The Vienna Coffeehouse Method: An Experiment in Social, Intellectual, and School Improvement in Seven Coffee Sessions

Introduction

To evoke the Vienna coffeehouse is to evoke a time and a place that is as much myth as reality. Like the village of Macondo memorialised in Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, the reality is as magical as the magical is made to feel real (see García Márquez, 1970). The evocation of a magical past is the old conservative’s trick—awaken a longing for a prelapsarian past when all problems stood silent before an idyllic setting. Thus, when I evoke the Vienna coffeehouse—when I tease the open spaces where artists, thinkers, journalists, and vernacular wits would mingle in open spaces over aromas never to be recaptured—the reader should, of course, read with a healthy dose of skepticism, knowing (as the wise among us usually do) that a hundred years from now others will invoke our own flawed present as an idyllic past.
 
Yet, having given my caveats, let us proceed (cautiously) to recreate the atmosphere of the Vienna coffeehouse—so prominent from the late 17th century into the early 20th century—as a corrective to some of the shortcomings of our 21st-century moment.
 
One cup of coffee, one cup of tea, one magical drink at a time, let us bond, face-to-face, wit-to-wit, to cure ourselves of smartphone addiction, loneliness, anomie, political polarisation, apathy, and more. Let us try to add liveliness and pep to our discourse. And, if no great obstacles are overcome, then at the very least we can enjoy the hours, minutes, and seconds of each other’s company. By the end of our shared journey, we may know better whether the “Vienna coffeehouse” can survive, if not by institution, then as a method for the improvement of educational institutions.
 
To summarise the research in more generic terms: this short essay chronicles several attempts to use shared drink experiences to improve the researcher’s host school (Nagasaki University of Foreign Studies) as well as several other English schools in the Nagasaki area.

The First Lonely Cups—Researching the Vienna Coffeehouse

My journey began with a few lonely cups. These cups, with no especially significant brands or blends, were my companion as I sifted through websites and research databases for details of the Vienna coffeehouse, hoping to pull research and insights into method. I was not only looking for historical information on Vienna coffeehouses but also a mood. William Carlos Williams (1958) famously wrote in his poem Paterson that there are “no ideas but in things” (n.p.). For Williams, it was the poet’s job to avoid abstraction and focus on concrete details. I believe there are benefits to bringing some of the concreteness of poetry to research on occasion (see my earlier paper, Clausen, 2019). Thus, in my readings, I also wanted to feel the landscape of these coffeehouses as much as possible.
 
My first lonely attempts at research took me to a volume entitled The Thinking Space, a book about cafes and café cultures, written by a cohort of authors enamoured with Vienna coffeehouse culture. As I sat down to read the chapters from the book, I imagined myself unfurling the chapters like a large newspaper in my favourite coffeehouse chair. In the introduction of the book, Haine (2016) writes of the importance of cafes: “[they] fulfill vital human needs: nurturing human perceptions with beverages, sights, smells, and sounds these spaces have had a dramatic impact on intellectual history at various points” (p. 3). It occurred to me as I read that I too would need to evoke not just ideas, but a time and place. For if I were to recreate something as magical as the Vienna coffeehouse experience, I would want my readers somehow to smell and feel the atmosphere through the pages.
 
Beyond the visceral aspects of my research, other important ideas presented themselves. Haine (2016) discusses the idea of the café as a “third place” (p. 11), someplace distinct from home and work. It occurred to me then that third places of all kinds have been disappearing or at the very least hollowing out. Cafes, churches, parks, barbershops, street corners to gossip—these places have been emptying of people and spiritual content, replaced by digital spaces such as social media, screen time, and virtual experiences. I still do not have enough firm ground to say that all these replacements are vacuous. In addition, the rise of Starbucks suggests that the concept of the café as a “third space” has not been entirely displaced; instead, it has been franchised and globalised, often in ways that shape how local coffee shops operate and how people consume coffee and use coffee shops for conversation (for a fuller discussion, see Curran & Chesnut, 2022; Gaudio, 2003).
 
