From Siberia with love or angst in the city? On the idea of merging research projects in Novosibirsk and co-teaching in Hamburg and Berlin

Abstract

Angst in the City is the title that the authors of these lines chose for a joint research project and seminar looking into expressions of emotion and social exclusion in diverse urban environments. The title serves as a shorthand for apprehensive feelings that individuals or groups perceive when physically or imaginarily finding themselves in certain spaces in the fabric of the city that they inhabit. The concept of fear will be discussed in more detail below (pp. 7-9). This article has four goals: first, to lay out how this research cooperation on the perception of urban space came into being; second, how it proceeded and what initial results emerged from it; and third, how the research generated the idea of jointly organized teaching. Students who participated in Angst in the City conducted small research projects on their own in Hamburg, Schwerin and Berlin, and four of their essays have been adopted for publication in this special issue of Ethnoscripts. To prepare the conceptual ground for these four contributions is the fourth goal of this article. It closes with a remark on how the students’ projects feed back into our own plans for further research.