conversas13

Gráinne Toomey has a background in linguistics and translation and while birdwatching was a hobby of hers growing up in rural Ireland, for a period of many years other interests took hold and this passion waned. A re-interest in "birding" was ignited a few years ago and was propelled to a further level upon moving to Berlin, where there is a rich and varied spectrum of avian life. For this Conversas she discusses how there are surprises around every corner when it comes to birdwatching here, how watching birds can help city inhabitants connect to nature and why it’s not even necessary to own binoculars to get out and do it.

Maaike is a Dutch academic working on the interplay between law and morality in authoritarian Tunisia. Right before the fall of the Tunisian dictatorship in 2011, Maaike was 'embedded' in a Tunisian court during one and a half years. She studied how judges navigated the progressive, modernist and secularist law to bring it in conformity with the more conservative norms living in society. She focuses on issues pertaining to gender and sexuality. Maaike worked at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris and at Harvard University in the US.

Peter Wagner, musician, author and social scientist works since his youth on a concept which he called „reality density“. He developed a social empirical method on the basis of social game theory which does basically two things: First, its the first attempt to put the claim of constructivists ("reality is constructed socially") onto an empirical foundation. Second, it leads to a new perspective on social life and concerns in its consequence lots of different areas of every day life. In the last few years construct reality density was called „promising theory“, „world formula“, „more art than science“, "stammtisch philosophy" and „just another attempt to ride on the wave of gamification“. Because Peter isn’t sure what it is anymore he will be accompanied by visual artist and graphic designer Marius Förster who developed the visual concept of Wagners work.