about the blog

Doing research means to think, observe, analyze, read, to ask questions in order to get responses. It means to make sense of the world we live in, of the present, the past and the future.

In this blog, we think aloud. We want to share our observations and thoughts which are not ready to be published in a peer reviewed article but nevertheless interesting to open up to those of you who are working on similar topics, visited similar events and places or are curious what the thinking processes of research contain.

Noting down one’s thoughts is also a method to structure one’s thinking, arguments, to navigate through larger projects and to become aware of patterns, connections or voids. So, we decided to use the blog as our regular writing and thinking practice and hopefully you can take something away from it.

Our starting point

Infra/Structures both connect and disconnect ideas, people, regions. Infra/Structures - especially when we consider the Latin prefix infra - are grounded in localities and have the capacity to act translocally and transregionally. When thinking of infrastructures from a local and transregional perspective, what forces, ideas and agents and practices are currently at work, where are they located and which “scapes” (Appadurai 1990) are being re-configured?

When we started our first field trips last November, we encountered our research topic via the lens of Covid-19. Covid-19 might become a paradigm shift as it changed tremendously practices, structures and realities we used to take for granted. We realized that Covid-19 is a new factor we need to include when investigating the constitution of infra/structures and its transregional implications, and hence ask ourselves: How does Covid-19 affect those research questions?

who is writing?

Linda Gerlach

I am a linguist interested mainly in African languages and I have been working on Bantu and so-called ‘Khoisan’ languages with a focus on phonetics/phonology and language contact. I did my PhD entitled “Phonetic and phonological description of the Nǃaqriaxe variety of ǂ’Amkoe and the impact of language contact” at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology and the Humboldt Universität zu Berlin.

I am currently working as a postdoctoral researcher at the Humboldt Universität zu Berlin in the project De:link//Re:link. Within the project I am especially interested (next to language documentation) in the interplay of language and identity and how both are (locally and globally) affected by globalized projects such as the BRI or, more recently, by global events such as Covid.

 contact linda.gerlach at hu-berlin.de

Jamila Adeli

Berlin based art historian, curator and researcher specialized in contemporary art in the MENASA region and in translocality and transregionality. I studied art history, english philology and film studies in Berlin, received my PhD on “Art, Market, Communication. The Transformation of Contemporary Art World in India (2000-2018) “ at Humboldt Universität zu Berlin. I am currently working as postdoc and curator at De:link // Re:link on “Artistic de/constructions in the context of Old and New Silk Roads”.

contact jamila.maria.adeli at hu-berlin.de

the larger research project

We belong to a group of researchers of the BMBF-funded research consortium “De:link // Re:link” at Humboldt Universität zu Berlin. In the project, China’s Belt and Road Initiative (2013, initiated under Xi Jinping) serves as a larger framework to understand and analyze how large transnational infrastructures and local knowledges/reactions re-shape the notion of regionality.

Our research consortium De:link//Re:link studies local perspectives on transregional (dis-) entanglements. It examines new spatial configurations and local perspectives on transregional infrastructure projects such as China's Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). De:link//Re:link addresses the local dynamics that are engendered by global processes of political, social, economic, lingual, and cultural entanglement and disentanglement.