In this talk, Dr. Eduard Arriaga (Clark University) will present an overview of his research on Afrolatinx digital culture in the Americas, emphasizing how Afro-Brazilian groups and organizations are creating networks of hybrid technologies in search of data and technological decolonization. Dr. Arriaga will show how the studied groups adapt and adopt diverse media, digital tools, and platforms from an Afro-Brazilian Black feminism perspective to challenge data and technological determinism. Likewise, he will discuss the way these groups get connected to local, regional, and global nodes to develop critical pedagogies of the digital from the South. The talk will conclude discussing how Afro-Brazilian Community data networks become an example of hybrid Black communal digital practices that require complex approaches that go beyond the boundaries of fields such as the digital humanities.
Prof. Dr. Cristina Florea (Cornell University)
Crossroads of Empires – Revolutions and Encounters at Europe’s Eastern Frontiers
Bukovina, a former borderland of the Habsburg empire now divided between Ukraine and Romania, was a place of mutual observation, competition, emulation, and conflict between the different states and governments that laid claim to this territory and its population. Over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the province experienced repeated regime changes - many of which occurred seemingly overnight. Bukovina and the Eastern European borderlands, more generally, became a place of unexpected entanglements between modern states and sovereignties. This talk will examine how the shared challenges of governing Bukovina facilitated mutual influences between regimes that otherwise viewed each other as ideological opposites. It will do so by exploring these regimes’ recurring preoccupation with culture, understood as literacy, modernization, and urbanization, as an instrument for total transformation.
Prof. Dr. Ursula Heise (University of California)
Into the Multiverse: Cultural Studies and Environmental Futures
The multiverse or existence of parallel worlds has come to the fore as a major theme as well as an important narrative strategy in novels and films of the last twenty years. The scale of these parallel worlds ranges from the individual life decisions in the Oscar-winning film
Everything Everywhere All At Once
(2022) to the ecological transformations in Gibson's novel
The Peripheral
(2014), social structures and racial inequality in the animated film
Spider Man: Into the Spiderverse
(2018) and Micaiah Johnson's
The Space between Worlds
(2020), all the way to different evolutionary trajectories in M.R. Carey's
Infinity Gate
(2020). Narratives such as these reflect, on the surface, on socioeconomic disparities and culture clashes, but they also engage with a deeper sense of epochal change, environmental crisis, and pervasive uncertainty that prevents not only confident forecasting of the future but also cognitive mapping of the present. This presentation will argue that the meme of split and parallel worlds has also affected cultural studies, which has increasingly fractured into tenuously connected epistemic ventures since the turn of the millennium. The paradigm of justice (social, economic, and environmental) has provided a new connective tissue over the last five years, but is itself subject to cultural divergence. The lecture will explore to what extent the cultural studies of the future need connecting paradigms and to what extent the multiverse might prove a productive metaphor for research on cultures.
Prof. Dr. Ralph Grunewald (University of Wisconsin-Madison)
This is Not Storytime: The Narrative Construction of Guilt and Innocence in Wrongful Conviction Cases
Wrongful convictions—cases in which an innocent person is convicted of a crime they did not commit—have been studied primarily through the lenses of law, psychology, and the social sciences. Despite a large body of scholarship, a very simple question has not been answered: How is it possible that prosecutors can convince juries and themselves of the guilt of an innocent defendant, often even against strong exculpatory evidence? In his book, “Narratives of Guilt and Innocence” (NYU Press 2023) Ralph Grunewald addresses this crucial question by analyzing the power of narrative and how it influences the construction of legal reality and the evidence for it. Wrongful convictions exemplify the uncomfortable relationship between narrative and truth in law, and they also provide insights into how differently legal cultures narrate truth in law. Grunewald will discuss the effects of different cultural narrative blueprints (the American and German) and how our narrative desire as a human trait has a universal power with a persistence that transcends the regulatory and procedural setup of a given system.
Prof. Dr. Insa Härtel (IPU Berlin)
Aesthetics of the Sexual: On Sheaths, Scenes, and Screens
He brings a condom into play, she – mocking him – blows it up like a balloon. This sequence from "Looking for Mr. Goodbar" (USA 1977) is quoted in the film "Test" (USA 2013), set in the gay 1980s San Francisco modern dance milieu. Based on the composition of such scenes and going beyond the actual use of the condom, this lecture deals with interlayers and screens, the performance character of sexuality and the aesthetic constitution of the latter.
