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Junior Professorship

The new junior professorship Digital Methods in Human Geography (DigiHum), was established in March 2022 and is headed by Prof. Dr. rer. nat. Sakura Yamamura, deals with social geographic issues with a special focus on the rapidly advancing digitalization and diversification of society, especially in an urban context.

Here you can find a detailed interview about the start of the professorship in Aachen..

In addition to individual projects, we also research interesting topics in cooperation with scientists from other institutes and chairs - both within and outside the RWTH, nationally and internationally. Currently, we are establishing a cooperation with Keio University in Tokyo / Japan. As a kick-off, a workshop with various participants from here and the Japanese colleagues will take place in October. Likewise, several publication and research projects are being developed with the Hunter Centre for Entrepreneurship at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow. The intensive collaboration, which has already lasted several years, also allows opportunities to supervise interdisciplinary student work.

In teaching, we offer courses for the bachelor and master programs in the cultural geographic fields of urban and population geography. We also regularly offer international regional internships to Malta, Scotland and Asian Global Cities.

We provide supervision for bachelor's and master's theses as well as for doctoral projects that fit our topics and empirical methods.

 

Reserach Profile

In today's global society, it is hard to imagine socio-geographic questions about the city-population nexus without the digital. In order to take into account the increasing digitalization of society from a human geography perspective, the use and development of innovative digital methods is essential.

The Junior Professorship Digital Methods in Human Geography (DigiHum) researches from different socio-geographical perspectives the socio-spatial complexity of societal diversity and diversification, which is especially increasing in importance in times of global networking and transnational migration. Beyond 'migration to cities' or 'migrants in cities', DigiHum's research focuses on socio-spatial questions about the connection and dynamics between "migration and cities" or society and space. From a critical and intersectional-feminist perspective, we examine social diversity and its spatial manifestations.

Economic, social, but also political contexts of urban diversity and societal diversification are considered from different scales and dimensions. In the interdisciplinary field within human geography, sociological, ethnological, but also socio-psychological and economic geographic approaches come together in DigiHum. In addition, innovative digital methods are to be developed in order to set new methodological impulses in human geography for the recording and analysis of complex society and its processes of change beyond the conventional methodological approach of quantitative or qualitative research.

Research Projects:

• Mediated Social Touch: Interdisciplinary Explorations of Digitally Mediated Touch for Interpersonal Relationships (DFG-JSPS).
• Diversities of Entrepreneurship: LGBTIQ* x Migrant Entrepreneurs in Poland (ISBE RAKE).
• Intersecting spaces of (super-)diversity in global cities