Encounter

MULTILINGUAL • CREATIVE • COLLABORATIVE

About us

The ENCOUNTER media workshops

Encounter is a multilingual workshop and media project by activists, artists, journalists, scientists, students and interested people from different countries, mostly based in Berlin, who want to create a conflict-competent and tolerant society, in which differences of opinion and multiple affiliations give rise to curiosity and exchange. Our goal is to create a different discourse and a greater wealth of perspectives in the migration and integration debate in order to work against prejudices and generalisations that are expressed in the public on topics such as religion, identity, disability, gender and culture.
 
In an age dominated by digital information and social media, we often forget that which is obvious. How does our neighbour actually live? What can we learn from people in our immediate environment? For us, neighbourhoods are spaces of learning and conscious encounters which we facilitate through our creative workshops focusing on (digital) storytelling, illustration, collages, photography, film, or associative writing. Our method is anthropologically inspired and follows the idea of reflective positionality, multi-perspectivity and multilingualism. Our website is currently under construction: https://www.encounter-blog.com/de/ 
Our book: “What happens when we meet? Encounter as a method for transcultural learning” (2022) is out at Waxmann.

 

GbR Encounter


Judith Albrecht

Project Mastermind

Judith Albrecht works as a social anthropologist and documentary filmmaker in Germany and abroad. For her fieldwork and film projects she spent long periods of time in Iran, Tanzania and Malawi. After the Libyan revolution she started to work with the Libyan women’s’ movement in Benghazi. The thematic focus of her work is gender and religion, social movements, conflict, violence and memory. The co-founder of the project group “Deutsch im Asyl” and “Memos e.V.” employs diverse approaches in the investigation of social and political upheavals and the impact it has on the life stories and biographies of the people involved. Her recent research project focuses on “Grief, trauma and social justice in Germany”.

Franziska Knierim

Franziska Knierim was born in Berlin but grew up in the countryside. She is a student of Social and Cultural Anthropology and Political Science at Freie Universität Berlin. She joined the Encounters team via the workshop “Picturing Encounter”. When it comes to encounters between people, she is more interested in the common grounds and similarities than in the differences that come to light She speaks German, English, some Turkish and just started to learn Farsi.

Sarah Fichtner

Project coordinator (JULY 2019 UNTIL SEPTEMBER 2020)

Sarah Fichtner was born in Berlin, where she works as a social and cultural anthropologist doing text- and film-based ethnographic research, evaluations and consultancies in the fields of education (especially teacher trainings in learner-centred pedagogies in West-, Central Africa and Germany) and flight and migration (particularly focusing on young children in refugee homes in Germany, and LGBTIQ* refugees). Currently she works at the FiBS. She has also been the project coordinator of the Medienwerkstatt Encounters between July 2019 and September 2020.

Irina Savu-Cristea

Irina is a PhD candidate in anthropology at Free University Berlin, focusing on emotions and self-making practices among girls in a school in Bali. She discovered anthropology “at home”, in Romania. Since then, she became interested in developing collaborative research methods and conducted ethnographic fieldwork in 2 high-schools (Bucharest & Berlin). She is also a team coach certified in the Action Reflection Learning® methodology and was involved in several educational projects facilitating synergic teacher-student-parent teams in Romanian high-schools. She is passionate about teams and enjoys organizing public encounters associated to our blog and magazine.

 

Our Network

Because the internet is a public space and not always safe, some of our team members don´t want to appear with a picture and a short CV.   

Ina Schebler

Ina Schebler films, writes, takes photos and studies Visual and Media Anthropology in Berlin. In her work, she focuses on political topics. Since 2015, she has been involved in several projects concerned with various topics related to forced migration. These include for instance work with rejected asylum seekers in Amsterdam, people who fled to Germany after World War II, and asylum seekers as well as volunteers in refugee camps on the Greek island Chios.