Winter Semester 2022/2023
Timo Maran (University of Tartu)
Ecosemiotics of the Anthropocene: How to Reground Culture in Ecosystems?
From a semiotic perspective, Anthropocene manifests as a massive multiplication and spread of abstract symbols that lack referential connections with biological and material processes. Such growth of symbols is anti-ecological because of the large amounts of matter and energy required to produce and upkeep various media and artifacts that embody signs. As symbols are signs based on human conventions, they cannot relate directly to changes in environmental and ecological processes (described as dissent by David Low 2009). It is the degradation of the object in the sign that is characteristic of the Anthropocene semiosis.
In the biological realm, organisms rely on the presence of objects (such as environmental constraints, ecosystem properties, and resources). Anthropologists Eduardo Kohn (2013) and Andrew Whitehouse (2015) have proposed the concept of semiotic ground to denote the semiotic basis of the ecosystem. The semiotic ground can be described as a tissue consisting of iconic and indexical signs that retain connection between object and interpretation and, accordingly, between material and semiotic realms. The semiotic ground is a semiotic system shared by human and non-human species alike.
We should find ways to reground human culture, that is, reestablish the connection between the human symbolic sphere and ecosystems. Juri Lotman’s concept of semiosphere (the entirety of culture) could be reinterpreted here as the ecosemiosphere. This would be a semiotic sphere comprising all species and their umwelts, alongside the diverse semiotic relations (including humans with their culture) that they have in the given ecosystem, and also the material supporting structures that enable the ecosemiosphere to thrive (Maran 2020; 2021). Means for moving towards more ecological culture are revising the existing cultural models of nature, emphasizing the role of iconic and indexical semiosis, and fostering connectivity and dialogue between semiotic processes of different complexity.
Florian Mussgnug (University College London, UK & University of Heidelberg, GER)
Transhistorical Speculative Fiction and the (Post-)Apocalyptic Anthropocene
Abstract:
Apocalyptic thinking is often described as reactionary or escapist. In this lecture, we will encounter a radically different, imaginative and progressive attitude towards the end of (the) world(s). Contemporary speculative fiction from Argentina, UK, Canada, Italy, USA, Australia, Norway, the Dominican Republic, and Zambia will provide us with examples of an apocalyptic imagination that is post-anthropocetric, critical and creative, situated and relational: a stance which preserves the ethical and political urgency of religious millennialism, but views apocalypse not as an unspeakable end-to-come. Instead, apocalypse becomes a dynamic marker of the fundamental unpredictability of post-holocenic societies and ecologies. As we will see, this idea of the apocalyptic runs counter to Eurocentric, teleological narratives of the modern emergence of the global. It seeks to revitalize and reformulate the bonds between constellations that are frequently cast as disconnected and incompatible totalities: past, present, and future; the global and the local; human and nonhuman nature. In this way, transhistorical speculative fiction holds the power to disrupt the knowledge practices and imaginative frameworks of anthropocentric mastery and to inspire new forms of aesthetic and political recalcitrance.
Prof. Vitaly Chernetsky (University of Kansas, USA)
My Own Private Ukraine: Utopia and Queer Futurity in Dark Times
Abstract:
Engaging with the thought of queer theorists José Esteban Muñoz, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, and Michael Snedicker, as well as Ukrainian feminist literary scholar Solomia Pavlychko, this talk explores the expressions of queer desire and utopian hope in Ukrainian literature and film, seeking sources for perseverance and optimism in the dark times of the current war. From the pioneering articulations of queerness in the texts of Olha Kobylians’ka and Ahatanhel Kryms’kyi in the 1890s through the late-modernist explorations by V. Domontovych and Emma Andiievs’ka and developing further in the work of contemporary authors in prose, poetry, and film, it seeks to uncover and trace a persistent utopian impulse that survived and regrew despite the lengthy history of repression, violence, and trauma.
