As part of a one-week block course, students from various cross-faculty courses - above all entrepreneurship and architecture - gained their first ethnographic experience in exploratory, interdisciplinary research teams. A number of teaching-learning tools were used, such as “Epistemic Objects”, the use of distributed roles, the “Juke Box” as a communication format, the “Table Criticism” tool, etc. Methods of cultural analysis, self-reflective thinking and interdisciplinary work were the subject of discussion during the course.

The course at the HafenCity University Hamburg took place in the 2019 summer semester in cooperation with the HALLO: e.V. association, which is committed to urban politics, and focused on the concept of property. Students from various disciplines (architecture, urban planning, cultural and urban research) worked with and on the site of a former recycling centre in the industrial eastern area of Hamburg. After dealing with theoretical literature on the topics of property, mapping and the value of humanities, the students developed small research projects on-site using a diverse catalogue of methods. The collected material was presented in the form of mapping installations on location and was incorporated into the formulation of the white paper.

The Graz course was conceptualised as an exploratory and open-ended teaching-learning laboratory. In interdisciplinary, multilingual teams from cultural anthropology, art and architecture, the students work out self-organised research projects on the subject of “upheaval” in the urban area of Graz over the course of a semester. By regularly changing the space in which they study, deliberate inclusion of irritations (“unlearning”) as well as a variety of input formats and tasks, a very special, open work situation was created and continuously reflected upon. Particular attention was paid to the moderation and creation of social processes in the sense of a temporary teaching-learning community.