Blog | Interview

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 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 West Africa, an entertainment genre called Afronovela is booming. Like South American telenovelas, they are romantic soap operas, but set in Africa. Especially in Senegal and the Ivory Coast, an industry of its own has emerged. In subproject C06, the French sociologist Séverine Marguin and the Congolese director and film scholar Daddy Dibinga Kalamba investigate how these series stage narrations of successful lives.

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.

Access to the internet has long been considered as essential as water and electricity supply; the UN declared online communication a human right several years ago. But despite its enormous social importance, not much is known about the administrative infrastructure behind it, i.e. who exactly controls the infrastructure of the net and what kind of ideas guide them. The subproject B02 “Control/Space” wants to change that, as project member René Tuma explains.

Olena Kononenko has been a guest researcher at the CRC 1265 since mid-May 2022. With Lucie Bernroider and Sarah Etz, she spoke about Kyjiw’s past, present and future, similarities and differences between Kyjiw and Berlin, her experiences at the CRC 1265 and her hopes for future returns – to both Kyjiw and Berlin.

Ariane Sept im Gespräch mit Julia Paaß vom Netzwerk Zukunftsorte zu konfliktreichen Gemeinschaften und gemeinschaftlichen Konflikten auf dem Land. Schon länger wird darüber debattiert, dass die ländlichen Räume für die urbane Mittelschicht zunehmend attraktiver würden. „Gefühlt will im Prenzlauer Berg jeder Zweite aufs Land“, titelte beispielsweise der Deutschlandfunk im Sommer 2019. Auch die Forschung beobachtet eine „aktuelle Konjunktur des Ländlichen“. Seit Beginn der Covid-19-Pandemie schwirrt der Begriff Stadtflucht noch stärker durch mediale Debatten.

From October 2019 till February 2020 Letteria G. Fassari was Visiting Fellow at the Collaborative Research Centre 1265. In this interview conducted at the end of her stay, she gives insights into her time at the CRC and her impressions of the city of Berlin.