Truth as a Discursive Positioning Game? Hypervisible Subjects in Political and Academic Discourse
Abstract:
Struggles over truth and post-truth are at the heart and centre of contemporary political discourse. How do we as discourse analysts position ourselves vis-à-vis the truth and post-truth of discourse? I will take my point of departure from the Strong Programme in Discourse Studies, which makes the case for epistemological symmetry between truths and post-truths: if post-truths (of others) can be accounted for in discursive terms, then we should also be able to explain our (scientific) truths in the same way. Against this philosophical background, I will suggest an analysis of political and scientific discourses that both are organised around few but hypervisible subject positions. If both truth and post-truth discourses are a product of the monopolization of visibility in discourse, how can we account for the many discourse participants who remain invisible and unheard? And more importantly, if truths are discursively constructed just as post-truths, how can we keep criticising post-truths in the name of truth? In this talk, I will invite you to take a resolutely discursive perspective on the ongoing controversies around populism without giving in to the populist idea that truth and post-truth are all “nothing but discursive constructions”.
The Power of Mainstream Western Media in Influencing Discourses on Migration: Defying the Narrative
Abstract:
This paper attempts to contribute to the transdisciplinary study of migration, mainly from a sociolinguistic perspective, and with factual evidence, it intends to challenge the narrative that the bulk of international migrations are south-north, and across oceans. The paper pinpoints that south-south migrations, in fact, are quite significant and that migrants are moving across land borders in the global south. By bringing together three different subject areas, namely, language policy and education planning, refugee and immigration studies, and translation and interpreting studies, the paper highlights the importance that the language factor plays in shaping society’s views, perceptions and understandings of migration processes, patterns, trends, figures, and related consequences. The paper argues that the key role played by language in migration studies, can be seen from a variety of lenses, such as, in documenting and reporting occurring migration phenomena, in resorting to translation and/or interpretation in order to breach the communication gap between migrants and the host country authorities (be it the court, police, immigration and/or health services), in facilitating access to the education system, as well as in determining whether persons in mobility will be granted the possibility to stay, and be integrated as active citizens of the host societies.
Summer Semester 2022
Uwe Wirth (JLU Gießen)
After Hybridity: Grafting as a Model of Cultural Translation
Abstract:
"All translation" states Walter Benjamin in his essay
The Task of the Translator
Walter Benjamin, "is only a somewhat provisional way of coming to terms with the foreignness of languages". The notion of
cultural translation
as it was developed by
postcolonial studies
attempts to cope not only with the foreignness of language, but also with 'the other' as a foreigner. In order to come to terms for the various interferences that occur in the course of processes of cultural translation,' Homi Bhabha and other postcolonial theorists have conceptualized interactions between different cultures on the one hand as an "activity of displacement within the linguistic sign", on the other hand as processes of hybridization.
I would like to propose an alternative model for describing processes of cultural translation, namely the
model of grafting
that has been used not only by Jacques Derrida as a metaphor for textual
cut and paste
operations, but also by Johann Gottfried Herder and Friedrich Schleiermacher for the purpose of coming to terms with the foreignness of other languages as well as other cultures. Hence, one focus of my talk will be, in which sense
grafting
can also count as an activity of displacement in the interaction of different languages
and
cultures.
Annetta Alexandridis
(Cornell University)
Plaster
Casts in Enlightenment and Colonialist Discourses on Race
Abstract:
Due to their colonialist legacy museums and universities (including at Gießen) have come under pressure to examine their holdings for repatriation of objects and human remains. Understood within a broader call for “decolonizing” Western institutions of knowledge production, such a moment of reckoning invites to revisit other, seemingly unproblematic collections, such as plaster casts of Greco-Roman sculpture. Once a staple of Western style museums around the globe or of departments of archaeology, these replicas democratized access to ancient art, while simultaneously establishing a canon of art through “mere exposure.” Its impact proved to be particularly powerful in the 18
th
and 19
th
centuries when cast collections also served to provide ‘scientific’ evidence. Following a longstanding tradition, many enlightenment and colonialist “polymaths” bridged the arts and sciences in their work in a way universities our days would hail as “interdisciplinary”. From that, however, arose a blending of real and ideal, with fateful consequences: in the context of discourses on the “human races” the use of casts established the (white) European body as exemplary, whether as pinnacle of humanity, or as default, unmarked model (man as such). The paper concludes with proposing strategies to address this problematic legacy without completely giving up on plaster cast collections.
