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What does research feel like? How does the place where knowledge is created shape the knowledge itself? And what knowledges remain neglected because we cannot transform them into written words?
Academia has become a precarious work environment in which it is difficult to gain a foothold and pursue a consistent career: fixed-term contracts, competitive pressures, financial constraints, mobility demands. Yet researchers manage to create spaces within this system where research becomes possible. In this ethnography from the field of Science and Technology Studies it becomes clear: Research is first and foremost a sensual affair – a practice, a feeling, a place.
BUILDING SPACES is a documentary film that follows four international social scientists in different positions through their lives in academia. It explores their already 'post-digital' workplaces, where every process is shaped by the digital – how we research, read, and write today is inextricably linked to the digital technologies we use to do so. Cinematically, it is about the mediation of a sensory experience: research, whether artistic or academic, is always a search, an emotional balancing act, a manual labor, a material work. The film puts into practice what it shows. Not all knowledges can be found in books, some must be learned through experience and discovered through filming.
