Blog | Travelogue

Earlier this year, researchers from subproject C07 on spatial conflicts and the platform economy spent six weeks in Cape Town, South Africa. In this brief Space-Vignette, Simon Pohl and Christina Hecht provide insights into the experiences they gathered – in relation to the project's research questions and beyond.

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.

As Shmuel Eisenstadt notes in his work Japanese Civilization, the Land of the Rising Sun has a special attraction for comparative sociology. For Japanese society combines an - from a Western point of view - exotic culture and a highly technological civilization that has made and continues to make its own way into modernity.

Martin Schinagl reflektiert im Nachgang seiner Feldforschung über Stadtplanung in New York City über eine Stadt der Widersprüche und Extreme sowie ihre Entwicklungen aus Perspektive eines forschenden Flâneurs: „Läufst du durch New York, siehst du die Welt. …“

Das Westjordanland ist eine der am stärksten politisch, ideologisch und militärisch umkämpften Regionen unserer Welt, es ist Schauplatz und Projektionsfläche des Nahost-Konflikts. Als ich im Frühjahr 2019 zwei Vertreter*innen der […]

Prof. Dr. Hubert Knoblauch (TU Berlin) schildert in diesem Beitrag seine Eindrücke, die er während eines Feldaufenthalts in Südkorea (9.-16.4.2019) sammeln konnte.