Abstract:
At the most basic level, my paper explores the concept of “invisibility” as a key register for a viable theory of contemporary political and artistic avant-gardes. In this respect, it does not take the existence of any contemporary avant-garde for granted as present or visible. Instead, I argue that that very idea of a contemporary avant-garde and a corresponding discourse for it must be distilled from contemporary political struggles and I suggest that in both the U.S. and in Europe those political struggles tend to be about recognition of those who are undocumented and who press over the borders (both physical and cultural) of accepted understanding of the nation-state. As their numbers increase, I argue, so does their political and cultural potential. But as undocumented, they remain an unrecognized and hence invisible avant-garde.
The COVID-19 pandemic is both the most extensive—global—pandemic, prompting an unprecedented surveillance surge, comparable to post-9/11, but far larger. Some pandemic efforts are treated as “national security” matters. A collusion occurred of public health surveillance
and
a parallel expansion of surveillance centred on the domestic sphere. Remotely conducted activities such as shopping, learning and working all enjoy enhanced surveillance capacities. So “state” surveillance is significant, but also, “corporate” surveillance mushrooms with the two often working in tandem, through public-private agreements. Questions are raised about some public health surveillance such as contact-tracing and vaccination certificates, but few about the overall surveillance surge. If the increased surveillance remains in place as the pandemic subsides, this poses major political challenges. As well as indicating an urgent need to update already existing legal and regulatory instruments, a broader response is also required, to raise the profile of “data justice.” This points not only to the notion that “privacy” might be violated or “data protection” impugned, but that a more universal challenge has surfaced. As surveillance data is the means whereby people are made visible, represented and treated, “data justice” is a new political priority, to ensure fair treatment for all in an increasingly digital culture.
Astrid Ensslin
(University of Bergen, Norway)
Literary Gaming: Digital Culture Between Narrative Play and Electronic Literature
In this lecture, I introduce the concept of literary gaming as a way of understanding the hybrid media ecologies between lucidity (playfulness), narrativity and poetic expression in contemporary digital culture. Taking an aesthetic approach, I demonstrate how literary expression in digital-born media exceeds and subverts traditional notions of literature. Looking at examples of digital poetry and fiction, literary-narrative games and virtual reality installations, I showcase how concepts of worlding, multimodality, and procedurality open up entirely new hermeneutic, phenomenological and critical paradigms that require new, transdisciplinary research agendas for analyzing, understanding and co-creating
these complex works, and for exploring how they can help us address real-world questions and challenges.
For some years now, there has been talk of a "new materialism".
Criticizing the idea of metaphysics of Aristotelian origin which opposes
form to matter, this current - if it is one - tries to return to the
materiality of thinking: there is no form without matter, matter makes
form, or even better, matter is form. To say it with Karen Barad:
"matter matters". This means in particular that text is also always an
inscribed text. A certain ideality of the notion of text such as it has
circulated in the post-structuralist tradition is thus put to shame.
Thinking is always an inscription, a text is always an inscription. And
thus there are no neutral tools in the hands of a thinking mind, tools,
protocols, formats... are thinking. Protocols, algorithms, formats
think. How do they think? What do they think? Based in particular on the
example of textual writing formats, I will try to show this fusion
between technique and thinking and its cultural and political
consequences. In particular I will analyze the format docx and the
implications of writing with Microsoft Word, and I will present the text
editor Stylo which was created in order to propose an alternative way of
writing in the field of Human and Social sciences.
Peter Haslinger (Herder Institute for Historical Research on East Central Europe, Germany)
Digital communication and the digital representation of the past are
obviously closely related to memory cultures, and by that also memory
politics. However, we still need a model that systematically captures
this complex and multi-layered interrelationship. Also, the digital
revolution raises a lot of new questions about the futures of
historical knowledge and – given the political development in
countries like Russia or China – especially of memory politics. The
aim of the presention is therefore to give an impulse for the
development of a new conceptional approach for future research. It
will start with the critical potential of Digital humanities
approaches when it comes to analyzing current trends in memory
politics, especially in the form of populisms from above. It will then
take a look at examples from Eastern Europe to address the
intersection between memory politics and digital knowledge spaces and
media systems. From that point of view it will in the end shed some
light on how digital communication might pro-actively help to foster a
digital knowledge environment that is based on multiperspectvity and a
critical and ethical approach to memory cultures.
