and how is it recreated? How can practices contribute to (re)defining power relations in different spaces? These questions and many more were discussed during the International Participatory Summer School on “Power and Space”. The school brought together scholars from four continents across a wide range of disciplines. Organized by a team of doctoral researchers of the CRC, the school took a participatory approach by combining participant-led workshops and presentations with keynotes and workshops led by activists, scholars, and artists. Within this framework, participants reflected on theories of power and space, as well as their own positionality. Through excursions in Berlin, the school moved beyond the academic space, enabling participants to experience physical and political spaces in the city.

In this blog post, CRC members Séverine Marguin and Jamie-Scott Baxter reflect on a trip they took with their students to the Royal Botanic Garden in Edinburgh as part of the project seminar "Nature, Space and Biopolitics: Understanding the Conservation Regime in Planetary Urbanism." With the aim of investigating the refiguration of the modern institution of the botanic garden in the face of multiple socio-environmental crises, they summarize the key insights they gained by comparing two of the most important European botanic gardens from an interdisciplinary perspective: the Botanical Garden in Berlin and the Royal Botanic Garden in Edinburgh.

Working in the CRC challenges us to translate the broad framework of spatial theory into our empirical work. In this blogpost, we illustrate how we handle this challenge in our project.