On the origin of Vienna coffeehouses, Lederer (2016) writes, “To be sure, the institution of the coffee house was not invented in Vienna. Coffee houses have been a flourishing tradition in the Near East since the Middle Ages; in Europe they existed in Venice, Marseilles, and London before coming to Vienna. But the Viennese gave them a special flavour” (p. 26). It seems to me that to run an independent coffee shop, you need to imbue it with a unique flavour. Thus, as I began to build my coffee basket, I filled it with business cards and mementos from various coffee shops around Nagasaki. These coffee shops—June, Kimama Coffee, ecRu, Goooooood Coffee—were the fertile grounds for my early ideas for this essay / adventure. My experience in these places urged me to ask: What special (local) flavours will I add to my coffee experiment?
 
What was the source of the decline of the intellectual café? Haine (2016) writes, “It was only in the post-1945 boom and with the dramatic reordering of daily life and the rise of consumer culture and mass tourism that the intellectual café would go into decline during the 1960s” (p. 9). It is difficult to determine how much the decline of European café culture was influenced by the rise of consumerism and mass culture, versus the social and political upheavals of the 20th century. However, the rise of franchise chains like Starbucks suggests that there is still a desire for “third spaces,” with the possibility of accidental discovery, both intellectual and social, that such places promise. As Haine (2016) writes, “Ironically a world that is becoming all the more serious and ferocious in its competition also has need for the ability to dream and play and fantasise in cafés, as artists and intellectuals have for hundreds of years. This is why intellectual cafés and the functions they serve will never become obsolete: as long as human beings have bodies cafés are not destined, as perhaps are most stores, to become museums.” (p. 21-22).
 
With these insights in mind, I suspended, at least for the time being, my reading on the subject. It was now time to observe just how the coffee / beverage experience could bring people together.

Field Work (February 28 and 29, 2024)—Niwa Festival and Kimama Coffee

Two trips were made to collect ideas for my coffee/drink sessions. On February 28, 2024, I went to the Garden Festival at Gokoku Shrine. The purpose of this trip was to observe how a “third space” filled with local artisans could create a sense of community. The second trip, on February 29, 2024, was to a small coffee shop in the countryside of Nagasaki. The purpose of this trip was to observe how local coffee shop owners fostered a sense of community with residents.

 

Image 1. Nagasaki Garden Festival and Kimama Coffee Shop (Photo by the author).

At the Garden Festival at Gokoku Shrine, I enjoyed a lively festival atmosphere. I watched local artisans displaying their crafts and families enjoying picnics. The festival offered a variety of local artisanal goods and treats (pottery, handcrafted wood art, matcha treats, and Sonogi Town tea) to deepen my thoughts on what a coffeehouse approach to school improvement might look like. In particular, the garden festival gave me the insight that it might be a good idea to invite students and teachers to bring personal items to talk about during the coffee sessions. Interesting items with rich origins (like the artisanal items found at the Garden Festival) might be the impetus for great conversations.
 
My second visit was to Kimama Coffee in Wakimisaki, Nagasaki. This coffee shop was situated in a small-town suffering from the effects of depopulation. The coffee shop was relatively small, with seats for about four to five people inside and about four to five people outside. The shop was built as an appendage to a local home and was decorated with handcrafted wood art. The inside of the coffee shop displayed local art and advertised community events. As I enjoyed my coffee (Tanzania “Kigoma Chimpanzee AA” Washed), I had the opportunity to observe the daily rhythms and interactions of the locals. The two shopkeepers excelled at educating customers on the kinds of coffees they were drinking and making each customer feel welcome without intruding on conversation.
 
More importantly, the simple establishment used coffee as a bridge to the wider world. In their small bookshelf were books such as Kōhī de yomitoku SDGs (Understanding SDGs through coffee) (Kawashima et al., 2021). Kimama Coffee Shop sold special coffee pouches as part of a project called “Hanto x Hanto.” The coffee pouches sold for 200 yen, with 100 yen going toward assisting disaster relief in the Noto Peninsula of Ichikawa Prefecture. I realised that this project could serve as an example for how students could engage in small-scale activism.

Image 2. Kimama Coffee Shop and small-scale activism (Photo by the author).

The First (Social) Session (July 3, 2024)—Theory and Hypotheses: Grounded, Ground, and Possibly Whole Bean

On July 3, 2024, I sat down for my first coffee “session.” For the first (social) cup, I met with my colleague, another coffee lover, to discuss what a project like this—a vaguely formulated “Vienna coffeehouse” project—could possibly become. I let him make the coffee, one cup from Kimama Coffee Shop and another generic blend. As we talked, I wrote out all our ideas for the project on flashcards so that we could review them at the end.
 