Youn-Zuh Rim

PROJECT COORDINATOR

Youn-Zuh Rim studied international business administration in Dortmund. She is interested in culture, languages and interpersonal cooperation. In the 70ties her parents emigrated from South Korea to Germany. Hence she was born and raised in Wiesbaden. She lived and worked in Shanghai for almost 6 years to learn the Chinese culture and language. Since she moved to Berlin she worked as a volunteer with a Syrian family and she provided organizational and communicative support for a collaborative platform. Since end of September 2020 she is coordinating the Encounters media workshops.

Mina Aghalouie

Editor Farsi

Mina comes from Iran,Tehran. Currently studying Master of communication design at HMKW Berlin. She joined the workshop picturing Encounter2017 as an Illustrator and now is working as a part of Encounter editorial team for Farsi language. She likes also to draw, illustrate and animate.

Joanna Mitchell

Editor English & German

Joanna has a degree in biology and works as a freelance translator, proofreader and environmental educator. She speaks English, German and Greek and is very much interested in how language shapes our sense of belonging. She joined the Encounters editorial team in late 2019 and is still enjoying the challenge.

Brooj Al-Ammari

Editor Arabic

Brooj is an architect who grew up in Sana’a and lived in many cities before Berlin. She became part of Encounters as part of the translation team, two months after she arrived to Berlin. She is interested in community development and working on participatory processes for community-led design and activities.

Hama Zangana

Hama comes from Kirkuk, Iraq and has been living in Berlin as a refugee since 2015. Hama joined Encounter in 2018 and is specialized in illustration, translation, and giving safe space workshops to discuss cultural and religious issues. He speaks Kurdish, Arabic, English, German, Turkmenish/Turkish.

Zeynep Disbudak

Editor Turkish

Zeynep is a fellow creature who was born and raised in Istanbul and ended up in Berlin in 2015. Enjoyed being involved in various interdisciplinary projects, she currently works for international film festivals and cultural institutes. She holds bachelor’s degrees in Economics and Sociology from Bogazici University and she has recently finished up her master’s thesis in Social and Cultural Anthropology at Free University of Berlin. She is fluent in Turkish, German and English and has basic conversational skills in Arabic and Italian.

Mojtaba Parvaneh

Mojtaba is an Iranian User Interface designer and Content Creator with aMasters degree in Advertising and Corporate Communication from the University of Milan (UNIMI).He worked as a photographer and graphic designer at newspaper and advertising companies in Iran. He came to Freie Universität Berlin as an Erasmus student where he got to know Judith Albrecht, and started his cooperation with Encounters workshops as a cameraman and video editor in the ”Kiezstory” project. Mojtaba also is the winner of the design competition,Lombardia Design Hubwhich took place in Milan in December 2018. He has recently launched a royalty-free stock photos and videos website which focuses on telling advertising storieson Instagram.

Lilas Al Loulou

Editor Arabic

Lilas Alloulou is from Syria, where she studied English Literature. In 2014 she started working with refugees in Egypt, where she completed her training as a psychosocial worker. She continued her work in Germany when she moved to Berlin in 2015. She is active in various projects and has been working with the editorial team of the magazine since its establishment. She is currently absolving a BA program with double concentration (Ethics and Politics / Art and Aesthetics) at Bard College Berlin.

Victoria Sakti

Victoria Sakti is a social and cultural anthropologist whose work draws on her multidisciplinary and intercultural background. Having spent her formative years in Indonesia, in the USA, and in Europe, she is keen in exploring the linkages of transnational migration, memory and their related emotions in her collaboration with the Encounter-blog. She is co-founder and chairperson of Mauerpark Institute and is currently a postdoctoral fellow at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity in Göttingen, Germany. Her current research project is a multi-sited ethnographic study of ‘ageing in exile’ in the case of East Timorese diasporas.

