My research focuses on newer approaches in social, cultural and political geography emphasizing the “constitutedness” of geographies and analysing how it is that specific spaces are (re-)produced – that is to say delimited, institutionalised, technically and materially established etc (see http://www.geographie.uni-erlangen.de/en/pers/gglasze/). The aim is to uncover how specific social structures thereby become reproduced and how the constitution of spaces is consequently an element of specific relations of power.
After a PhD in urban social geography on the global spreading and regional contextualisation of so called “gated communities” with fieldwork in Lebanon and the US, and a habilitation theses in political geography on the discursive constitution of a world spanning “geocultural space” – “Francophonia” with fieldwork in France and Burkina Faso as well as a postdoc fellowship at the Maison des Science de l’Homme in Paris, in 2009 the University of Erlangen-Nürnberg (Germany) has offered me the chair in cultural geography.
Since three years I am working on the fundamental shifts that the GeoWeb brings to carto-graphic (re-)presentations. Cartographic (re-)presentations categorize, define, arrange, locate, designate and thereby (re-)produce certain conceptions of the world (and marginalise others). Consequently, they affect our thinking and acting in the world. The new technical possibilities and practices of the GeoWeb change the assemblages of producing and consuming geographic information radically. Sometimes these changes have been described as an “opening” or “democratising” of geographic information and cartographic (re-)presentation. However, I am interested in analysing these changes from the perspective of a political geography that is sensitive to moments of struggle and exclusion within the emerging practices of making and using geographic information and cartographic (re-)presentations.
Political Geography, Social and Cultural Geography, Critical Cartography, Geoweb-Studies, Web 2.0-Mapping, Crisis Mapping, OpenStreetMap.
With Dr John Postill
Dr Postill argues for the versatility of digital ethnography as a ‘flat methodology’ that need not elevate any one method, not even participant observation.
