RESEARCH

Our research projects are driven by ongoing conceptual debates that wish to overcome the common dualistic understandings of e.g. human-nature, culture-economy, land-sea, virtual-actual, North-South. Thus, they embed current cultural geographic approaches within the wider theoretical discussions of the new materialism, posthumanism, and postphenomenology as well as the methodological interests of Science and Technology Studies. Drawing on ethnographic insights we generally strive to go beyond the discursive formation of the phenomena under study and consider their lived experience. For this to be possible, our work is embedded in strong international research networks and close collaborations with partners - at universities but also outside of academia as they inspire us to challenge established points of view and look at the world from different perspectives.

Cultural Geographies across North-South divides

Driven by a strong interest in the history and paradigmatic shifts of cultural geography, our research is informed by the current conceptual debates in this field. In particular, we attempt to overcome a division between cultural geographies in the Global North and development geographies in the Global South and encourage a more „worldly“ and relational theorizing.

Design geographies

Current discourses on design as a practice and theory of world-making are taken as a starting point in this project to contribute to the development of a geographical perspective on design.

Shelter technologies in Action

Through ethnographic fieldwork we follow selected shelter technologies from their design and production sites to their distribution networks and everyday use in the global South and North, thereby we foreground shelter technologies and humanitarian supply chains not as neutral means to humanitarian ends, but rather as artifacts and infrastructures that co-produce the social worlds of humanitarian action.

Geographies of Experimentation

We examine how worlds are imagined, tested, and enacted through situated practices and spaces. Rather than viewing experiments as confined to laboratories, this field explores how humans and more-than-human actors (collaboratively) experiment, adapt, and tinker with their spatial and social environments. We examine experimentation as a mode of sociotechnical governance, a condition of more-than-human life and a possibility for learning and imagining alternatives, focusing on how new forms of knowledge, coexistence, and futures are negotiated through practices ranging from micronations and microbial worlds to atmospheric processes. Accordingly, experimentation is understood as a process of adaptive becoming and a renegotiation of what counts as knowledge in times of planetary crisis and societal transformation.

Micronations

The project addresses the question of how the phenomenon of micronations can be understood on three different magnitudes: the individual, communal, and societal level.

Technonatural mediations of elusive airs

This project draws on the spatialities, mobilities and materialities of urban air to explore the transforming relationships between air, humans, technologies, plants and particles from a transdisciplinary perspective.

Microbial-human relations of fermented dough

This project looks at sourdough and injera as cultural artefacts of human-microbial relations that are entangled with artisanal and cultural histories, significance of taste and migration, practices of experimentation, tacit knowledges, and contemporary food trends.

Appraising Risk

Within this international partnership we Interrogate historical data to enhance understanding of environmental crises in the Indian Ocean World

Indian Ocean cyclones: Communicating in times of disaster.

Based on experiences with cyclone Idai, this research investigates the potentials and pitfalls of mobile communication technologies to enhance early warning and disaster preparedness in Zimbabwe

Maritime Geographies

Our interest in the ocean is twofold: On the one hand, we wish to examine the relations between humans and the sea by focusing on coastal waters as a particular contact zone (Haraway 2008).

On the other hand and in line with recent debates in Area Studies, we are interested in maritime regions as fluid spaces that transcend common spatial units of analysis by foregrounding relations and processes of exchange over physical proximity. In linking both, we critically discuss the role of new technologies in processes of knowledge generation about the ocean.

Becoming more-than-human

This project examines shark-bite mitigation technologies through a posthumanist lens to examine maritime contact zones.

Long-term Projects

Apart from these current research activities, we also still continue to pursue some long-term research interests. Following recent dynamics and developments in these research contexts, we benefit from long-standing relations to different actors in these fields.

Living translocality

Based on long-term ethnographic research with Zanzibari-Omani families, this research focuses on the lived experience of translocal connections and their material entanglements.

New Marrakech

This long-term project has studied the transformation of the city of Marrakesh since the late 1990s. At the beginning of the project, we were interested in phenomena in the old city such as gentrification, lifestyle migration, and neocolonialism. More recently, we have mainly focused on the effects of neoliberalization in the entire city area and urban hinterland.

Geographies of Memory

Based on a qualitative research approach, this long-term project first examined different case studies in France and Germany. In France, it was dedicated to the rituals of remembrance of World Wars I and II in Verdun and Normandy. In Germany, it investigated the perpetrator and victim sites of Vogelsang, Obersalzberg, and Dachau. More recently, the focus has been on a theoretical-conceptual approach to the thematic field of geographies of memory.

Previous projects