Early into our conversation, I decided to write a notecard with the word “Despair” on it. I decided to reveal my insecurities about the project. On the card, I wrote, “I don’t think I’ll ever have the peace of mind or time to do this the way I want to.” It was nice to have a colleague listen to my anxieties in a non-judgmental way. I realised that my anxieties regarding the project had to do with trying to navigate between defining the project too narrowly (and thus, preventing possible accidental discoveries) and not defining the project narrowly enough (and thus, the project becoming aimless).
 
During our chat, my colleague told me about aspects of the school he wished were different: more chances to meet fellow colleagues, chances to exchange ideas, ways to get students to meet one another. As we talked, he also gave me a good idea: have a session where students who want to study abroad can talk to students who have already studied abroad. At one point during our conversation, however, I started whistling. That’s when he told me, “You shouldn’t do that during sessions.” So that became a card too. “Don’t whistle.”

Image 3. Brainstorming session (Photo by the author).
 
After we had written out several cards with ideas, we continued to chat about this and that—things that didn’t seem necessarily to belong on cards as research ideas, but were important, nonetheless. Perhaps that is part of this project, too—creating an open space to air ideas, even if they don’t warrant inclusion in an academic research paper.
 
The result of the brainstorming session, approximately seven ideas for specific coffee sessions, went into a compartment in the coffee basket. The idea was that I would return to these ideas periodically during the project.

The Second and Third (Non-Purposive / Casual) Social Sessions (July 18 and 26, 2024)

During the research project, I plan to have several cups with very targeted purposes. Some cups will be to mend relationships; others will be to inspire wayward students; others will be to generate ideas that will improve the school. On July 18, 2024, I took time for some casual cups with students.
 
A student from the university wanted to catch up, so I took out the coffee basket, now fully stocked with coffee, teas, conversation flashcards, and games. Another student joined midway through, and we enjoyed our time together, chatting leisurely. I had forgotten how nice it is just to share company with another person without other motives.
 
However, I could not turn off my researcher instincts entirely during this session. I noticed that the session really didn’t start to have deep value—social, healing value—until about twenty or thirty minutes in. This was around the time when the participants began to drop their inhibitions and feel safe with one another. I realised then that if I really wanted the project to have an impact, I would have to commit serious time to each session.
 
Even though it was close to the end of the semester (a busy time for everyone), we were able to schedule a follow up session for July 26, 2024. For that session, seven students participated. We drank tea and talked in Japanese and English. I didn’t take notes for this session either, but rather, just enjoyed the opportunity to spend some time with students. I did everything in my power to make the session feel casual—not a farewell party or a social experiment.
 
One student asked midway through the second session, “What is the point of this, by the way?” I did not feel obligated to answer that person’s question directly. Rather, I reflected the question back, “I don’t know. What is the point?” The student replied, “I don’t know… but it is rather nice.”

The Fourth Session (September 4, 2024)—The IT Crowd

Image 4. The "IT" Crowd (Photo by the author).

The next coffee session was conducted on September 4, 2024, and involved four participants in addition to the researcher. I have labeled this session “The IT Crowd” because the session mainly involved colleagues who work in and around the Information Technology Department, though their roles involve many different functions at the university. Before the session, I asked the participants for their favourite drinks and prepared them, along with chocolates and a selection of “surprise” drinks sourced from various coffee shops in the area.
 
The goals of this session were to provide some “human” appreciation for all the hard work and help these colleagues have given during the semester, to spread a little awareness of coffee shops in the local area (including giving away business cards for those shops), to get to know my colleagues on a more personal level, to get feedback on the coffee basket, and, of course, to have a great time together.  
 
Initially, the session was designed to involve switching partners to maximise the variety of interactions. However, it quickly became apparent that the participants were deeply engaged with their initial partners; thus, the plan was adjusted to allow these conversations to continue uninterrupted. Although the session lasted for sixty minutes, it took approximately fifteen minutes for the participants to warm up and feel comfortable engaging in deeper discussions. This reinforced an earlier observation that the real value of the sessions only began to set in after a certain level of comfort was established. The use of conversation cards, which were prepared by students from previous sessions, played a crucial role in facilitating these initial interactions and easing the participants into meaningful dialogue.
 
