Universität Hamburg - Institute of Geography
Working Group "Critical Geographies of Global Inequalities"
Germany
Description: The working group „Critical Geographies of Global Inequalities“ concerns itself with persisting relations of inequality and power from a critical perspective. Rather than accepting these conditions as givens, our collective focus is to reveal their socially produced character and thus to interrogate possibilities of transformation. Our work involves theoretical and conceptual approaches as well as empirical research and we aim to discuss our findings with various social actors and to introduce them into social societal processes.
Our regional foci mainly lie in South America and Europe and we pay attention both to events on a local level and to global dynamics, in order to take into account the close entanglements and interdependencies between different scales. Along with involvement with North-South relations and postcolonial theory, subjects such as Social Nature and urban inequality form part of our research. We mainly work with ethnographic and visual methods, as well as critical cartographies and discourse analyses. First and foremost we understand the working group as a space for discussion and mutual exchange, within which we can develop collective standpoints, but also accommodate different types of questions and approaches.
Art meets cartography – artography?
While trying to reflect on our own theoretical and methodological research practices individually and at the same time willing to develop a standing point as a collective, we quickly reached the limits of the conventional repertoires of scientific practice. We realized that thinking, discussing and writing as our standard tools to acquire new perspectives on different themes was at this time not enough for us, so we started to include creative and visual elements into our reflection processes. It became clear that engaging also creatively with our own work made it possible to deal with complex content related issues as well as theoretical questions and methodological approaches at the same time on one piece of paper. In collaboration with Neele Bunjes, a Hamburg based artist and illustrator, we started a collective artistic mapping process based on the interdependencies between art and scientific knowledge production. Moving between the steps reflection, imagination, visualization, representation and discussion over and over again, this map represents the current intermediate result of our discussion that is part of the ongoing negotiation of our positionalities and therefore neither fixed, nor final.
Official contact:
- Martina Neuburger
E-mail:This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. - Tobias Schmitt
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Working Packages: WP2-Methods & Capacity Building
Category: Academic
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