PD Dr. Anna-Lisa Müller´s (IKG) research was part of a new publication: "Preserving and Constructing Place Attachment in Europe".

In this chapter she argues that place attachment in cities stems from constant (re-)negotiatons between individuals and groups in urban space and their interaction with the space’s materiality. Based on a case study from Darmstadt, Germany, she shows how citizens and urban materiality engage in a process of co-creating place attachment. Empirical data from autoethnographic observation and photographic documentation of the Georg-Büchner-Platz, a centrally located urban square in Darmstadt, highlight how people establish attachments to particular places in their environment by interacting with other people and the ambient materiality and how this very materiality serves as means to stabilise attachments to places and as means to re-frame local belonging and place attachment. The case study is evidence for the broader argument followed in this chapter that place attachment should be understood as dynamic over time and fundamentally intertwined with the material qualities of spaces and has the potential to contribute to social cohesion in an urban society.

Here to the chapter - access via university portal.

Katharina Leimbach (IKG) and Dr. Nicole Bögelein (University of Cologne) have published a chapter on "How to Deal with "Doing Social Inequality" by "Doing Criminological (Qualitative) Research"" in the soon to be published book "Qualitative Research in Criminology".

Criminological research is a challenging field in many ways. The discipline criticizes the labeling carried out by the criminal justice system, which marks certain groups of people as “deviant,” “criminal,” or “dangerous.” Nevertheless, criminological studies often fall into the same trap. By relying on labels that the criminal justice system has applied when accessing the field through prisons, probation officers, or other kinds of support systems for offenders, sampling and labeling are intertwined. This article scrutinizes how qualitative reconstructive research supports and reproduces social inequality. It applies the concept of “doing social problems” and emphasizes a constructionist point of view. Furthermore, we review the sampling mechanisms of recent studies: What concepts of “social problems” do we see? What world does the criminological research at hand reconstruct? In our conclusion, we call for a sensitive approach and a broad discussion of possibilities and limitations. To us, qualitative reconstructive research – in fact – seems to offer some solutions for making the processes of labeling visible. We ask how social knowledge systems concerning crime and deviance are constituted and how we, as criminologists, contribute to them through our research practice.

You can find the publication here.