Following the session, the participants contributed additional discussion questions that would be used for future coffee sessions. Notably, most of these discussion questions were written in Japanese, indicating a preference for or comfort with their native language. I believe that continuing to allow participants to communicate in any way they wish is an important aspect of creating an open, free space for building community. As far as improving the coffee basket, the participants suggested adding games such as Uno and playing cards. All participants seemed to enjoy having an informal space to meet and socialise.

More Lonely Cups—Deeper into Vienna Coffee Culture

It is around this point in my research project that I returned to the act and art of reading. In a perfect (research) world, I would have taken my reading to a local café truly to immerse myself in research; unfortunately, I found myself in my office reading PDF chapters of articles (perhaps it is the environmentalist in me that did not want to waste ink and paper). Once again, I was reading about Vienna café culture to try to understand the “feel” of a Vienna coffeehouse in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. As I read, I noticed recurring patterns: the Vienna coffeehouse as a place full of specificity and local colour; its existence as a third space; and the need for colourful figures to create a sense of vitality.
 
In a turn-of-the-century Vienna coffeehouse,

one could enjoy the artistic décor, reflect on oneself, and observe others in oversize mirrors; sit at marble tables on world-famous Thonet chairs; play billiards, chess, checkers; meet one’s girlfriend; read journals and newspapers in dozens of languages; eat Viennese pastry specialties—many of which had actually been invented in Prague, Budapest, Zagreb, and countless other culinary centers of the Austro-Hungarian Empire (Schwarz, 2016, p. 33).

It is hard to imagine me providing such an experience with a simple coffee basket (no room for billiards or full newspapers!). However, the specificity of Vienna coffeehouses (“Viennese pastry specialties”) made me realise that my coffee basket would benefit from “Nagasaki treats,” as well as treats and coffees from students’ hometowns. These delights could easily turn into conversation starters. Even if I could not create a Vienna coffeehouse, by keeping business cards from local coffeeshops and various items from other places, I could help my guests imagine specific locations in their minds.
 
During my readings, I could not escape the theme of Vienna coffeehouses as “third spaces,” a place neither work nor home. “The literary café is a thirdspace in the sense that is ‘located’ at the borderzone between the ‘public’ and the ‘private,’ the ‘inside’ and the ‘outside,’ the ‘real’ and ‘imagined,’ the ‘immigrant’ and the ‘native,’ the ‘elitist,’ artistic avant-garde and ‘mass’ consumption” (Pinsker, 2016, p. 53). For me, the categories I wish to break down are the rigid categories of the university: teacher / student; faculty / staff; senpai (“senior”) / kōhai (“junior”). I seek to create a space where faculty, students, office staff, cleaners, and other support staff can mingle openly. In Japan, especially, categorical identification can be hard to overcome. However, overcoming these rigid categories can be essential to building an inclusive school community.
 
The trick of overcoming these rigid categories can perhaps be facilitated through a familiarity of faces and places:

The coffee house offers continuity. Conversation with like-minded characters sharpens their wits and inspires their creativity. It is a place where communication is possible. It gives one support in the frightening loneliness of the metropolis. It is the only place where one’s absence is noticed, where one is known by name, which counteracts the anonymity of modern life (Schwarz, 2016, p. 49).

Though Togitsu, Nagasaki, where my university is located, is much more rural and offers the prospect of familiarity, it occurred to me that student isolation is still problematic. Unfortunately, I found the prospects for creating “familiarity” out of my reach to be limited. After all, my coffee sessions could only be held irregularly.
 
