Author: Huib Ernste

Prof. Huib Ernste Radboud University Nijmegen
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A passion for teaching

Teaching is much more than just conveying information from the lecturer to students. Nowadays students are anyhow over-fed with information, through a multitude of different channels and media., so that they cannot see the wood for the trees anymore. Real teaching is an experience and a two or multiple way communication process. It is a communal and shared feeling. Especially during the Covid-19 period, when everything was just online and at a distance, we noticed the difference and what was missing. You cannot study the environment and sense of places only from books and from behind the screen. Even though we also embrace the fascinating possibilities of new digital tools in teaching, we are now also very happy to slowly but surely get back to an almost normal teaching situation, where we can feel again the personal engagement of both lecturers and students with each other and with the environment and our joint passion for the geography of places. We very much hope to be able to go into the field with our students again and have excursions together which also creates dense bonds between the learners and the teachers. Since this is certainly also my and our mission in teaching geography, we are also very proud, that one of our appreciated colleagues and Urban geographer, Dr Rianne van Melik, of our Geography Group has now received the well deserved Radboud University Teaching Award (click on the picture to view the short video about Rianne van Melik).

But this is not just about Rianne, but about the passion for teaching, which we try to cherish in our Human Geography group as a whole. The relation to our students is something we take very seriously. So this is not about fulfilling teaching obligations or about following the directives of the educational centre of the university, but about really having a passion for teaching and an engagement with the curiosity of our students.

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Our Certainties and Doubts

In our current ego centred society, it seems important to have a strong profile, otherwise, one is not seen nor heard. One needs to be convinced of oneself and maybe even a bit narcissistic to appear front stage. But with 7.8 billion ‘egos’ on this globe in 2021 it is quite an effort to stick your head out, and to be someone and to survive in the struggle for attention. It was already Georg Simmel (1903) in his famous essay on the “The Metropolis and Mental Life”, who noted that on the one side, the dense and anonymous urban life creates the liberty to be who one likes to be and to not be pigeonholed by the rigid structures of a closed community, but that on the other side of that same coin, one needs to put a lot of effort in gaining a recognised position and identity in these same anonymous urban settings. These kinds of urban conditions seem now to have become ‘planetary’, and in our daily life, we seek our own place and identity, our own certainty of who we are and what we stand for,  while at the same time we try to avoid being pinpointed and fixed, and we try to overcome our current situation and envision an alternative future. We thus also question and doubt our current position. We are torn between our assumed certainties and hopeful doubts.

I, myself never had the self-confidence of a strong ego, and always felt the doubts and the struggle for recognition. Having lived at many different places, where one, over and over again, needed to find one’s own position again, and maybe as a side-effect, I also was lacking the expressive eloquence to state the ideas I stand for loud and clear, the constant struggle for who-we-are became very apparent to me. Although science and an academic career was never my pre-set goal, when it by coincidence happened to me, also legitimised my doubts and my continuous search for my own convictions. In science, it is our profession to always ask critical questions and to scrutinise all presupposed certainties. Science is not about finding final answers, but about continuously posing questions. This also resounds in the, for me so inspiring, philosophical anthropology of Helmuth Plessner, who states that we cannot essentialise who we as human being, or as a single person are. We are the undetermined being (homo absconditus), and as a consequence, we continuously need to (re-)create ourselves. But of course one cannot profile oneself without an audience. Who we are is, therefore, not the result of a lonely creative act, but of creative inter-actions, it is a social construction, it is ‘teamwork’. Who we are, what we know, and what we stand for is created in interaction and in team-work. We never do this alone. This also coined my vision on the development of scientific knowledge in general. The core of what we do as scientists is to express to our audience what we claim to know and invite others to scrutinise these claims and come up with better and new ideas. Although we are very aware of all the shortcomings of the current scientific institutions and practices in this respect, it is still the core of knowledge production. Based on these ideas, it might not be surprising that also the Theory of Communicative Rationalisation of Jürgen Habermas (1985), and similar later ideas, such as those of Axel Honneth et al. (2017), have been a source for inspiration for me. But since doubt is also inherent in the social construction of knowledge, also the enemies of these ideas became dear to me, and helped me to understand my own position, and to also discover the shortcomings of my own and their tentative ‘truths’. The continuous struggle and partly even conflict is the core of the production of knowledge and wisdom (see also the work of my colleagues at our own Department: Landau, 2019 and van Leeuwen, 2007). This is also well reflected in the following quote of the Swiss psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Carl G. Jung:

But current times are rather refractory to this scientific process of jointly making sense of the world around us. The individualisation in the assessment of our scientific production denies the social- and team efforts involved. The exaggerated celebrity and ‘excellence’ culture around certain ‘stars’ in science suppress the productive force of doubts and critique. The publish or perish culture forces scientists to stay within the comfortable and well-established mainstreams of thought instead of delving into more marginal critical approaches. Of course, being critical is not necessarily better than being mainstream, but it is the debate between them, which should be the core of our scientific endeavours. Relativisation and scrutinisation of our own and other’s position are not appreciated. Being a critical mind, even within an academic setting does not contribute to our career. University administrations rather prefer tame and easy-going functionaries, who do not ask uneasy questions. What is true for academia is also true in general in society and in governance. Also there we do not seem to cherish the doubt and debate, or openness and recognition of others, sufficiently. Simple undisputed truths and ‘leaders’ who forcefully express and apply these truths are called for by many populist movements. Former US President Donald Trump fulfilled that role with fervour, while Barack Obama, as expressed in his latest book, was blamed to be hesitant and doubting. Robert Putnam in his famous book with the title Bowling Alone, addresses how in society one increasingly seems to lose the ability to engage with political inter-action and debate, to engage in the dialectics of certainty and doubt. To reinstall or revive our ability to find wisdom in the social interaction and scientific debate is however more than re-creating a community of equally minded people as an immunised comfort zone, within which we can find confirmation of what we already thought to know.  As Helmuth Plessner argues in his The Limits of Community: A Critique of Social Radicalism (1999), it demands to actively engage with the ‘other’ with the ‘unknown’ and ‘uncertain’ and to actively position one-self and one’s convictions in between certainty and doubt. Of course we can also interpret the mutual identification and recognition of ourselves and our potential opponents as a kind of ‘knowledge’ community in which also disagreement may persist, but which nevertheless could lead each of us to new insights.

References

Habermas, J. (1985) The Theory of Communicative Action, Vol. 1: Reason and the Rationalization of Society, and Vol. 2: Lifeworld and System: A Critique of Functionalist Reason. Beacon, Boston.

Honneth, A.,  Rancière, J., Genel, K., & Deranty, J-Ph. (2017) Recognition or Disagreement. A Critical Encounter on the Politics of Freedom, Equality, and Identity. Columbia University Press, New York.

Krüger, H.P. (2019) Homo Absconditus: Helmuth Plessners Philosophische Anthropologie Im Vergleich. [Homo Absconditus: Helmuth Plessners philosophical anthropology in comparison]. de Gruyter, Berlin.

Landau, F. (2019) Agonistic Articulations in the ‘Creative’ City. Routledge, Abingdon.

Leeuwen B. van (2007) A Formal Recognition of Social Attachments: Expanding Axel Honneth’s Theory of Recognition. Inquiry. Vol. 50, No. 2, pp.  180-205.

Plessner, H. (1999 [1924]) The Limits of Community: A Critique of Social Radicalism. Humanities Press, Amherst.

Putnam, R.D. (2000) Bowling Alone. The collapse and revival of American community. Simon & Shuster, New York.

Simmel, G. (1976 [1903]) The Metropolis and Mental Life. The Sociology of Georg Simmel. Free Press, New York.

 

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What Groningen does with us and what we do with Groningen

In 1976 I started studying Geography at the University of Groningen. At that time we did not have a free choice where to study, as geography was a popular study programme, and there were not always sufficient free slots at the university of our preference. An allocation committee decided where you could go. I was sent to Groningen. In hindsight, I did not regret it, as Groningen as one of the more peripheral University Cities, also had a vibrant student life because students could not always afford to go to their parental home in the weekends. The ‘Pakhuis’ (Warehouse) was our favourite student pub for the weekends. Notwithstanding the not so fancy (but cheap) housing accommodation during my studies, we were happy with our newly gained autonomy. My first room somewhere around the Plantsoenstraat, at that time, had rather primitive sanitary facilities, with a separate toilet-building in the back garden. For a shower, we anyhow had to go to the university sports facilities. Soon I moved to downtown, in the red light district. My room was noisy and in the wintertime, I had to go to the university library to keep warm, which by the way, unintendedly was also profitable for my study results. Then we had the opportunity with some extra state subsidies to rent an apartment in a highrise building on the outskirts of the city in Vinkhuizen. For us, this was ‘luxury’, although on the ninth floor when the wind was sweeping over the flat Groninger countryside, the wind howled through the cracks, and the elevator always smelled of piss, and we had to queue up to make a telephone call at the only telephone booth in the street, in these very cheap low-end housing conditions.


Plantsoenstraat                    Lopende Diep                                    Aquamarijnstraat         Barmaheerd

Nevertheless, we had a great time, during which friendships for life were made. And the University also allowed us to discover and develop our interests. Groningen in my experience was and is a great place. A place where our formative years took place became very dear to us, and it still is, although I lived at many other places since then. Not just as a student city, but also in other respects, Groningen can be characterised by its typical atmosphere. It is almost the only bigger urban centre in the whole of the North of the Netherlands, and has the allure of a big city, in a part of the Netherlands, which is rather down to earth, and where people are usually characterised by their no-nonsense attitude. The historic centre with its many street cafés, and markets is iconic. The Grote Markt, where we remember the flower seller, James Squarrosa (Jaap Bloemendaal), nicknamed, ‘the oracle of Andijk’, standing on the back of his truck, yelling that you cannot leave without taking a few of his plants and flowers for almost nothing. And when you believed you were satisfied, he always added another plant to it. He was a weekly returning phenomenon, which you would never again forget. But also the vegetable market where my wife would explore al stands to find where the salad was the cheapest because we had to live with a single student allowance.  And in the city hall on the ‘Grote Markt’ we also married, a bit low profile, in a hippy fashion at those days, having our wedding dinner on the pancake ship in one of the canals of Groningen. Groningen has changed much since then. Many parts of the city have been revitalised and refurbished. Groningen also added to its diverse hipster-like offerings along the Folkingestraat, which in the past had been more or less a  no-go area, and created a totally new atmosphere, which is so nicely described and celebrated in the love song for Groningen by the cabaretier Janneke Jager (click on the picture to hear her song (in Dutch)). And this brings me to the topic I wanted to raise here. Because, what creates an urban atmosphere? What is an urban atmosphere? Is it an attribute of the place or is it an attribute of our subjective experience, infused by our memories, nostalgia and habitus? Who creates or causes these atmospheres?

