“Practicing Place”: DFG funds new research training group

An interdisciplinary team of researchers at the KU could convince the German Research Foundation (DFG) in a multi-level selection procedure for funding new research training groups. The DFG will support the research training group titled “Practicing Place: Soziokulturelle Praktiken und epistemische Konfigurationen“ (Practicing Place: Sociocultural Practices and Epistemic Configurations) with approx. three million euros over an initial period of four and a half years. This is the first DFG-funded research training group at the KU. The project focuses on the academic discussion of place and space in view of global movements, national isolationism, and borderless communication patterns. The range of academic disciplines involved reaches from geography and sociology through philosophy and art history to literary and cultural studies. During the first funding period, two cohorts, each consisting of ten doctoral research fellows and one post-doc candidate, will be provided with excellent working conditions for interdisciplinary research in an internationally oriented scholarly environment.

“Research on the topic of space and place is already an established research focus at the KU. Our university provides an ideal institutional setting for promoting early-career researchers from an interdisciplinary perspective. The close ties and encompassing collaboration with international leading experts in the field of space and place studies underline that there has already been very successful previous work in this area. The success of this group of KU researchers is an important and encouraging step on our path towards membership in the German Research Foundation”, explains Prof. Dr. Jens Hogreve, vice president for research at the KU.

With its research focus on space and place, the new research training group takes up an issue that is highly topical in view of current global interconnections, flight and migration movements and worldwide communication patterns: How do families, local groups, regional associations, nations, religious groups or supranational organizations define themselves in relation to other formations? How do they negotiate their territory, determine their regions, imagine their spatial environment, etc. in processes of dialogue and exchange with others, or in practices of confrontation and differentiation? Among the topics addressed by the research training group are, for instance, the increasing importance of the place of the street and public squares that can be observed in various protest cultures since the Arab Spring and that has distinctly picked up speed under digitalization conditions, or the rapidly growing demarcation lines and exclusionary processes between poor and rich regions of the world.
The research training group does not conceive of place in monolithic ways, as reflected in the idea of an immutable homeland or in the sense of clear-cut scenarios of origin and descent. To the contrary, the research fellows investigate place from a decidedly dynamic perspective, i.e. they focus on the diverse and complex social, political, cultural, and medial practices that continually create and recreate places and that characterize them in terms of ongoing processes of change.

Questions relating to place, emplacement, and localization have so far primarily been approached within single disciplines, using a particular field’s specific methods. However, it is precisely the entanglement of social, political, artistic and literary aspects that calls for a pronounced interdisciplinary approach. Such a joint approach, chosen by KU researchers, is unique within the international field of studies on space and place. For this reason, the group of applicants has additionally involved cooperation partners at the KU from the departments of history, archaeology, and theology.

An outstanding feature of the project is the encompassing and long-standing international network that the applicants have maintained with distinguished scholars in the field of space and place studies in all the disciplines involved. The expertise of the national and international cooperation partners will be systematically integrated in the research training group, ensuring an excellent disciplinary as well as interdisciplinary training of doctoral candidates on a competitive international level.

The team of applicants consists of (in alphabetical order):
·     Dr. Nathalie Aghoro (Assistant Professor, KU Chair of American Studies)
·     Prof. Dr. Joost van Loon (KU Chair of General Sociology and Sociological Theory)
·     Prof. Dr. Richard Nate (KU Chair of English Literary Studies)
·     Jun.-Prof. Dr. Annika Schlitte (Junior Professor of Philosophy at the Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz)
·     Prof. Dr. Kerstin Schmidt (KU Chair of American Studies)
·     Prof. Dr. Robert Schmidt (KU Professorship of Process-Oriented Sociology)
·     Prof. Dr. Christian Steiner (KU Chair of Human Geography)
·     Prof. Dr. Hans-Martin Zademach (KU Professorship of Economic Geography)
·     Prof. Dr. Michael F. Zimmermann (KU Chair of Art History)