Progress towards the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) is regularly evaluated. Markus Schaffert, Professor of Geoinformatics at the University of Applied Sciences in Mainz, researches, among other things, the influence of space and place on corresponding indicators.

As a guest researcher at our lab, Markus will work on the spatial expansion of villages; the visual communication of rural and urban sprawl; and the role of space in planning processes. He will also expand our repertoire of places by the Palatinate Forest as a place of tranquillity with insights from case studies.

Jonas researches the concepts of agency, society, and place. He explores how the concept of place is fundamental in understanding human agency and sociality at large, but also vice-versa.

Within philosophy, his main areas of interest are social ontology, phenomenology, philosophy of action, and philosophy of mind. Beyond this, he engages with further areas that deal with agency, society, and place, such as geography, environmental psychology, and architecture. Besides his passion about the concepts of place, he has a strong interest in decolonial philosophy, philosophy of games, and Ancient Greek philosophy.

Jonas did his undergraduate degree in philosophy in Belo Horizonte, Brazil, and his MA and PhD, also in philosophy, in Manchester, England.

Together with soprano Friederike Kühl, Franz-Benjamin Mocnik has received the out of the box award from the City of Salzburg. The prize is awarded to teams that interweave scientific, cultural, and further aspects as part of corresponding events or projects. These are meant for the wider public and should relate to the places Itzling and Elisabeth-Vorstadt.

In the context of the award, Friederike Kühl and Franz-Benjamin Mocnik will organize three public events under the title music in place – place in music. These events will explore the relationship between art and science in a low-threshold and participatory way. At the heart of this is the integration of the music performed and corresponding scientific explanations. These two aspects will not simply be concatenated but creatively interwoven. The first two events are about music in places and places in music, while the third aims to synthesize both.

The events will take place in October 2024. Further information will follow.

The Space and Place team is growing! We are pleased to share that Maia Williams has joined the group and will be working alongside Franz-Benjamin at EXDIGIT. Maia will be starting her own PhD research as well as participating in collaborations within the team, EXDIGIT, and beyond.

Maia has previously worked with spatial data and geographical information systems (GIS) across multiple domains. She has sought diversity in projects, gleaning ideas and skills from specialists along the way – anthropologists, ecologists, architects, urban designers, and data scientists amongst them. Her current research intentions are to better understand the nuanced mechanisms of place attachment and place change, and how place processes could be made explicit and more accessible within computational contexts.

Maia has swapped the Western Australian sandplains for Austrian mountains and is enjoying the newfound vertical dimension!

You can learn more about her here (a work in progress).

Hurray, the Space & Place LAB has officially been launched! We are an emerging lab at the University of Salzburg, Austria, dedicated to the research of places, spaces, and corresponding information. We use a wide variety of methods, ranging from theoretical considerations to applications, depending on what fits best with the various questions related to our object of investigation. With regard to digital media and methods, the lab is in close contact with the EXDIGIT project (Excellence in Digital Sciences and Interdisciplinary Technologies).

We are very much looking forward to our upcoming research! Stay tuned!