Martin Eve (Birkbeck, University of London, UK)
Publishing, Power, and Praxis: Open Access and the Humanities
Academic publishing, a core part of any research activity, has become, in recent years, a highly politicised act. Boycotts have arisen against the major publishers – and particularly Elsevier – over claimed monopolistic practices. At the same time, the rise of open-access (OA) publishing has presented a series of social and economic challenges that are still unresolved. While it appears to yield great promise of universal access, for many researchers, the increasing number of mandates for open-access from centre-right governments appears to betray the argument that this form of dissemination could be of greater ethical import. Coupled with high article processing charges, OA appears emptied, in many ways, of any of its political force.
In this talk, Martin Paul Eve will talk about the ongoing debates around open-access publishing; the core challenges for the humanities disciplines in achieving better levels of access; and the implications of open, digital forms for the future of the scholarly monograph.
To counter the narrative that the global pandemic merely accelerated an inevitable digital transition, we need a foundational critique of the mutual entanglements among higher education and media technology over the
longue durée
. This talk distills switches, binaries, and polarizations in ongoing debates about the “idea of a university,” putting a materialist theory of the university as a media system in dialogue with recent work in critical university studies. Even if the key social aspects of the digital order consist in automation, interactivity, and interconnectivity, it remains unclear whether a truly “free” and “open” university is possible in the digital age.
In this talk, Erik Born will examine the shifting historical alliances among the university, the book market, and the nation-state. Drawing on media history and theory as well as the emergent field of critical university studies, the talk aims to provide a space for discussing digitization and academic labor.
We often hear that in the age of the digitalization, people no longer read books. What this juxtaposition of “online culture” and “book culture” ignores, however, is the fact that there is a growing group of readers who combine “old” and “new” media practices and use social media to structure and communicate their lives as book lovers. This talk presents the example of BookTube – a group of YouTube channels – in order to discuss how literary reading is `done` on social media. Which affordances of BookTube do the practitioners utilize for their reading? Does the printed book as an object still play a role in this context? To what extent do social media transform literary reading into a more social activity? And how does this relate to long-standing reading practices?
Join the lecture to find out more about the world of online book culture – and on the way reflect about your own reading practices in the age of digitalization.
In our exchange, we want to explore opportunities and challenges that come with employing digital technologies for presenting and facilitating engagement with cultural heritage. We will examine some of the curatorial and usage strategies at play at the Pergamon Museum in Berlin. Specifically, we will compare the historic reconstructions of the Pergamon Altar as they were and are displayed in the gallery with the current stand-alone, digitally-enabled Pergamon Panorama exhibition. Our aim is to tease out the respective capacities of analogue and digital exhibits for scaffolding immersion and interplay, pinpoint the curatorial blind spots that impact engagement with these displays, consider how these different settings shape highly politicised spaces, and experiment with alternative forms for presenting (contested) cultural heritage in the digital.
Maura Spiegel (Columbia University, USA)
Narrative Medicine at Work: Giving and Receiving Accounts of Self
Telling and listening are at the heart of the clinical encounter. Helping clinicians understand the co-constructed and situational complexity of that basic dynamic in healthcare is one of the many clinical applications of Narrative Medicine. This discussion will draw on a range of thinkers and fields, including Mikhail Bakhtin, John Dewey, Relational Psychoanalysis and Narrative Therapy to introduce the growing scholarly and clinical project of Narrative Medicine.
Literary scholar Peter Parsisi observes that “[the] real object of literary study is not to bring readers a message, but to bring them into a mode of attention.” Close reading of literary and other artistic work is the signature method in this field. Surprisingly, it is through shared experiences of this kind that clinicians discover new ways to encounter the intersubjective, narratological, and existential dimensions of those they treat –and of caregiving itself.
My case study for this talk, Ambrose Bierce’s “One of the Missing,” is literary fiction; my theoretical argument, however, is broader: it concerns narrative cognition as an elementary sensemaking resource, and how cultural forms of narrative negotiate with it in semiotic media. I want to suggest that contingency in fiction is a marker of the gap between the reductive but efficient sense-making of narrative and the unmanageable systemic complexity of experience. Narrative contingency, in other words, is symptomatic of the way our cognitive dependence upon a basic narrative logic strongly constrains how we understand complexity; but sophisticated cultural forms of narrative, including literary fiction, work to loosen these constraints – principally by exploiting two intrinsic features of narrative, which are its reflexiveness, and the irreducible narrative function of the implicit. Literary fiction chafes at the limits of narrative sense-making by subjecting narrative logic to the complex processes of its own articulation within a semiotic system, displacing interpretative interest from its sequential logic onto the circulation of meaning within the complex networks of signification that narrative itself cannot help generating. One of the effects of this reflexive movement, I suggest, is to continually confront narrative sense-making with the unassimilable in contingency, and so return it to the frontier of its encounter with phenomena, the threshold of emergent meaning where narrative cognition supervenes upon embodied experience.
