Blog | Travelogue

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.”

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.

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.

This blog post is a field report of the author’s trip with the University of California Irvine’s EcoGovLab to the Salton Sea in California. Based on this field trip a few miles from Desert Hot Springs, near the San Andreas Fault, the article focuses on the non-human dimension in the figuration of spaces in the Anthropocene and the challenges posed by harmful entanglements that require alternative research approaches and close university-community relationships.

Within the framework of the project seminar “Nature, Space and Biopolitics: Understanding the Conservation Regime in Planetary Urbanism,” we spent the last year investigating the refiguration of the modern institutions […]

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.