Teching Research Projects

How is Slack being used to create collegiality during the pandemic?

How are the crisis meetings in the digital game Among us related to the pandemic crisis?

And what does a museum tour with a robot look like?

A group of students on the Transcultural Studies/Cultural Anthropology master's programme at the University of Bonn focused on these and other everyday digital practices in a teaching research project. The results of the research were presented on the blog of the dgv Commission "Digitalisation in Everyday Life" https://www.goingdigital.de/.

The research follows a wealth of different traces of digitalisation in our everyday lives. From digital games to digital agriculture, different areas of life were examined in which our practices are interwoven with digitalisation.

The project was also characterised by digitalities in several respects: In terms of content, the research projects were dedicated to online practices in locally situated contexts. At the same time, the collaboration in teaching was also purely digital. And the coronavirus measures shifted the ethnographic research into digital worlds. These special circumstances are also reflected in many of the students' research projects and questions. The coronavirus pandemic and its effects transformed many digital practices and gave rise to new ones.

TO THE BLOG: https://www.goingdigital.de/beyond-the-black-mirror/

Students have published the results of the teaching research project "Beyond the Black Mirror - Cultural Analyses of Digital Worlds" 2020/21 at the University of Bonn in audio, video and text contributions.

About the teaching research project:
Everyone is talking about virtual spaces. Computer games entice us with new digital worlds. Social media open up so-called online spaces. Technological dystopias promise a post-humanism in which human practice blurs with that of machines. But is "space" just a metaphor for digital media? Is there a space behind the Black
mirror? Can cyber spaces also be researched from a cultural anthropological perspective?

A cultural analysis of digital spaces attempts to do justice to the particularities of digitality in terms of methodology and theory. It explores online practices in locally situated contexts and considers cultural constructions of and through digital technologies. The connections between actors, servers and programmes are revealed between individual practices and society. How much culture is there in an algorithm? How do interfaces write into everyday practices? What meanings do source codes generate? How do power relations manifest themselves in digital technologies? And what potential do online spaces offer for appropriation by actors?

The joint teaching project examines the implications of digitality in everyday practice from a cultural anthropological perspective. Students will learn how to conduct an ethnographic research project, from the initial research sketch to publication. The results of the research project will be published in blog format from summer 2021.

The results of the teaching research project were published as a book:

BONN|ER|LEBEN
Streifzüge zur Bonner Alltagskultur

About the project:
The city is a diverse living space for people and therefore a complex field of research in cultural anthropology. Here, social dynamics become visible and cultural constellations are negotiated. The living environment and practices of the actors are juxtaposed with the symbolic dimensions of discourses, legislation and orders, as well as the architectural and built spaces within which various practices are located. Questions of space are always also questions of cultural and social orders. Different actors have different opportunities for social, cultural, economic, political and legal participation. Questions of inclusion and exclusion, processes of inclusion and exclusion in the city and in certain urban locations are of central importance for the project. How is the city perceived and utilised by actors? What possibilities does it offer for shaping the city? How do spaces become "spaces of fear" that are experienced as dangerous and where do "spaces of possibility" for creative practices emerge? What do image-laden symbols and people like Beethoven have to do with Bonn for the city's residents? Which places and landmarks are important to people in the city? And how can the city be experienced anew with all the senses?

The joint research project examines the dynamics of urbanity, city and space using the example of the city of Bonn as a collective project. The course examines the interactions between architecture, built artefacts, people's experiences and ideas and poses the question of how a city worth living in can be created for its inhabitants. Through the research work, a variety of heterogeneous perspectives of Bonn's city dwellers will be collected in the course of the project. As a result, patterns in the experience and description of the city will become recognisable in the overall project and a multi-layered intersubjective picture will emerge that takes into account different perspectives of diversity, gender and interculturality. The research work takes place in cooperation with regional cultural organisations and institutions. Following the study project, the results of the research project will be communicated to a broad public through various interventions and publications from summer 2020.

