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The 2024 annual conference of the Collaborative Researcher Center (CRC) 1265 Re-Figuration of Spaces brought together research at the intersection of space and conflict. It tackled the question of how […]

How do conflicts over and within space unfold? In this first of a two-part blog post, we highlight some of the answers give by scholars from various disciplines and research projects gave to this critical question at the CRC’s annual conference in October.

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.

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.

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.