An urban atmosphere is certainly not just a set of functional properties, which we can rationally appreciate or criticise. An atmosphere is a feeling, an affective aspect of a place. It is the emotion which a place evokes if we think of it or remember it? Or is it the emotion we experience if we immerse in it and are directly encountering it at that moment? Urban atmospheres are a central concept in placemaking and place experience. They refer to ‘a class of experiences that occur before and alongside the formation of subjectivity, across human and non-human materialities, and in-between subject/object distinctions’ (Anderson, 2009, p. 78).

Conceptually and theoretically this concept draws on the new phenomenology of Hermann Schmitz (2019), and on the further development of these ideas by Gernot Böhme (2014), and has been applied also to the city of Groningen by the German Geographer Jürgen Hasse, one of our recent Alexander von Humboldt Lecturers at the Radboud University.

Prof. Jürgen Hasse develops a methodology to investigate urban atmospheres, which he describes as ‘micrology’ but which is sometimes also denoted as ‘phenomenography’ (De Matteis, Bille, Griffero & Jelić, 2019). In a nutshell, Hasse (2012) describes urban atmospheres as belonging ‘to the life of the city like its traffic flows, they come and go with the situational change of the urban. They are different in this location than in any other, they spontaneously emerge out of the presence of things and the dynamics of life or are the object of deliberate production. They have their own significance in the lives of people as well as in the unique character and history of a place. Where they are produced according to a systemic calculation and interest, they fulfil functions as affective dispositions in an ideological, economic or political context’ (pp. 11-12).

Urban atmospheres, therefore, are emotional experiences of the human surroundings; are dependent on how we live these places, and how we actively perform these places. They do not just have passive semiotic meanings which just need to be discovered or ‘read’, but are continuously creating meanings through the performative stream of human dynamics. Urban Atmospheres can not be reduced to specific aspects, but need to be seen as wholes in between subject and object, as ‘in-between spaces’.

Urban Atmospheres are situations, which consist of the things that are, of problematisations of what is, and of programmes for realising what is not yet. In this respect, one can also distinguish between individual personal situations and more collectively shared situations. Atmospheres are not just created by human interventions but as well by the emerging phenomena of nature. Atmospheres have the power of indentedly or unintendedly affecting what happens and what takes place. Atmospheres are not just things, which are there and which might be transformed but cannot really disappear, but are ‘half-things’, which might be linked to things, but which are much more volatile in their performance and in the way they are experienced. Atmospheres are communicated and experiences through our different bodily senses, which then are re-combined into a ‘synesthetic’ holistic impression. The concept of Urban Atmospheres also re-covers the importance of emotions and affects, which in the course of the modernistic and rational project, seems to have gone lost and in this way also allows a critique of one-dimensional economics of aesthetics but also allows access to the constructive dimension of atmospheres.

Usually, Atmospheres are distinguished from Moods. Atmospheres are seen as a-specific and a-personal reality, while moods are seen as personal and individual and therefore also more specific feelings of being in this world, and of being related to this world. Moods create a disposition of the self and create the sensibility for the experience of urban atmospheres. ‘Whether we can and want to feel at home in the urban space of a city is never solely dependent on the urban atmospheres of that city, but also on personal moods, i.e. the affective relationship to living in the city in general and to living in that specific city at that moment in time, in particular’ (Hasse, 2012, p. 20).

In this respect, I see some similarities between the concept of an Urban Atmosphere, and what one could describe with Piere Bourdieu as the affective dimension of a “Field”, while the concept of a Mood could then be parallelled with the affective dimension of our ‘Habitus’, although one might object that Bourdieu sees Habitus as a much more structural personal disposition, while Hasse sees Mood as a much more volatile and momentary personal disposition. But for understanding the difference between Mood and Atmosphere this might nevertheless be helpful, in my view.

Furthermore, Hasse pragmatically describes Urban Atmospheres along several sensible dimensions, like:

  • The built infrastructure
  • The smell
  • The light and shade
  • The soundscape
  • The feeling of the ‘air’
  • The rhythms and movements
  • The looks and sights
  • The habitus and the way people dress
  • The presence of nature and other life forms (animals)
  • The ‘family of things’ as media for distinctions

In this way, he comes up with a lively and very detailed scientific, analytic and synesthetic description of the places Janneke Jager sings about in her above-mentioned love song for Groningen. It shows what geographical science can contribute to understanding the role of the affective dimensions of places in our daily lives.

