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Sarah Jurkiewicz is a post-doc researcher and research coordinator at the Zentrum Moderner Orient, Berlin. After studying European Ethnology, Middle East Studies and Theatre Studies in Berlin, she worked at the ZMO as assistant to the director. Subsequently, she completed her PhD at Oslo University with a PhD thesis on the production practices and modes of publicness of young bloggers in Beirut. Her research interests lie in the anthropology of the Middle East, media anthropology, studying translocal entanglements and migration, as well as practice theory.Sarah Jurkiewicz's project:In Search of Urban Involvement—Cultural Activism in Kuwait CityMy current research project is part of a comparative project on “Spaces of Participation” which studies topographies of political and social change in Morocco, Egypt, Palestine and Kuwait. By studying space-related activities that are situated at the juncture between public and private, the project focuses on where people turn into political and social actors and addresses the issue of change at the micro-social level.My own project on Kuwait attempts to study semi-public spaces that foster cultural activism – with a focus on the issue of urban space and participation. Due to the urban transformation in Kuwait after the advent of the oil-industry, Kuwait’s inhabitants have according to Farah al-Nakib lost the right to “being involved in the process of actually producing the city” (2014: 106). Only recently quests for public participation in the urban development have been made, such as by a curatorial collective of architects called “Arabana” that has established a warehouse studio by restoring an old warehouse. My project sets out to study such initiatives of cultural activists related to or emerging from semi-public spaces (such as cultural centers, galleries etc.). I will trace the activists’ involvement in relation to the actual (material) spaces while analyzing the reflection or co-construction of theses spaces online. My focus lies on the activists’ daily lives, how they inhabit the city and make use of concrete material spaces. In addition to that preoccupation with contemporary practices and spaces, I compare these to historical spaces of involvement in Kuwait’s urban history.&#160;&#160;