Perhaps one also needs lively characters to bring the Vienna coffeehouse back to life. No figure looms as large over the Vienna coffeehouse scene as Peter Altenberg. Who was Peter Altenberg? He was the author of literary sketches, short stories, notes, and aphorisms; but beyond that, he was a lively character. “He was fond of describing himself as a Schnorrer, a penniless destitute. He was a familiar sight in Vienna, strolling around with his slouch hat, a gnarled stick in his hand, his sockless feet shod in sandals, a notorious Bohemian and veritable forerunner of the beatniks. He had to be protected from starvation by the benevolence of art-loving patrons” (Schwarz, 2016, p. 36; for a colourful portrait of Altenberg, see also, James, 2008). Even if such a person existed to frequent my coffee sessions, it would be best not to describe him or her in detail, lest the university revoke my coffee-providing (and research) privileges. Typically, universities like their professors to publish research that is interesting—but not Peter Altenberg-level interesting! However, without lively personalities, it is hard to have a lively university community. To make memories, it helps to have personalities and characters that are memorable. Though the sessions have been described in dry academic prose, one of the points of these sessions is to find the characters and personalities behind the everyday faces I take for granted at the university.

The Fifth Session: Discussing Coffee Culture at Kona Café (September 14, 2024)

On September 14, 2024, a coffee session was conducted with a former student from a previous workplace, a language school in a different city in Nagasaki Prefecture. The session took place at Kona’s Coffee Hawaiian Pancake House in Togitsu, Nagasaki. The session was an opportunity for me to catch up with a former student and to have a uniquely coffee culture-themed lesson. The lesson material was developed from a textbook titled Sixty-Six Little Lessons: Photocopiable Lessons for English Teachers. The textbook contains free photocopiable lesson resources for teachers divided by themes (Walker, 2018, p. 17-18). The lesson flow included: picture speculation, vocabulary discussion, discussion questions, and a role play. However, the most interesting aspect of the lesson regarding this project involved a role play activity.
 
In the role play, we were asked to create a coffee shop, including choosing between a franchise coffee shop or an independent coffee shop, as well as developing a unique selling point for the coffee shop.

Image 5. Sixty Little Lessons (Source: Walker, C. Sixty Little Lessons: Photocopiable Lessons for English Teachers, 2018)

Interestingly—and perhaps counterintuitively given the spirit of this project—the student decided on opening a Starbucks. The rationale behind the decision was the financial feasibility of opening a well-known franchise over starting an independent shop. The student was especially concerned with avoiding going out of business and wanted to maximise his return on investment. Though we were not able to come up with a unique selling point (after all, the point of a franchise is that it is familiar, not unique), the student was able to convince me why a Starbucks coffee shop was a wise investment. Customers would benefit from a familiar brand; and the student, someone who had no experience running a coffee shop, would have a ready-made business. He could avoid all the headaches of learning how to run a business through trial-and-error. (As if life were not more fun with trial-and-error!)
 
Over chips with guacamole at Kona’s Coffee, we debated the merits of this decision, but eventually, I allowed the student’s pragmatism to win out. Apparently, the romantic ideal of an independent coffee shop that draws in freethinkers is admissible as long as it exists in the space of a frivolous academic article (with no significant amounts of invested capital)!

Image 6. Kona's Coffee Hawaiian Pancake House (Photo by the author).

The Sixth Session– Puzzling about the Puzzle of Research through a Puzzle (October 2, 2024)

Image 7. Puzzle Time. (Photo by the author.)

On October 2, 2024, at the beginning of the fall semester, I encountered a student I hadn’t seen for several months. I invited him for coffee, and we started to catch up over cups of pancake-flavoured coffee (one of several dessert-flavoured coffees the basket was stocked with). On a whim, I brought out a 200-piece puzzle that I had put in the basket. I thought to myself, “At most, this will take an hour to complete.” Two hours later, we still hadn’t finished the puzzle. Luckily, I was not distracted by other tasks. I was amazed at how absorbed we became in the activity. What had started at 4:30 as a casual cup became at 7:30 a passion project. We still had not finished the puzzle by the time we left the school twenty minutes later. I was puzzled by the puzzle—was this the best use of my research time? However, as I was walking home, I thought about how delighted the student had been to share that time with me. Also, because of my decision to make student-centred research a priority, I’d had the time to spend with my student. Like the puzzle itself, my research and my ideas about what I should be doing with my research time were filling in slowly. And, if the puzzle was never to be completed, at least I had shared the delight of pancake-flavoured coffee with a fellow human being.
 
