Feliciana Chiaradia, February 2026 Venice welcomed us with a stunning sunset over the lagoon. As our train from Munich passed across the water, we could see the mirrored sun reflecting through both windows: a perfect prelude to our journey. The RTG trip to the Biennale of Architecture began early that morning, and everyone was enjoying […]
Text by Feliciana Chiaradia As an expat from Calabria, Italy, I have experienced throughout my life abroad what it means to be away from the things I loved about the place I came from: my family, friends, the mountains rising above the sea… yet less people ever asked me about that. The most common question, […]
Hello from my temporary, but very sunny desk in Eichstätt! My name is Rumya Putcha. I am an associate professor at the University of Georgia in the Franklin College of Arts and Sciences. Currently, I am in residence at KU with the Practicing Place research group as a Mercator fellow. I’ve thoroughly enjoyed my time […]
The dominance of oil as an energy source persists because of how the substance has been and continues to be culturally imagined. In September last year I visited the U.S. state most associated with oil production, and ‘energy capital of the world’, Houston, Texas, to explore how a ruling imaginary of oil has materialised through […]
In 2024, Hannah Mayinza joined our team as a student assistant. In the blog post below, she describes the differences in practices between Germany and her home country, Uganda. Thereby, she shows from an everyday perspective how places are shaped by practices and how practices are shaped by places. The two states being different is […]
In the text below, our fellow Leonie Unkel writes about the conference „Welcome to Retrotopia? Placing Visions of ‘Britishness’ in the Long Twentieth Century“ that the KU Eichstätt hosted in July 2024. She also presented her own work in the course of the conference. ‚Retrotopia’ is a concept coined by the British-Polish sociologist Zygmunt Bauman […]
On June 25, 2024, we had the pleasure of welcoming Dr. Henrike Kohpeiß to Eichstätt where she held a guest lecture and then led a workshop with our fellows the following day. Henrike is a philosopher and postdoctoral researcher at the SFB 1171 “Affective Societies” at the Free University of Berlin. During her lecture, „Respect […]
Rob Shields is Professor and Henry Marshall Tory Endowed Research Chair at University of Alberta, Canada. In June 2022, he joined us in Eichstätt as a Mercator fellow. During this time, he shared his current research on Practical Aesthesis. Our fellow Shruti Malik also had the opportunity to record a podcast episode with Robert Shields. […]
On May 2, we had the pleasure to welcome Jun.-Professor Maria Sulimma for a guest lecture on “Leisurely Gentrification? Conflictual Places and Practices in Contemporary Fiction” at the KU. Jun.-Prof. Sulimma is an American Studies scholar working in the intersecting areas of literary and cultural studies, urban studies, and feminist media studies. Currently, she is […]
Tim Cresswell is Ogilvie Professor at the University of Edinburgh. Trained as a cultural geographer, he is renowned for his extensive works discussing and conceptualizing the role of space, place and mobility in social and cultural life. Amongst the recent academic publications is his book Maxwell Street: Writing and Thinking Place (2019) [1]. Cresswell is […]