There are places where we feel well, with which we can identify ourselves, and where we can be ourselves. Places where we are welcome, places where we can feel at home. But sometimes it is difficult 
to find one’s place or we feels at home in many different places, and, therefore, feel a bit place-less. It is not always given that we are accepted at a place. Sometimes we are explicitly excluded from certain places. We also cannot always ‘make’ or ‘create’ our own place, or are ‘outplaced’ by others. There is a politics of place.
This, in a certain way, was also the main topic of a recent PhD thesis by Dr. Emiel Maliepaard in our group under the supervision of Dr. Roos Pijpers, and Prof. Huib Ernste on the ‘Bisexual Rhapsody: On the everyday sexual identity negotiations of bisexual people in Rotterdam and Amsterdam and the productions of bisexual spaces. The first PhD-thesis addressing this issue in the Netherlands and as such a path-breaking work.
We are now working of a state of the art online course (Massive Open On-line Course (MOOC)) on ‘Qualitative Methods’ for the 
Together with Dr. Maria Kaufmann, Prof. Huib Ernste organised a very successful course on ‘Qualitative Methods’, for the second time in row. A very diverse group of scholars, from Bachelor students to PhD students from many different disciplines and countries participated in this course. Although it is intensive work, it is also a great joy, with these highly motivated and diligent students. It also provides us with some extra income which is re-invested again in creating a modularised on-line version of this course, which can be used for many different purposes, audiences and situations.
Traveling this summer through Kirgistan and Uzbekistan, provided us with great new experiences and knowledge of places we did not know enough of before. Since we moved into a new university building last Christmas, and still need to make that new place to ‘our’ place… it was fascinating to see this early university built by one of the founding fathers of our today’s science, and one of the founding fathers of our own discipline Geography, Ulugh Beg, and what this place expresses and how it impresses you when strolling through them. Then you get the feeling that the architect of our modern, transparent, and unrecognisably similar to almost all modern office buildings all over the world, could have done better in making a special place for science… The art of place making…
