Blog

This blogpost reveals how Ukrainian cities under occupation have become unexpected battlegrounds of non-violent resistance. Amidst surveillance and oppression, civilians employ ingenious tactics to defy the occupying forces, reclaiming urban spaces with symbols of hope and resilience. This exploration delves into the strategies of silent protest and civic defiance that transform everyday streets into arenas of courage and solidarity.

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.

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.”

In digital media, places are often invoked in political debates. Over time, these conjunctions of locations and issues can shape our understanding of where pressing public concerns, like the housing crisis, are truly located and must be addressed. Daniela Stoltenberg dives into this dynamic in her new book, exploring how Twitter users locate the housing crisis. She shows how housing is constructed as an issue that arises in the urban center, but can be solved in the periphery.

This blog article explores the elusive materiality of the Yellow Sand phenomenon: The sandy dust that originates in the Gobi Desert and travels above all of Asia, carrying hazardous components. What does it mean to ethnographically research something barely visible? What happens if we take Yellow Sand’s materiality seriously? How do we write about a phenomenon with no clear spatial or temporal boundaries? Here, CRC 1265 researcher Margherita Tess reflects on ethnography's communicative possibilities for dealing with hyper-objects, the atmospheric, and the refiguration of spaces in the Capitalo-Anthropocene.

The following blog aims to reflect on the notion of regionalization in the context of multistakeholder Internet governance by briefly highlighting the history of the Regional Internet Registries as a specific figuration between conflicting territorial and network logics.

The blog post reflects on the transformational changes in the Ukrainian society following the transition of the Orthodox Church of Ukraine (OCU) to the Revised Julian calendar. Analyzing the contested religious situation in the context of Russia's war against Ukraine, Olena Kononenko highlights both the general features of social-religious processes and the spatial differences of religious attitudes through the lens of personal experience during her last trip to Kyiv.

The process of writing and producing a movie plays out in an arena with diverging political agendas. From the production to the final outcome, films about irregular migration from West Africa are often distorted to fit certain narratives and agencies. Ata Messan Koffi, a Togolese researcher, film producer, and guest researcher at the CRC 1265, illustrates this dynamic by shedding light on his conflictual field of research.