Blog | Methods

In Jordan, many refugees from various backgrounds seek asylum. However, the limited resources and the interconnectedness of social, political, and economic crises, all exacerbated by climate change, lead to frustration and increased competition between the different refugee groups, as well as between the refugees and the host community. This has resulted in complaints and blame being directed at authorities and international actors, aggravating spatial conflicts within the refugee communities. This vignette shows some of the stories that CRC doctoral researcher Qusay Amer collected during his fieldwork in Amman, in the context of a workshop titled “Data justice for refugees.”

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.

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.

The parable of the blind men and the elephant can be found in Hindu, Buddhist as well as Jain texts and revolves around the endeavors of several blind men to […]

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.

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.

The article describes the basic principles and some key exercises of the five-day participatory workshop that took place in Berlin in November 2022 with a group of young students. The aim of the workshop was to develop a progressive web application together with the young Berliners, which will later be used by the same students to create mental maps, a research method employed to record the routines, paths and experiences of young people in (their) spaces.

On the 22nd of November, 2022, Claudia Mock from the Methods-Lab of the CRC 1265 organized the hybrid lecture and workshop “Visualizing Narrative Spaces” with the visual artist Simone Rueß, who shared insights into her work, which deals with the inscription of politics into urban structures, home-making practices and memory processes within biographical narrations, contextualized through drawings, animations, objects and installations. In this blog post, Simone Rueß reflects on the hybrid workshop, which was conceived as a performative narrative in which diverse participants from various disciplines developed individual visual approaches in a collective action.