Doris Bachmann-Medick
Doris Bachmann-Medick
Adjunct Senior Research Fellow, PhD
International Graduate Centre for the Study of Culture (GCSC)
Justus Liebig University Giessen
Otto-Behaghel-Straße 12
35394 Gießen
mail
I have always striven to push or extend the boundaries of my discipline. Being trained in literary studies (German philology), I expanded my notion of the literary into the study of culture, first by bringing it into relation with ethnology (literary anthropology). This translation between disciplines opened for me the broader field of cultural theory. In my book on “Cultural Turns” I carved out main trajectories and new orientations in the study of culture that are stimulating for transdisciplinary approaches. It formed the basis from which I am now pursuing a calling question: Can translation be considered as a major mode and important analytical category for our contemporary times and problems – not only for crossing disciplines and linking different research systems, but also for a necessary transnationalization of the study of culture and, finally, for the global encounter itself? In this sense my new book in progress on “Society as Translation” deals with an expanded, not merely linguistic notion of translation: As an important category of cultural and social practice in a globalized world translation seems to become a main concern of translational humanities.