Thomas Stodulka    

Thomas Stodulka’s work focuses on studying childhood and youth, stigma, marginality, and the interplay between culture, emotion, mental health, and illness. He conducted long-term fieldwork with street-related young men in Yogyakarta, Indonesia between 2001 and 2015 and he has directed various interdisciplinary research projects on the role of emotions and affects in ethnographic knowledge production. Beyond academia, he is a founding member of the Mauerpark Institut Berlin e.V, an independent cinema-café in Yogyakarta, Indonesia, a shelter for chronically ill youth and he is a proud associate of the Milas Vegetarian Restaurant and Workroom Yogyakarta (since 2001).

Lotte Knote

Lotte Knote is an anthropologist who was born in Berlin and who recently joined the encounter-project. She studied African studies, Swahili and social and cultural anthropology in Berlin, London, Zanzibar and Lamu. Her research interests focus on social and political processes of the Kenyan and Tanzanian Swahili coast. Her passion for ethnographic and poetic filmmaking is rooted deeply in the potential she sees in communicating social and political issues through visually engaging images to a global audience. She is currently mainly engaging in topics such as postcolonialism, intersectional feminism and social justice and has worked as volunteer and freelance researcher, editor and translator.

Sadaf Farahani

Sadaf Farahani is a filmmaker, cultural activist and translator based in Berlin. She worked as staff photographer for several newspapers and magazines in Iran and as a freelance photojournalist/author with various international media before she moved to Germany in 2011. She is involved and very interested in immigration and integration related issues.

Sadek Bouzinou

Sadek Bouzinou is an engaged artist from Algeria. As an urban sociologist, he is used to observe the social phenomena of his country. Thanks to his music, the leader of the Algerian Reggae band Democratoz became a spokesperson of the Algerian youth. Through images, sound and text, he speaks up for the cause of migrants, education, and the environment. Recently, Sadek has attracted attention as a film-maker, giving a voice to the most vulnerable in his clips and short films.

Elnaz Mostaan


Editor Farsi

Elnaz is a social and cultural activist coming from Iran and living in Germany since 2016. She has a Bachelor in Civil Engineering and a Masters in Architectural and Cultural Heritage. In her research, she studied the forms of community participation through intangible cultural heritage in Berlin. She is a fan of collective work which encourages creativity and movement, and that is what connected her to “Encounter”.

Ladan Nobijari

Editor Farsi

Ladan was born in Tehran, Iran. She has been living in Berlin since 2009. She has a Master’s degree in Process Engineering and is a member of the Encounters editorial team for Farsi.

Nadine Krüger

Editor English & German

Nadine grew up in a small town in the Spreewald region of Germany and has been living in Berlin since 2017, where she studies Social and Cultural Anthropology and English Philology at Freie Universität. She joined the Encounter network as part of an internship at the end of 2019, and is now a member of the editorial team and responsible for German and English translations. She is fluent in German and English and has some knowledge of Swahili, Spanish and French. Her interest in the ways in which language influences our perception of the world and one another, connects her especially to Encounters’ multilingual approach.

Alvaro Martinez

Art Director

Alvaro Martínez, is a Berlin based visual artist, illustrator and anthropologist from Bolivia. He studied anthropology in Bolivia and focused his research on ritualistic and symbolic-healing  among Aymaras in the city of La Paz. As an illustrator his experience is focused in book illustration, graphic novel and character design. His illustrations were published in the Major University San Andrés of La Paz, where he published the graphic novel “La Chaskañawi” in 2012 and designed the image for the international colloquium “Roland Barthes Amateur”. He is the co-creator of the illustrated world of Rokooko and worked for the Spanish Editorial Santillana. He was graduated at the Pictoplasma Academy of Berlin and his work has been exhibited at the Urban Spree gallery and White Concepts Gallery in Berlin. His illustrations were showed at the Maxim Gorki Theater of Berlin.

All former visual conception of the Medienwerkstatt Encounters project by StudioAbashi. Logo designed in 2017 by Golnar Kat and modified by StudioAbashi in 2019.