If you click on the image below, the original text (in German) will appear. In you prefer a (quick and dirty) translation in English, click here.

We sometimes only become aware of the special effects of urban atmospheres, when they abruptly change. Some weeks ago a newspaper article (in Dutch) in NRC-Handelsblad described the Vismarkt in Groningen in Covid-19 lockdown times. This makes us aware of the quality of urban life which is all of the sudden missing, but which we otherwise seemed to take for granted.

The affective and emotional elements of space determine where we feel at home and part of the local community, where we feel attracted and thrilled by the experience of the ‘strange’ places we visit, how we can make places hospitable for ‘strangers’, how places can provoke us to think differently, where ‘diversity’ or an elan for hopeful change is ‘in the air’, what characterises ‘no-go’ places or inspiring and creative places, where we feel the respect for historical and cultural heritage, or where we feel the disgust for evil pasts, and to which places we feel attached, or with which we can identify. These feelings are the hidden but essential drivers of our everyday doings, maybe much more so than our rational thinking.

References

Anderson, B. (2009) Affective atmospheres. Emotion, Space and Society. Vol 2, No. 2, pp. 77-81.

Böhme, G. (2014) The theory of atmospheres and its applications. Interstices: Journal of Architecture and Related Arts. pp. 93-100.

De Matteis, F., Bille, M., Griffero, T. & Jelić, A. (2019) Phenomenographies: Describing the plurality of atmospheric worlds. Ambiances. Vol. 5, pp. 1-22.

Hasse, J. (2018) Märkte und ihre Atmosphären. Micrologien räumlichen Erlebens. [Markets and their Atmospheres. Micrologies of spatial experiencing.] Vol. 2, Karl Alber, Freiburg.

Hasse, J. (2012) Atmosphären der Stadt. Aufgespürte Räume. [Atmospheres of the City. Felt spaces.] Jovis, Berlin.

Schmitz, H. (2019) New Phenomenology: A Brief Introduction. Mimesis, Milano.

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Conspiracy Theory and Science

Lately ‘Fake News’ and ‘Conspiracy Theories’ are the talk of the day. We believe that their followers are ridiculously stupid. and unknowledgeable. Some of them even believe that the result of the presidential election in the USA is a hoax which was deliberately set up by the democrats. Of course, sheer nonsense. And, Yes, we need to fiercely stand up against it. Especially science, as the rational counter programme should provide the ‘fact checks’ and propagate the truth.

But this is where it becomes complicated: Already ages ago, in the 1950’s the expert in cybernetics, Heinz von Foerster, wrote that knowledge or on other words: that epistemology is politics. Later on, it was Michel Foucault who linked the discourse about knowledge with the geometry of power in our society. The distinction between political opinions and scientific knowledge blurs. And yes, indeed, it is generally accepted in the social sciences that science is highly political. In our research, we focus on the most urgent societal problems and try to contribute to their solution, and therefore make science highly relevant but also highly political. It is difficult to see the societal relevance of investigating black holes, but it is evident that we should find solutions for the Covid-19 pandemic, and we should try to overcome racism and poverty. But if our science is so political, what makes it different from any other political opinions? The main difference is of course that we have the better arguments. As Jürgen Habermas wrote, it is the power of the better argument, which should be convincing in a rational communicative debate. Having different opinions is not the problem, as long as we are debating with each other, as long as we exchange arguments, and are willing to put our arguments to the test, and as long as we find the words to convince the others. This is where good science can stand out; in the way, it can provide empirical evidence, in the way it can logically derive conclusions, and in the way it may underpin certain interpretations. Combined with an effective translation into everyday language, science can be a main political force and a real contribution to society. People will also listen to it. Take for example the currently popular crossovers between different media like in the DWDD University on Dutch Television or take the scientists who become celebrity guests in talk shows during the current Covid-19 pandemic. Yes, we as scientists, we should be at the front stage in many topical societal debates. We should shout out loud. This performative stage work is certainly not my personal talent (there are others in our geography group who are more talented in this respect), but we do try to raise the critical awareness of our students and we try to mobilise their societal engagement and stimulate their communicative skills to fulfil this responsible role in civil society.

However, in science one also needs to guard for being too much taken away be certain political ideals, and for not being open to alternatives ideals, ideas and arguments. Ideals are often rather simplistic categorisations of supposed ‘goods’ and ‘evils’. Idealists can easily become as autistic as many conspiracy theorists and negators of real facts. Not the difference in opinions, ideals or convictions, but the lack of scientific debate is then the problem. And each debate starts with listening, with taking the other seriously and with meeting each other at eye level. Populism is fed by classes of neglected and not-listened-to people. They feel like the famous comic chick Calimero, who always feels as a marginalised minority confronted with a large overbearing majority. ‘They are big and I am small…’  Constructing and blaming some strawmen has always been an easy way of self-justification. But that goes in both directions. In the same way, one cannot counter populism by ridiculing it, by not taking it seriously and by not starting a discourse. This is, however, easier said than done…