Telling and listening are at the heart of the clinical encounter. Helping clinicians understand the co-constructed and situational complexity of that basic dynamic in healthcare is one of the many clinical applications of Narrative Medicine. This discussion will draw on a range of thinkers and fields, including Mikhail Bakhtin, John Dewey, Relational Psychoanalysis and Narrative Therapy to introduce the growing scholarly and clinical project of Narrative Medicine.
Literary scholar Peter Parsisi observes that “[the] real object of literary study is not to bring readers a message, but to bring them into a mode of attention.” Close reading of literary and other artistic work is the signature method in this field. Surprisingly, it is through shared experiences of this kind that clinicians discover new ways to encounter the intersubjective, narratological, and existential dimensions of those they treat –and of caregiving itself.
What is the status of the literary representation of music in the age of media-technological reproducibility? In our digital age, computers and earphones allow the listener to experience the bodily affective immersion in a seemingly limitless cyberspace of music files, whose aura they can project back onto their surroundings, transforming reality into resonant projection screens of their own fantasies, desires, and aesthetic sentiments. The possibilities and limitations of these digitally mediated atmospheres open up a new understanding of the literary representation of musical experiences by high-modernist writers.
A comparison between Thomas Mann's description of the production of musical entrancement by the fashionable gramophone in Der Zauberberg and Georg Trakl's poetic exploration of the Orpheus myth in "Passion" reveals a hidden conflict in early 20th century culture between state-of-the-art media-technological reproducibility and a seemingly anachronistic exploration of "live" or "real-time" musical atmospheres whose immersive affect and hermeneutic meanings exceed the acoustic data storage capacities of technological media while allowing themselves to be represented authentically by the literary imagination. Theoretical work on technological media (W. Benjamin and F. Kittler), the phenomenology of atmospheres (H. Schmitz, G. Böhme, T. Griffero) and sonic resonances (H. Rosa) will be brought together to explore this largely uncharted territory encompassing sound studies, philosophy, and literary criticism.
Documentary is not simply a neutral medium to record reality. Rather, it participates in the social imaginations of reality as a contested terrain. This paper discusses how documentaries activate the imaginations of radioactive waste. While many documentaries and scholarly discourses have tended to localize and nationalize the issues of radiation since the 2011 Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Accident, radiation is fundamentally a global matter in that it is produced and distributed through the transnational network from the front end (uranium mining) to the back end (nuclear waste disposal), is supported by the economic and political worldwide network, and may damage the entire earth. Moreover, supposed that the only way to dispose radioactive waste is to bury it in the deeply excavated repository (1,710 feet underground in the case of Onkalo, Finland), radioactive waste literally and symbolically epitomizes the Anthropocene, the geological epoch in which humans have intervened in the planet to a significant degree. But, at the same time, this very abstract and gigantic nature makes it difficult for us to imagine radioactive waste. It is against this background that documentaries have played vital roles in bringing concrete imaginations about the social and ecological reality. Taking Waste: The Nuclear Nightmare (Éric Guéret, 2009) and Charka (Shimada Kei, 2017), among others, for case studies, I will explore how these documentaries alike problematize radioactive waste but evoke different imaginations of it. It is particularly interesting to see how a film shows radioactive waste as the otherwise invisible global material and institutional reality in which radioactive waste are unevenly distributed so that privileged people can enjoy their electric lives by at once exploiting and marginalizing other people near these sites.
Isabel Paehr (Berlin) & Johanna Schaffer (Kunsthochschule Kassel)
Ambivalences of
Visibility
(Revised)
12.11.2019, 18-20, room 001, MFR
The book ‘Ambivalences of Visibility’, that Johanna published in 2008, was above all a plea to engage with the forms of specific representations, and not with questions of quantity (‘more visibility for…’). For, as Peggy Phelan has argued, if there were a causal connection between visual representability and political power, then in the liberal democracies of the West, young, scantily-clad heteronormative female performing persons would necessarily have quite a bit of power. In our changed media realities, we need to rethink the analytical/political usefulness of the concept ‘visibility,’ for in digital media realities visibility (= views = monetization) almost entirely loses its oppositional connotations. If ‘visibility’ is a concept that belongs to historically specific media realities and their critical languages, what can be learned from them for our current examinations? We also would like to suggest some other terms along the lines of ‘distributed agency’ and ‘infrastructure’ in order to discuss crucial interventions in the field of digital visuality and data-rich environments.