As it turned out, two days later, I continued the puzzle with two other students over cups of Hazelnut and Hawaiian Kona Coffee. The puzzle and the cups of coffee provided a wonderful atmosphere to learn about how these students were progressing with their job searches. As it turned out, we finished the puzzle. And if I could finish the puzzle, then perhaps I could bring this project to a kind of conclusion as well.

Image 8. The Completed Puzzle. (Photo by the author.)

More Lonely Cups—Deepening the Research Agenda

It occurred to me that there is a research agenda—beyond Vienna coffeehouses—that integrates coffee and English language learning. Though it is not the goal of this article fully to engage with this literature, it is to the benefit of all (me, the readers, the school, and the coffee-drinkers of the world) that I should at the very least motion toward fuller engagement if for no other reason than to set some foundations for a longer research agenda—hopefully one that includes more felicitous bonding over delicious coffee.
 
As I explored further, I discovered a master’s thesis by Garzón (2024) that combined learning about the importance of coffee for the local community with English language learning in Colombia. Garzón (2024), building on the research of Zuluaga Corrales et al. (2009), creates a task-based learning experience that combines coffee culture and English-language acquisition. Garzón (2024) writes,
 
local knowledge within these coffee communities can significantly influence curricular constructions by resignifying cultural values within the English classroom. In this regard, students actively engaged in exploring their coffee culture, fostering positive awareness about their identity as coffee farmers (p. 5).
 
By engaging in what Garzón (2024) describes as Community-Based Pedagogies, local knowledge and English language learning become activities that reinforce one another. The project involved students in field trips, interviews, participant observation, and a coffee fair.
 
As I was reading this thesis, my own question was: How difficult would it be to implement Community-Based Pedagogies at my own institution? It seems that fully to implement Community-Based Pedagogies one needs mature students, abundant time, and perhaps even small class sizes that allow for more intense monitoring. However, a natural extension of this paper and its coffee sessions would be the use of field trips to local coffee shops to learn about how these coffee shops were started by local entrepreneurs.
 
As I finished these lonely cups, it occurred to me that if I wanted to, I could grow this research beyond a mere coffee basket with isolated sessions. I could create structured class projects, lessons, work experiences, field research projects, and more.

The Seventh Session—Or, Goodbye For Now Vienna Coffee Culture (October 11, 2024)

Six students came to this (final?) coffee and beverage session. The session brought students from different places throughout Japan (Oita, Okinawa, Kitakyushu, Nagasaki) and one foreign exchange student from Texas, United States. We enjoyed cups of Mont Blanc-flavoured coffee, which we tasted together. We attempted to give our self-introductions in as many languages as we could, which proved to be a fun activity. We communicated in bits of English, Japanese, Chinese, Korean, and even Sign Language. By the time we moved onto Vanilla Macadamia-flavoured coffee, we had begun discussing our hometowns. Out of the six students, only a few knew each other from previous classes; thus, it was a great chance for students to get to know one another. Instead of breaking into groups or pairs, we stayed in one big group, which perhaps explains why students seemed a little shyer than in previous sessions. However, all the students reported having fun and regretted when our hour-long session was over. This session, like the others, reinforced the idea that students need a place where they can have repeated meetings with budding friends and temporary strangers.
 
During the session, too, perhaps to reinforce that at least the first stage of this research project was ending, I gave away many of the resources in the coffee basket. As a researcher, I knew that I would need a little time fully to digest all the lessons of these seven coffee sessions.

Bonus Session: Visiting a Friend’s School (October 12, 2024)

I planned to finish this paper around my seventh coffee session. However, as I was finishing the paper, I had an opportunity to visit a friend’s English school to do a guest lesson. There I continued my coffee shop experiment by adapting the lesson on cafes from the Walker (2018) textbook. It was a delightful way to catch up with a friend and be of service to a local language school. It also demonstrated that my experiment had resulted in lesson materials I could reuse in other settings. In this final session, about five students were present of various levels. Unlike the previous sessions, which were free flowing, this had some of the trappings of a formal lesson with structured tasks and objectives. The lesson was a good time for all and seemed to fit within the loosely defined “Vienna Coffeehouse” project.

Image 9. Choose a topic. (Photo by the author.)