"Cultural anthropological approaches to media representations of region - a teaching research project "As part of our teaching research project 18/19, we focussed on a variety of connecting lines between hashtags, Instagram images and imaginations of region. The guiding principle was always to look at "small" and initially inconspicuous practices in the everyday use of images in order to understand larger contexts based on these observations, which suggest a specific reading of the region. What Pott-Korn, light art and drinking halls have to do with the aestheticisation of work and regional figurations of the "Pottoriginal" can be read in 17 contributions at http://alltagspott.blog.
Since the crisis in coal and steel production in the 1960s and 1970s, the Ruhr area, as a former industrial region, has been in an ongoing phase of economic and socio-cultural upheaval that is difficult to summarise with the term structural change. The region continues to be the scene of extensive adaptation and change processes that are shaped and characterised by various players.
 
Regional identity marketing has been booming ever since, which is reflected in numerous funding programmes and political measures for regional branding. Recently, an attempt was made to showcase the Ruhr with an environmental focus, bringing the region onto the international stage for the second time in a row (after Essen's title as European Capital of Culture 2010, representing the 53 cities of the Ruhr Regional Association): Essen's title of European Green Capital 2017, understood as the prelude to further "green" external representations of the region. In 2018, the Ruhr region is now under the motto "Glückauf Zukunft", which summarises a wide range of events relating to the end of coal mining in the region.

However, beyond its political address, the region and its representation is also becoming a topic of everyday cultural and media negotiations. On the Instagram platform, for example, there are numerous posts with regionally connoted hashtags: #ruhrgebiet” (with 338.078, 11.12.17), #ruhrpott (398.652), #ruhryork (40.186), #ruhrpottliebe (39.180), #industriekultur (31.806), #ruhrpottromantik (29.290), #heimatpottential (13.469), #ruhrgebietsliebe (10.894). These media practices anchored in everyday life form the starting point for the teaching research project, which is intended to appeal in particular to Master's students of cultural anthropology in the first two semesters. Based on a social constructivist approach, students will design and conduct their own ethnographic field research and answer questions about the creation of a regional "imaginarium": How is the region staged and by whom? Which actors with which cultural capital are involved? Which regional narratives are translated into images? What temporality is represented? How are the images designed and interpreted by the Instagrammers? How are they related to others?
 
In the two-semester teaching research project, participants are introduced to the topics of spatial staging and visual and performative practices in local media through joint (compulsory) excursions, in-depth reading and independent research activities. From a cultural anthropological perspective, these discussions are intended to contribute to an understanding of the negotiation processes of a region and, in particular, to critically scrutinise local media and the practices linked to them as discursive opportunities for participation.

“From Fiji to Bonn united for climate” is the motto of the 23rd World Climate Conference (United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, 23rd Conference of the Parties, COP23), which took place from 6 to 17 November in Bonn. The aim of the conference was to negotiate the details of the implementation of the 2015 Paris Agreement. Parallel to the official conference, climate protection experts from all over the world and a wide variety of social sectors – science, business, politics, religious communities and environmental associations – met to discuss the triad of questions regarding climate: “Climate Change – Energy Questions – Ideas for Sustainability” (Homepage BMUB FAQ COP23). Not only political scientists, geographers and natural scientists take part in the ongoing debates, but cultural anthropology can also particularly contribute to an understanding of anthropogenic climate change and its consequences. After all, the debates also aim to understand how people experience global events, such as climate change, how they deal with it, how they talk about it and what patterns of action they develop while dealing with the issue. These outlined topics and questions are dealt with mainly in cultural sciences.

COP23 is, therefore, the starting point for an in-depth cultural anthropological examination of the topics energy, climate/change and sustainability, which is intended to address master students of Cultural Anthropology in the first and second semester. The two-semester teaching research project aims to develop an objective and critical understanding of the topics mentioned above. The focus will be on the following questions: How do communities react to climate change, the energy revolution, etc.? Which practices/patterns of action play a role in this context? What narratives? Which socio-cultural dimensions of climate change or current energy consumption are emerging and can be made tangible? What are national, (supra)regional and local reactions to climate change and the transformation of energy systems? Within the scope of these questions, the students are to conceive independent ethnographic field research projects, which are to be presented at a self-organised workshop/symposium in the summer semester of 2018.