Rita Felski (University of Virginia)
Hooked: Art and Attachment
19.11.2019, 18-20, room 012, Alter Steinbacher Weg 44
My talk makes a case for “attachment” as a key word for the humanities. The word directs our attention to what carries weight: it has both affective and ethical force. Drawing on a range of examples, I discuss two important aesthetic ties: identification and attunement. Finally, I clarify how the language of attachment is relevant to pedagogy and to practices of interpretation in the classroom.
Mary Neuburger (University of Texas at Austin)
Meat
Unpacked: Global Protein Narratives and the Making of a 20th Century Bulgarian Bio-imaginary
03.12.2019, 18-20, room 001, MFR
This talk will explore the place of meat within the larger framework of global encounters between East and West, before and during the Cold War. It will explore evolving connections (imagined and real) of meat—its mass production and regular consumption—to progress, and more pointedly, political and economic power. Consumption of meat expanded exponentially in the US, Europe and globally particularly after World War II, reflecting changes in commerce and taste, but also given new assumptions about the role of protein in twentieth century development narratives. Influential writings and polices grounded in the scientific community and international organizations like the League of Nations, the United Nations, the Food and Agriculture Organization, and the World Health Organization posited that a lack of animal protein in “national” diets was both the cause and the effect of underdevelopment, which was tantamount to “hidden hunger” and even a global “protein crisis”. As the talk will explore, however, such notions competed with global counter-narratives grounded in bio-ethics, biopolitics, religious practice, and/or differing opinions within food science. Using the capacious concept of the bio-imaginary, I will explore how such narratives were appropriated and deflected in the course of 20th century Bulgarian history, before and under socialism. Bulgarians appropriated both pro- and anti-meat assumptions from global religious, scientific, and policy-minded thinkers. They also domesticated and contributed to this global conversation and set of practices in a range of locally grounded ways. This took on particular forms under socialism, when Soviet-dictated food ideology required an embrace of meat—as fortification for the socialist body, as well as nutritional and gastronomic proof of the superiority of the system’s utopian promise. Even then, anti-meat narratives emerged as part of the Bulgarian “thaw”.
Erin James (University of Idaho)
Narrative in the Anthropocene
10.12.2019, 18-20, room 001, MFR
When scholars speak of narrative and the Anthropocene, they tend to do so in one of two ways. The first is the conversation that dominates work in the environmental humanities and positions narrative as part of the problem of and solution to environmental crisis. Change the stories, these scholars suggest, and change the damaging attitudes and behaviors that have brought us to this point. A second group of scholars link narrative and the Anthropocene in a much less optimistic way, suggesting that narrative is a rhetorical mode deeply unsuited to our current epoch. These critics argue that narrative is intimately tied to human perspectives and, as such, cannot adequately represent the broader timescales and wider conception of inhuman lives that our current moment of environmental crisis demands.
In this talk, I offer a third option for considering the relationship between narrative and the Anthropocene—one that questions what contribution the epoch stands to make to narrative studies and vice versa. I bring together the until now disparate conversations of the environmental humanities and narrative theory to propose an “Anthropocene narrative theory,” or a theory of narrative sensitive to matters commonly associated with the epoch, to explore how narrative and the Anthropocene inform and are influenced by each other. I do this by thinking through various ideas and issues that we associate with our new geological epoch—especially those relevant to representations of narrative time and space and the processes of narrative production and interpretation—and envisaging their possible narratological correspondents. As my talk explains, an Anthropocene narrative theory poses the following questions: how does narrative help us think differently about the Anthropocene? How do narratives provide us with safe contexts in which to explore how humans make and inhabit worlds in their own image? How does the reading of strata in rocks, tree rings, and ice cores, which are themselves material representations of sequences of events, challenge our most basic conceptualizations of narrativity? How do the materials that we associate with the Anthropocene—rocks and ice, but also the fiber cables and LCD screens of digital medias—change the way that we interact with narrative? How do the new, broad conceptions of geologic time and planetary space associated with the Anthropocene diversify models of narrative chronologies and spatializations? How does an awareness of collective agency of humans as a geological agent shed new light on types of narration and narrators?