Thinking of the current political situation, it seems as if science is a big exception, and is much more rational and communicative. Scientists seem to play the role of the wiser and more reasonable ones. But some critical self-reflection might be justified here. Because being at the politically correct side sometimes also gives us the illusion of truth. If we engage against racism, against colonialism, against inequality, against injustice, against climate change, or whatever, the enemy, the evil other, is easily identified and blamed. A Calimero-like reflex. But a second look can disguise this view as partly ‘fake’ and as another ‘conspiracy theory’. A closer look often shows that we, ourselves, are the so-called ‘evil others’. Such imaginary contradictions are not that uncommon in science. Science is not separate from society and its populistic tendencies. Science is always in danger of becoming a playball of the political economy of academia and of scientific populism. Also in science one sometimes observes such self recursive and self-emphasising bubbles like we also see in social media, with their own ‘truths’ and their own ‘enemies’, their own journals, their own conferences and their own fan clubs of followers and Maecenas. Science is not different from everyday life.

In this situation, scientific doubt becomes a precious virtue. The willingness to recognise and not prejudice the other and to express openness for alternatives without apriori enciphering away one’s own arguments and judgements. We need to ask who (and why) is the other and we should try to understand them. A difficult dilemma, between clearly positioning oneself while also being ready to move on to new insights and understandings, between clearly communicating what we really believe to know and interaction for the sake of gaining better knowledge. Like in society also in science the debate around this dilemma is reviving. The dilemma, however, is not just the problem, but also the solution. We should not be tied to fixed positions, to fixed categorisations, of fixed conceptualisation and essentialising judgements, but we should always be in between, on the move, in transgression, crossing borders, in a state of change. Although this blog-site has placemaking as title, scientific placemaking in this line of reasoning should focus on creating spaces for change, change of knowledge, change of understanding, change of position and change of place. Only in this way we can fight prejudice, conspiracy and populism, not just in science but also in society.

Not so long ago, one of my favourite columnists wrote a background article on this issue in the Dutch newspaper NRC Handelsblad, which I share with you here in my own freely translated version.

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PhD Defence by Rodrigo Bueno Lacy

Friday, November 13, for many a curious date, one of our members of the Geography Group, Rodrigo Bueno Lacy, successfully defended his PhD Thesis entitled ‘In the image of Kronos – or how Europe is devouring itself. The iconological construction of EUropean identity, its geopolitical implications for the project of European integration and why it needs to be re-imagined ‘. Because of the Covid-19 pandemic, the opponents and audience needed to follow the defence at a distance via the live stream connection.

In his thesis he addresses how consciously or unconsciously the European identity and implicitly of course what is excluded from being ‘European’ is socially constructed also by means of cartographic images. The relation to the title of my personal website is obvious. This is a prominent form of Placemaking. Rodrigo strongly criticises how this European identity is superimposed and enforced upon others and how many are also excluded in this way. In his thesis, he develops a ‘critical cartography’. In this defence, he was generally praised for his emancipatory engagement. On the other hand, the opponents almost jointly addressed in how far the imagination of an evil top-down power superimposing a specific conceptualisation of a European identity, does justice to the diversity and layered identities of Europe. In the same way, one could ask who the ‘other’ in this case is? From this discussion, one might also wonder in how far this very engaged view, is maybe also contributing to, instead of emancipating from an ‘us’-‘them’ thinking, which he, in the first instance, intended to criticise.  Reality in this sense might be much more complex and probably needs to be looked at much more from a relational perspective starting with a flat ontology. Nevertheless, addressing this issue in the way Rodrigo did, already contributes to a critical debate about how identity is not naturally given but continuously is part of identity politics and the politics of placemaking. This cannot be stressed too much.

It is again fascinating to see that the basic issues addressed and the theories mobilised in this analysis are very generally applicable in many different fields of Human Geography, Spatial Planning and Environmental Politics, irrespective if it is about borders, migration, integration, tourism, diversity, urban development, mobility, place experiences, economic relationships, armed conflicts or whatever. Especially in human geography, we tend to look for local contexts and the situational aspects of many phenomena and want to unveil the small stories of everyday life, but these more general aspects also show that there are also larger stories to be told. Looking into these general mechanisms of placemaking is also an essential aspect of doing fundamental research in academia. In that respect, Rodrigo’s contribution to the debate is a very valuable one.

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First MOOC of Radboud University

On the second of November, with a few months delay, because of Covid-19 pandemic situation, we finally launched our MOOC on Qualitative Research Methods, in close cooperation with the Geography Department of the University of Zurich. This is the first MOOC of the Radboud University and therefore a first step bringing our university into the 21st century of online teaching. The Radboud University can be very proud of its beautiful green campus, especially also in this autumn season, and for a long time has seen this as their competitive edge, and therefore was very reluctant in developing off-campus online education. In the meantime, the university has become aware that one needs both, a beautiful campus for in-person and on-location teaching as well as an online presence reaching out and accessible for a worldwide audience. And I am proud that with our MOOC we could contribute to both, as our online course is combined with on-campus teaching in a real blended way.

