about 15 people from Berlin have made their way to Istanbul the last few days since last Saturday, with the last people arriving on Tuesday before the workshop introduction. Many used the opportunity to come to Istanbul a bit earlier over the long Easter weekend to meet relatives and friends, relax and do sightseeing before going to work.
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| Vera, Esra and Max (behind the camera) at Schönefeld Airport on Monday morning |
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| Hagia Sofia Mosque from the water |
The workshop kick-off was the first time all participants got to know each other. We noted that there are a lot more female participants: we have the luxury problem of needing men for gender diversity! While the Berlin group has a diverse background of studies, over architecture, educational sciences and economics from different universities, the Turkish group from YTU are all urban planners at different stages of their studies, ranging from first years to PhD students and with different focuses of study.
After initial greetings from Ula and Tolga, we quickly got to the details of our work here in Istanbul. The main thing we all noticed is the interdisciplinary, comparative aspect of our work. A major challenge will consist in finding a common mapping methodology over several social science disciplines. Luckily, there is a lot of methodological, creative/multimedia and language skills between the participants, which we all hope to be able to use.
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| In the middle: Ula and Tolga Hoca, the workshop instructors |
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| Attentive listening! |
The main takeaway for Wednesday is that our first exposure to the field work is meant to be exploratory. It's about getting a feeling for the place, the crowd and the shops, which will help us formulate our research questions for the following days. We will approach these questions, collect the data and build our maps through the whole array of skills we have (which was impressive for me), over interviews, photography, film, discourse analysis and even digital drawing.
We really hit off well and collectively decided to make teams of two for tomorrow, always pairing one student from Istanbul with one from Berlin, nicely underlining the intercultural dimension of our work here. This will also help us stay flexible and pursue differing research interests. After finishing the introduction, we diffused into the Istanbul nightlife, eating and drinking together in different groups. The great start made us all really excited to working together over the next week!
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| Beyoğlu on Tuesday night |
The six-bed room in the World House Hostel enjoyed the great view from the balcony on Galata Tower at night before going to sleep a little to late. Sorry for the four-bed room with the rest of us, but you can come up to our balcony anytime! ;)
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| Serena and Katharina enjoying the view from the hostel balcony |
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