Blog | Methods

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.

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.

This blogpost uses the phenomenon of the fata morgana – mirage – to illustrate the dynamics of real estate advertisements for exclusive housing developments in Cairo. In doing so, we investigate some of the ways in which public media and advertising create a display of the urban that does not reflect the lived social, spatial, and economic reality of the majority of the population. At the same time, this urban visual is produced and shaped by the intersectional dynamics of embedded societal norms.

The CRC 1265 is currently experimenting with visual methods of analysis. This blogpost presents one such experiment. In this experiment, preliminary research findings were transformed into graphics by a designer, thus setting in motion an image-based process of discovery and reflection. It is shown how such a short-term collaboration between social science and artistic design has been carried out and what kind of potential it brought with it.

One likes to show guests something special, and depending on what they find interesting, the places usually selected range from museums, shopping malls, historic city centers, impressive nature reserves to the latest 5-star restaurant. In contrast, our visiting scientists from Chile are interested in how fruit production in Germany differs from that in their home country. For this reason, we, the CRC project A03 “Goods and Knowledge II” in cooperation with the DFG project “Apples and Flowers”[1], visited a fruit farm together with our guests Beatriz Bustos [2] , Patricia Retamal and Raúl Contreras.

Olena Kononenko has been a guest researcher at the CRC 1265 since mid-May 2022. With Lucie Bernroider and Sarah Etz, she spoke about Kyjiw’s past, present and future, similarities and differences between Kyjiw and Berlin, her experiences at the CRC 1265 and her hopes for future returns – to both Kyjiw and Berlin.

This blog post shows that the Covid-19 pandemic and contact restrictions changed the how and where of exchanging social support with others shifting increasingly to the digital. This may be in part a result of the Berliners’ attempt to create a new private outside. Krüger et al. argue, however, that this new private relies on an illusio of privacy. Especially during the pandemic, they hold, our worries might have become “surplus value” in an unregulated and intransparent market of data on and by us.