But our course is more than just an online presence of our university. It is as well a dynamic platform in which different universities can share their expertise in Qualitative Research Methods with their own students as well as with a larger audience. It is therefore also a platform on which we openly try to bring together the best one can get in this field from wherever in the world. As such it is also an attempt to ‘de-border’ our university in particular and academia in general, and a contribution to a sharing society. Our course will therefore also for certain develop further and offer a spectrum of different modules for a diversity of needs.

If you are interested you can peek into our online course: https://courses.swissmooc.ch/courses/course-v1:UZH+RadboudMANBCU2033UZHGEO242+201920/about

In the current times of the Covid-19 pandemic, of course, the emergence of all kinds of quick-and-dirty online teaching modes are ubiquitous. This MOOC, however, is very different as we started this project well before the pandemic hit us. We developed this not for pandemic reasons but to get the best out of both online and on-campus teaching. We also wanted to move beyond many free online courses which for reasons of accessibility also lowered the standards for academic teaching. We really wanted to keep up our high academic ambitions. At the same time we also did not want to turn everything academia has to offer into an endless sequence of brief video’s, no, we know that it is the mix of different modes of teaching (watching, reading, doing, discussing, presenting, reviewing, engaging, reflecting, assessing, practising, etc. etc.) which stimulates the learning experience. Many features of online teaching can help us in doing that. It is also this, which is the big challenge for me in developing this MOOC and in developing it further. I learned a lot as I usually do from teaching and interacting with students. These kinds of intellectual challenges make scientists ticking.

Especially now, under the current pandemic situation, we became again aware of how important it is to not just academically reflect at a distance (at least 1.5 m), but also to be physically and personally confronted with the topics we investigate and we teach about. The direct exchange, the touch, the feeling, the engaging and experiencing is central in our learning, not just in relation to the objects and subjects of our study, but also in relation to each other, to the (fellow) students and to the lecturers. In the current on-campus meetings with students, which enhance our MOOC, I experience the more, how important it is to really experience that both lecturers, tutors and students need to be in a collaborative and friendship relationship to jointly discover and learn. Under the current difficult pandemic conditions teaching sometimes really sucks, but on the other hand, it is still a big privilege… as this cartoon, which I found on the pinboard at our department next to the xerox machine, expresses.

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Making Policies against Migrant Smuggling

On Thursday, September 24, 2020 our Phd candidate Federico Alagna, successfully defended his PhD thesis.

Federico was part of a double degree programme together with the University of Bologna, and from the side of the Radboud University was supervised by Prof. Huib Ernste, dr. Joris Schapendonk and dr. Martin van der Velde.

His thesis is titled: SHIFTIG GOVERNANCE. Making Policies against Migrant Smuggling across the EU, Italy and Sicily.

Abstract
This research seeks to understand the policy-making dynamics related to migrant smuggling within the European Union, focusing in particular on the Italian case and on the Sicilian sub-case, over the period 2014-2019.
The study is based on an operational definition of migrant smuggling which goes beyond a merely legal understanding of it and considers smuggling in its persistent tension between security and human rights. To do so, the phenomenon is unpacked into its two main components – supply and demand, the latter being often neglected in policy practices. After that, such components are brought back together into a ‘smuggling spectrum’, which becomes a key analytical tool: an area of complexity where the phenomenon is considered through six different layers, pointing to the existing contradictions both in empirical and policy terms.
Building upon this approach, this interpretive case study, falling within the broad field of the EU studies, combines new institutionalist and multi-level governance approaches. This analytical perspective makes it possible to answer the main research question, aimed at understanding how and why agency, influenced by institutional constraints, moves within and across governance levels in the formulation of policies aimed at countering the smuggling of migrants in the EU, Italy and Sicily. To do so, multiple data are considered and analysed, including: 23 in-depth semi-structured interviews, realised with relevant actors on different governance levels; parliamentary proceedings from 1998 to 2019; judicial proceedings; documents from the European Commission, the European Parliament, the Council of the EU, national ministries, Europol, Eurojust, UNODC, UNHCR and NGOs, among others.
The multi-level perspective is unfolded into three different levels – i.e. supranational (EU), national (Italy) and local (Sicily) – each of them being associated with a sub-research question. Moreover, the elaboration of an analytical model makes it possible to apply the conceptual combination of new institutionalism and multi-level governance on the specific case at hand and on the three governance levels connected.
Adopting a bottom-up perspective, the focus is firstly placed on local implementation patterns in Sicily, based on different arenas of agency. The consequences of these practices on policy-making, as well as (sometimes unwanted) bottom-up dynamics in fighting migrant smuggling, influencing both national and European policies, are also discussed, disclosing the importance of certain actors in particular, such as judiciary, NGOs and intermediate bodies (institutions placed in-between governance levels), among others.
The analysis of the national level explores policy-making in relation to migrant smuggling, in the light of vertical and horizontal dynamics. The former are based on the influence of the local and EU levels, where again intermediate bodies play a crucial role, alongside parliamentary committees and unwanted effects originating at EU level. As for the latter, they consider the way in which different policy areas and different institutional and non-institutional actors placed at national level interact in the elaboration of smuggling-related policies. Here the security-based framework, the unwanted consequences caused by NGOs and the executivisation of policies are all aspects that gain primary relevance.
A very similar approach is proposed also at an EU level. In this case, vertical dynamics confirm the importance of intermediate bodies and parliamentary committees, in addition to field visits, whereas horizontal interactions help to disclose the relevance of other policy domains outside the Area of Freedom, Security and Justice, the institutional consequences of that, the interaction between supranational and intergovernmental actors as well as the important (and yet contradictory) role of research and studies.
Building upon this analysis and assessing the way in which each actor moves within and across the governance levels, influenced and limited by institutional constraints, this study makes it possible to understand (a) which actors lead the policy-making process in the field of anti-migrant smuggling in the EU, Italy and Sicily, and why this is the case; (b) what their approach to smuggling is; (c) what dynamics characterise the relationships between them; (d) how much room there is for processes of information and preference upload; (e) to what extent non-institutional actors contribute to the process of policy adoption.
Namely, what emerges in these five dimensions is the strong executivisation of policies, with a prominent role of national governments and of the Council of the EU; the widespread tendency towards a more securitising approach to migrant smuggling; the existence of pass-the-buck dynamics (especially between national and supranational levels); the difficulty in processes of information and preference upload (mostly depending on the content to be uploaded); and, lastly, the importance of non-institutional actors in influencing the policy-making process through their practices.
The conclusions that are reached, on the one side, allow for an in-depth understanding of the specific Italian/Sicilian case, which is significant, considering this as first systematic insight into a policy domain still to be explored. On the other side, through the conceptual combination proposed, they provide a definition of a model aiming to look at similar policy-making processes in other fields and/or in other case-based and comparative studies.

