Blog | Methoden

Das Reallabor „Campus as Commons“ erprobt, wie leerstehende Universitätsgebäude zu gemeinwohlorientiertem studentischem Wohnraum umgebaut werden können. Zwischen 1:1-Mock-ups im ehemaligen Mathematikgebäude der TU Berlin, internationaler Zusammenarbeit und Gesprächen mit Politik und Verwaltung wird sichtbar, welches Potenzial im Format der Projektwerkstätten steckt – und warum Hochschulen selbst Teil der Infrastruktur des Wohnens sind.

This blog post aims to reflect on the ways in which the decolonization of knowledge can be actively pursued through the co-production of research. It focuses on examples from the author’s own research activities in the field of cultural anthropology in a historically marginalized district of Dakar (Senegal). The blog post also discusses the challenges posed by research co-production in terms of methodological issues of validity and legitimacy, as well as challenges that endangered the field research (e. g., power relations among the research participants, the tendency to gain individual control over the project, gender biases that implicitly shape the design and implementation process).

In June 2024, four CRC projects brought their empirical cases to the “Comparison Clinic”. Together with guest researcher Jennifer Robinson and CRC PIs Séverine Marguin and Silke Steets, this workshop invited the participants to explore the prospects of comparative analysis. This report summarizes the discussions and highlights how valuable comparisons are for the development of concepts such as refiguration.

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.

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.

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.

Stadtpläne, U-Bahn-Netze, Google Maps: Kartierungen von Räumen sind aus dem Alltag nicht wegzudenken. Doch auch Forschende können mit Mappings ganz neue Wege einschlagen, findet Séverine Marguin. Hier erklärt die Soziologin, wie Wissenschaftler:innen des SFB mit diesem Werkzeug arbeiten, warum die Kommunikation via Kartierung oft sogar besser gelingt – und weshalb man sich von den hübsch anzuschauenden Plänen nicht täuschen lassen darf.