SFB 1199:  Processes of Spatialization under the Global Condition

• Subject Area: Social and Behavioural Sciences ; Humanities ; Geosciences
• Term: from 2016 to 2024
• Website: Homepage
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 266371360

The SFB 1199 examines how processes of spatialization change under the global condition and how new spatial formats are produced by the actors underlying the condition while existing spatial for-mats are modified as well as merged into new spatial orders. In order to describe and explain these transformations, we have (initially) elaborated a terminology that allows us to distinguish between(1) the multilayered spatializations resulting from every kind of social interaction;(2) spatial formats, which are characterized by (at least medium-term) establishment/recurrence, institutionalization, (routine) performance, and intersubjective reflection, and which become established in a practice that involves imaginations (descriptions and visualizations); and(3) spatial orders, which are the outcome of negotiation processes involving differing spatial formats.These categories provide us with a heuristic and a descriptory terminology with which processes can be coherently described and explained despite being far from each other/diverging greatly in time and space as well as concerning different social domains such as politics, administration, religion, health, literature, science, consumption, migration, crime, the economy, and the culture industry.The SFB combines an empirically oriented, inductive approach with a conceptual and systematic orientation. In the different subprojects, we investigate a large number of spatial formats in multiple world-regional contexts and the transformation of spatial orders over a long period of time, beginning in the late 18th century. This combined approach and investigation act as the precondition for achieving the SFB’s two main goals:(1) a systematic description of spatial formats and(2) the development of a historical narrative explaining how spatial orders change in times of global respatialization.

• DFG Programme: Collaborative Research Centres

Current projects

• A01 - Spheres of Production and Circulation: Mass Culture between Europe and North America, 1830s to 1930s (Project Head Möhring, Maren )
• A02 - Innovative Technology Enterprises in Unlikely Places in Central Asia and Africa (Project Head Lang, Ph.D., Thilo )
• A05 - Digital Governance and the Respatialization of the Indian Nation State (Project Head Rao, Ursula )
• A06 - Chinese Engineers and their Spatial Imaginations: Architects of an Interconnected Nation, 1906–1937 (Project Head Kaske, Elisabeth )
• A07 - “Free Radicals”? Political Mobilities and Post-Colonial Processes of Respatialization in the Second Half of the 20th Century (Project Head Marung, Steffi )
• B01 - The Respatialization of the World during the Formation of the Global Condition, 1820–1914: The Americas and the French Empire (Project Head Middell, Matthias )
• B02 - Spatial and Temporal Limitations of “Berlin’s Africa”: Between the Decline of a Spatial Format and the Dissolution of a Spatial Order (Project Heads van den Bersselaar, Dmitri ;  Jones, Adam )
• B03 - Socialist Development Models for the “Third World” (Project Heads Hadler, Frank ;  Müller, Uwe ;  Troebst, Stefan )
• B05 - Cross-Border Enzymatic Hazards. Practices of Fighting Antimicrobial Resistance (Project Head Miggelbrink, Judith )
• B07 - Interregionalism and Security in the Sahel: The African Union, ECOWAS, and the European Union (Project Head Engel, Ulf )
• B09 - The “Iron Curtain” between Static Spaces and Fluid Networks. Exclusion and (Re)Connection, 1960–2010 (Project Head van Laak, Dirk )
• C02 - Imperialist Geographies: The Transpacific and Circum-Caribbean Space in US Literature in the Period from 1880 to 1940 (Project Head Pisarz-Ramirez, Gabriele )
• C05 - Maps and Atlases as Mediators and Producers of Spatial Knowledge under the Global Condition (Project Heads Lentz, Sebastian ;  Moser, Jana )
• C06 - “Off the Grid”: Infrastructures, Processes of Spatialization, and Drones in Africa (Project Head Burchardt, Marian )
• MGK - Integrated Research Training Group (Project Heads Engel, Ulf ;  Wardenga, Ute ;  Zinecker, Heidrun )
• Z - Central Tasks of the Collaborative Research Centre (Project Head Middell, Matthias )

Completed projects

• A03 - Taiwanese religious communities and their internationalization strategies (guojihua) since the 1980s (Project Head Clart, Philip )
• A04 - Maras as producers of translocal spaces of violence in the Americas and Europe (Project Head Zinecker, Heidrun )
• B04 - Remittances and a transnational moral economy: El Salvador, Togo and the Philippines in a comparative perspective (Project Head Zinecker, Heidrun )
• B06 - Gold mining and new regulations of (sub)national spaces in Africa (Project Head Werthmann, Katja )
• B08 - Spatial orders of hunger: food insecurity in North Africa (Project Head Gertel, Jörg )
• C01 - Spatial Semantics of Geography in the 19th and 20th Centuries (Project Head Wardenga, Ute )
• C04 - Reimaginations of Land and Agriculture in the Context of Digitization (Project Head Sippel, Sarah Ruth )

• Applicant Institution: Universität Leipzig
• Participating Institution: Leibniz-Institut für Geschichte und Kultur des östlichen Europa (GWZO); Leibniz-Institut für Länderkunde (IfL)
• Participating University: Technische Universität Dresden
• Spokesperson: Professor Dr. Matthias Middell