This PhD thesis shows that Places are especially made at the Border! and not just at the centres of European Governance.

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Informality in Spatial Planning

Spatial Planning is closely related to applying strict procedures and rules for spatial decision making, and for the implementation of these decisions. In the ancient times of Spatial Planning this was a sole government responsibility, even though in the seventies of the last century, certainly also in the Netherlands, spatial decision making was increasingly done in a participatory way. These were the heydays of collaborative and communicative planning.  Since then we moved from government to governance, and spatial planning became a joint responsibility of many involved public and private partners. The public participatory decision making was at the same time partly replaced by market-led planning. Throughout these developments, the relationship between the different involved stakeholders and affected groups and parties has also changed. They are not always led by the same target, they have different interests, they value the diverse aspects of a spatial decision differently, they have unequal resources to contribute to the plan, etc. etc. Spatial planning has thus evolved as a complicated game of dealing, negotiation and collaboration. This is therefore much more than choosing a target, setting up a plan, and implementing a plan. Successful planning nowadays is the art of bridging these cultural and social differences between the involved parties, and only to a very small part driven by formal rules and procedures. This also implies that much more informal ways of communicating, evaluating, and negotiating have become crucial in spatial planning. Spatial planning is really the work of human beings with all their subjective needs, interpretations, valuations, preferences, visions, intentions, beliefs, politics, talents, etc. One might say that these ‘soft factors‘ or ‘cultural factors‘ in spatial planning have increasingly become decisive, and formal and institutional aspects seem to lose their importance. Spatial planning becomes a regular form of Placemaking.

It was my Austrian colleague Prof. Peter Weichhart from the University of Vienna and Prof. Rainer Danielzyk from University of Hannover, who already addressed this in 2005 as the Culture of Spatial Planning when they were asking, why is even in states which have an elaborated and almost perfectly institutionalised and regulated spatial planning system planning not always successful? and, what are then the real structural principles and deeper working mechanisms in spatial planning? And what is the role of the subjective and cultural backgrounds and of their culturally determined ‘ways of doing’ of the people involved? It is self-evident that the growing importance of these cultural aspects of spatial planning is not necessarily about ‘national’ cultures, or planning styles, or planning systems but much more about the cultural backgrounds and everyday ways of doing of the people involves in spatial planning, beyond the rules and regulations of the planning system.

In the former PhD project on this issue by Marlies Meijer (see separate entry on this site) this was addressed as Informality in Spatial Planning in demographically shirking areas in Sweden, Spain and the Netherlands. As a follow up on that stream of thinking, now Jinshuo Wang now successfully defended her PhD thesis on Local government-led informality in planning in Chinese urban land development. She was supervised by Prof. Erwin van der Krabben, but I had the honour of being a member of the panel at her defence.

Her thesis was different and also her defence was different. Of course in China the situation is different and also local cultures are different, both: the local cultures of spatial planning as well as the local cultures of doing research on those issues.  Jinshuo Wang accordingly operationalised ‘informality’ as ‘spatial decision making through negotiation’, and investigated this on the basis of a huge quantitative data set on many spatial planning projects. This also in first instance seemed to have confused some of the spatial planning peers, which somehow again confirms the importance of ‘culture’ in spatial planning and spatial planning research. This is of course only one form of informality and maybe also not the one where soft factors can fully flourish and have a broad impact, but on the other hand — as she convincingly showed — it is a culturally sensitive deviation of traditional formal top-down planning. Her defence was also different because of the circumstances of the Covid-19 pandemic, which implied that several opponents could only participate remotely on screen.

