Author: Jan Koehler

After designing, acquiring and implementing (with changing partners) three VW-Foundation financed projects and a further three DFG-financed projects I closed the door of our last FU office – the Gardenhouse – for the last time on the 15th of August 2019. Sixteen years of work for the Freie Universität Berlin came to a quiet end. When I finally locked the door three “men” took the last stance: Tamila Gvadzhava, who had helped me finalising the ICCS project here in Berlin (it will live on at the partner universities in the North- and South Caucasus! New projects based on ICCS and longitudinal impact research are also in the pipeline on our side, with a new academic affiliation), Anastasia Koehler, who had assisted our projects from time to time in Berlin, the Caucasus, Peru and Mexico, and myself. On the light side, however, and owing to the somewhat fleeting institutional interest in our work, we did enjoy degrees of academic freedom in organising and implementing the research we could only have dreamed of under more engaged conditions; hence, I have nothing to complain about here and am quite grateful to FU for providing, if unwittingly, the niches and shadows that enabled our work to flourish. There is a crack in everything – that is how the light gets in (Leonard Cohen, of course).