Conclusion: Third (Coffee) Spaces and their Meaning

By returning to the Vienna coffeehouse, I hoped to connect a historical idea with a modern need. The concept behind the Vienna coffeehouse culture is that the world (and particularly my university) needs more “third spaces,” where intellectuals, freethinkers, and others can commune, share ideas, and engage in intellectual free play. The coffee sessions, modest though they were, were a start toward creating these spaces.
 
During my research, I experimented with various ways to create what I hoped were meaningful “third spaces.” In the future, I hope to have an even more eclectic mix of informal gatherings, pre-structured sessions, and opportunistic get-togethers. However, as I have found during this project (as in all my research projects), life always seems to intervene (in this case, in the form of work tasks that have muddled my schedule). For that reason, perhaps the best way to continue the project is to maintain its simplicity and flexibility and not lose sight of its motivating spirit—create spaces where people are free to express ideas and connect with others.
 
The challenges with my project are clear: the lack of a designated space and limited time. A recurring theme throughout these sessions was that they only became “comfortable” and “safe” after about fifteen to thirty minutes of socialising. Another recurring theme was participants’ desire for regular spaces and times for more sessions—something this modest research cannot yet provide.
 
Unfortunately, my modest research project lives in the shadow of a superior alternative: an actual coffeehouse. Stocked with conversation cards, games, and mementos, the coffee basket (it has no formal name yet) serves as a humble stand-in for the ideal space I envision. It is not the sterling open intellectual space of the mythologised past, but rather—a modest attempt to recreate the magic of the Vienna coffeehouse in today’s world.

References

Clausen, D. (2019). “No Idea but in Things” - Ideas for Crafting (Evocative) Theory. Journal of Asia Pacific Studies, 5(2), 162-169.
 
Curran, N. M., & Chesnut, M. (2022). English fever and coffee: Transient cosmopolitanism and the rising cost of distinction. Journal of Consumer Culture, 22(2), 551-570.
 
García Márquez, G. (1970). One Hundred Years of Solitude (G. Rabassa, Trans.). Harper & Row. (Original work published 1967).
 
Garzón, A. E. A. (2024). From Beans to Bonds: Coffee Culture, Identity, and Community Education (Doctoral dissertation, Universidad del Tolima).
 
Gaudio, R. P. (2003). Coffeetalk: Starbucks and the commercialization of casual conversation. Language in Society, 32(5), 659-691.
 
Haine, W.S. (2016). Introduction. In Rittner, L., & Haine, W. S. (Eds.), Thinking Space: The Cafe as a Cultural Institution in Paris, Italy, and Vienna (pp. 1-22). Routledge.
 
James, C. (2008). Cultural Amnesia: Necessary Memories from History and the Arts. WW Norton & Company.　
 
Kawashima, Jose, Ikemoto, Y., & Yamashita, K. (2021). Kōhī de yomitoku SDGs. [Understanding SDGs through coffee]. Tankobon Hardcover.
 
Lederer, H. (2016). The Vienna Coffee House: History and Cultural Significance. In Rittner, L., & Haine, W. S. (Eds.), Thinking Space: The Cafe as a Cultural Institution in Paris, Italy, and Vienna (pp. 25-32). Routledge.
 
Pinsker, S. (2016). Jewish Modernism and Viennese Cafés, 1900–1930. In Rittner, L., & Haine, W. S. (Eds.), Thinking Space: The Cafe as a Cultural Institution in Paris, Italy, and Vienna (pp. 51-64). Routledge.
 
Schwarz, E. (2016). The End of a False Summer: Aspects of Viennese Literary Culture around 1900. In Rittner, L., & Haine, W. S. (Eds.), Thinking Space: The Cafe as a Cultural Institution in Paris, Italy, and Vienna (pp. 33-49). Routledge.
 
Walker, C. (2018). Sixty-Six Little Lessons: Photocopiable Lessons for English Teachers. Closely Observed.
 
Williams, W. C. (1958). Paterson. New York: Laughlin. Retrieved April 24, 2018, from https://archive.org/stream/PatersonWCW/PatersonWilliam_Carlos_Williams_djvu.txt
 
Zuluaga Corrales, C. T., López Pinzón, M. M., & Quintero Corzo, J. (2009). Integrating the coffee culture with the teaching of English. Profile Issues in Teachers Professional Development, 11(2), 27-42.

Article copyright Daniel Clausen.

Back to top