About
A researcher with a particular interest in how place shapes thought — the difference a city makes, what a mosque does to a neighbourhood, what it means to visit something as a partial outsider. Moved across Europe on an Erasmus Mundus scholarship; have been in Germany for the last two years. Writes to remember things before they flatten into summary.
The Erasmus Mundus years
BDMA — Big Data Management and Analytics — is an Erasmus Mundus Joint Master Degree run across five European universities. The programme is designed to move students between institutions: a first semester on data management foundations, a second on distributed systems and big data infrastructure, then a specialisation year at one of the partner universities.
What the structure means in practice is that you live in three cities across two years — you find a mosque in each one, you figure out how the public transit works, you make friends you will probably not see again after the next move. Brussels was grey and organised and quietly welcoming. Barcelona had too much light and I was never ready to leave it. Paris was enormous and I spent most of it working.
The useful residue of all that movement is a finely tuned attention to what makes cities different from each other at the level of daily texture rather than landmark. That is probably what most of this writing is about.
What this is
A public diary. Posts group into five categories — places for specific locations, religion for anything touching faith and practice, travel for the movement between, reflections for the harder-to-categorise, and ideas for thoughts that started somewhere and did not finish. There is also a lessons page: short things that seem to be true, numbered for convenience rather than importance.
The writing is not optimised for discoverability. It is for remembering things with enough precision that they stay useful.
Contact
Email: testtoseek@gmail.com