Facilitating a research-led seminar that examines how non-institutional and grassroots forces challenge the state-led canonization of history. In a city where the landscape is an active archive of trauma and transition, the course investigates the mechanisms behind public commemoration: who possesses the agency to decide what is memorialized, and how do these choices dictate the city’s contemporary identity? By moving through the urban fabric, the curriculum analyzes the "hauntology" of Berlin—exploring sites where monuments have been removed or where "absent presences" continue to exert social and political influence.

Utilizing practice-based research and mixed-method urban analysis, participants engaged with local activist groups and artistic initiatives that operate outside traditional museum frameworks. The seminar prioritized on-site inquiry, shifting the classroom into the streets to observe how various organizations contest official narratives through ephemeral interventions and site-specific protests. This critical engagement allowed students to reflect on their own roles as active agents in the ongoing construction of the city’s "memoryscape."

The seminar’s findings were synthesized into the "Berlin Counter-Memoryscapes Booklet," a publication released by Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. Structured as a toolkit for urban practitioners, the booklet is organized into sections on Concepts, Methods, and Topics, documenting a wide array of student-led investigations into the city's friction-filled history.

With contributions by:

• Muhammad Fata Akyas
• Kornel Bajnay
• Cornel Bandli
• Diana Borisova
• Joseph Colson
• Lucie Girardin
• Cora Nielsen Hovet
• Yizhong Huang
• Faye Johnson
• David Joscha Keller
• Noa Letouche
• Samuel Longchamp
• Wojciech Marczak
• Isabelle McIndoe
• Finn Meiklejohn
• Olivia Noss Dugan
• Thommy Cristian Pantis
• Julia Jadwiga Paterczyk
• Essie Thompson
• Dominic Tucker
• Viviane Wu
• Ziru Zhang