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Alexander von Humboldt Lecture

Alexander von Humboldt Lecture
and Opening Lecture of the 2020-2021 Human Geography Master Programme

Thursday, Sept. 3, 2020, 15:30-16:45 (Dutch time)
Public Virtual Lecture by means of Zoom:
https://radbouduniversity.zoom.us/j/92973028257?pwd=TGdSZS9WZHhMamowWXVWRE43RW5tdz09
Meeting ID: 929 7302 8257
Passcode: 748148
Free entry

Prof. Eberhard Rothfuß, University Bayreuth, Germany

The Theory of Recognition and its relevance for Geography
Empirical evidence from urban Latin America and rural Sub-Sahara Africa

Abstract: The aim of this presentation is twofold: Firstly I will try to explain, why the Theory of Recognition by Axel Honneth (1994) – the most prominent protagonist of the third generation of the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory – has a high potential for Human Geography and secondly to illustrate the empirical evidence of recognition theory from two different socio-spatial contexts of the Global South, to understand the struggles of social groups in their ‘fights for recognition’.

The first case study will focus on a marginalised neighbourhood (“favela”) in Salvador da Bahia – Brazil, which is constantly confronted with exclusion and ‘social invisibility’. The point which is being made is that the Brazilian favelas are, on the one hand, in terms of their media coverage and stigmatisation, the most visible urban spaces in Brazil. On the other hand, however, with regard to societal recognition and human relevance of the Favela residents, these disadvantaged urban spaces remain socially invisible. This involves a double humiliation of this Brazilian declassed class.

The second case study will address aspects of energy justice in Ghana. Many urban households in Ghana are keenly installing Solar Home Systems (SHS) to mitigate frequent grid power outages and ensure stability in the performance of social and energy-saving practices which grant them recognition as ‘enlightened’ social groups or as individuals staying au courant with modern energy technologies. Many rural community residents, however, claim the SHS facility restricts performances of ‘modern’ practices in comparison to fellow ‘Ghanaians’ who have access to electrical grids and that its acceptance may perpetually reduce them to ‘second-class-citizens’. Empirical evidence suggests that energy justice visions remain fuzzy unless they are set in relation to how and why practical solutions to the energy ‘needs’ and ‘visions’ of socially and spatially differentiated groups could be realised. I call this practical recognition.

In this lecture, I advocate practical recognition as a suitable alternative pathway in Geography for researching just urban and rural futures by emphasizing connections between socio-spatial justice, human agency and entitlement notions.

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Master Programme 2020-2021

Our Human Geography master programme has been steadily growing in number of students. Of course, this is a very good sign, as it shows how attractive our programme is for students and how relevant the topics are which we address in our programme. This really triggers our students. Geography in general and Human Geography, in particular, is about how we deal with our physical, but also with our social environment. And this is not an easy nor unproblematic relationship, and our students are really very keen on making a difference in practice, and on helping to find solutions to urging problems. The topical issues we deal with in Human Geography are not very evident from the name of our discipline: ‘Human Geography’. Who really knows what that is about…? But if you take a look at our specific Master Specialisations, it becomes clear how topical and important these issues are, which we address in our programme. Through these Master Specialisations, we seem to touch a sensitive chord and that explains the great attraction our programme has on students.

Especially in the Dutch University System, which for its funding is so dependant on the number of students, this is very important. So, both for reasons or creating a sound financial basis for our teaching and research, as well as to make an important contribution to a better world, I have always been dreaming of surpassing the magical number of 100 new master students. This is of course, somehow ridiculous because 99 or 101 are numbers which are as beautiful and magical as 100. But of course, we somehow need a vision and to speak with Martin Luther King, ‘we need a dream’!

So I promised my colleague in our Geography Group, Dr. Martin van der Velde, who is responsible for the sometimes tedious job of finding Supervisors for our master students, a bottle of wine, once we surpass the number of 100 new master students. Although we all enjoy teaching and enjoy working together with students on a better future, it is also quite an effort, especially in times of severe austerity measures, my colleague was therefore always hoping not to get that bottle of wine, and was rather satisfied with the ‘small is beautiful’ slogan.

Nevertheless, this year my dream came true… We have now well surpassed the threshold of 100 new Human Geography Master Students, while the way we organise our Master Programme still preserves the advantages of ‘being small and beautiful’. Probably it is totally irrational, but somehow it gives me a good feeling, especially if one remembers that when I started my job at this University there were only about 12 Master Students.

But under the current Covid-19 circumstances we cannot really celebrate this occasion. So this virtual blog entry and the virtual bottle of wine should do the job. Thanks to all our Geography Group members! We could not have done it without you…! Cheers.

And of course also thanks to our students. With them at least we could properly celebrate the start of the new academic year with an informal bicycle tour to the Thornse Mill and a real Dutch pancake dinner.

We somehow again have contributed to the special place, called ‘Human Geography’ and the ‘Human Geography group’ at the Radboud University Nijmegen. This is ‘intellectual placemaking’…