Personal Reflection. The language and globalization class was the first class held in English that I’ve taken at Viadrina so I didn’t have any expectations but the idea of doing a group project with international students sounded like an interesting idea to me. In the end we ended up being 3 Germans and only 1 international student in the group but the fact that we all lived in berlin made it much easier for us to quickly decide that our project should be placed in berlin and also to meet up there.

Although for quite a while I was unsure what our project was supposed to be about or what was going to be our approach, which was in my eyes mainly because we all had a slightly different idea of what to do and how to do it, we all ended up being on the same page and created the idea to do a LLS project. We decided to choose Hermannplatz as the place to go as it seemed to be a very multicultural space in all our eyes.

When we all first met up I realised that each of us a slightly different idea and different demands and expectations for the project. On top of that we had quite a different need for flexibility and or structure in terms of the group work for this project. But in my eyes we all eventually found our position in the team.

Doing a field work as freely as this one was a completely new experience for me, especially because most of my classes were very theoretical so far so it was great and exciting to try something new. When we met up to take the pictures at Hermannplatz I realised that we all had very different ways of working, which was a little chaotic at times but when we all got together to work on a specific thing we did quite a good job.

Luckily some of the team members were very good at using the Mahara website and able to do a proper layout for this portfolio as I had and still have quite some difficulties adapting to this website. I find it quite confusing and difficult to use without creating a big chaos on the website.

All in all I learned a lot from this project, not only about Linguistic Landscape studies and working in the field but also about working in a team and being a member of a team where everyone has such a different way of working but still making it work.

Coming originally from an epistemological history and law studies background, it is the very first time that I have to go “to-the-field”; which has good and bad. 

Good because you observe carefully after that, you pay even more attention to what is going to within  a city, not only its colors and movements but also its sounds and pictures. Landscaping is not only a “sensitive” diagnostic tool for ethnographical studies but also a way of experiencing, living in a particular place for each human being. Landscaping is no exclusively reserved to the ethnographer. Another positive point is the flexibility of such study tools and the creativity they call for. I would say that landscaping in Hermannplatz gave me a paradoxical feeling, for some minutes it was amusing but then it got a bit frustrating. First, the question what would be the connexion between all of these pieces of information. Secondary, it became to be boring when I could not find anything else. The “what to do next” was a question that kept on ringing. That is why I went to Hermannstrasse, even though we did not plan to go there. On one hand, we all agreed that thanks to this initiative we could raise interesting points and ideas and link it to multiculturalism in Hermannplatz, also the flexibility of such tools and the non-rigid characteristic of ethnographical studies allow doing so. Why not. On the other hand, I decided to go there while my the rest of the team was still in Hermannplatz without communicating it, which lacked in a way of team spirit. This latter thought is raising another point; once “on the field” obstacles appear, not necessarily coming from the outside, meaning our study subject, but also from the inside (the team). If communication is the key to a dynamic work, sometimes it is hard to enable it. I enjoyed working with the rest of the team and learned a lot. Maybe next time it would be better to use deadlines and make it clear from the beginning. According to the results we got, this team worked pretty well. 

Now comes the negative point of such studies. I would say first it lacks order, of a clear outline and way of conducting a study case. Most of the things happen to appear once on the field, in other words, they are unplanned. Dealing with the unplanned requires taking distance and calmness. That could be the first obstacle. The second comes after, which could be summed up by one question - what to do with the data? what to do if it shows the opposite of what we first thought we would find? In case of pictures, do we let them talk and describe only and exactly what is on them or can we also add another narrative to it and make assumptions. The field of possibilities is wide with ethnographical studies.