Wendy Bracewell (University College London) & Leyla von Mende (University of Jena)
Accounts of travels from Western and Central Europe to Eastern Europe haven been an object of academic research for a rather long time. These travel accounts have played a significant role in the formation of “mental maps” as scholars have demonstrated with regard to notions of “Eastern Europe” (Wolff) and collective imaginations of the “Balkans” (Todorova) as well as cultural constructions of “Europe” more generally. Recent scholarship has drawn attention to dynamic identity formations in the context of these encounters and, more specifically, the role of perceptions of Europe from alternate viewpoints. While the perception of Germany in Russia has been studied (e.g. Kopelew), the perspectives from south eastern directions have received less scholarly attention so far. In our master class we will discuss perceptions of Western and Central Europe and specifically perceptions of South European states in the eyes of travellers from the Ottoman Empire and Turkey.
Leigh York (Cornell University, Ithaca)
Transmedia Contact Zones: Episodes from the Page to the Screen
14.05.2019, 18-20, room 001, MFR
Abstract
This talk will posit the “episode” as the primary narrative unit that shapes multi-media print narratives in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. With the rise of the periodical press, authors were faced with rapidly changing printing technologies and an expanding literary marketplace. Whereas earlier picaresque novels comprised series of episodes that were only loosely connected, new media conditions demanded new narrative strategies. This project looks at the ways that nineteenth-century authors began using the episode to generate complex forms of transmedia continuity that generate continual (and futural) narrative pleasure. By looking beyond its own narrative limits and asking “what comes next,” the episode conveys a storytelling gap that prompts continuation in future episodes, thus generating a potentially infinite series that, in many cases, exceeds the boundaries of text and medium. I trace the development of multi-media episodes from the eighteenth-century work of Karl Philipp Moritz to the nineteenth-century bestseller Karl May; I end by arguing that the episode continues to structure popular transmedia storytelling well into the twenty-first century, in print, online, and on screen. This paper uncovers a continuity between print media in the long nineteenth century and digital media in the twentieth and twenty-first, giving us a deeper historical view of our own storytelling practices and aligning these practices with larger shifts in how we conceive of life, pleasure, value, and politics.
St
Theodore, Euchaïta and Anatolia, c. 500-1000.Landscape, Climate and the Survival of an Empire
11.06.2019, 18-20, room 001, MFR
Abstract
No-one doubts that climate, environment and societal development are linked in causally complex ways. But in relating these different evidential spheres in an explanatorily satisfactory way, we must consider a number of issues, not least the scale at which the climatic and environmental events are observed, and how this relates to the societal changes in question. Differentiating between the various effects of the structural dynamics of a set of inter-connected or overlapping socio-economic or cultural systems is complex; building into our explanation the impact of environmental stressors does not make life easier. One good reason for a historical perspective is to determine how different categories of socio-political system respond to different levels of stress – in the hope that such knowledge can contribute to contemporary policy and future planning, for example. How and why are some societal systems more resilient or flexible than others? If we don’t really understand these complex causal associations, we are unlikely to generate effective responses.
Since Anatolia was for several centuries the heart of the medieval eastern Roman empire, understanding how its climate impacted on the political, social and cultural history of the eastern Roman world would seems to be an important consideration. But only recently have historians begun to think about this seriously and to take into account the integration of high-resolution archaeological, textual and environmental data with longer-term low-resolution palaeo-environmental data, which can afford greater precision in identifying some of the causal relationships underlying societal change. In fact, the Anatolian case challenges a number of assumptions about the impact of climatic factors on socio-political organization and medium-term historical evolution. In particular, the study raises the question of how the environmental conditions of the later seventh and eighth centuries CE impacted upon the ways in which the eastern Roman Empire was able to weather the storm of the initial Arab-Islamic raids and invasions of the period ca. 650-740 and how it was able to expand again in the tenth century. When looked at holistically, the palaeoenvironmental, archaeological and historical data reflect a complex interaction of anthropogenic and natural factors that throw significant light on the history of the empire and its neighbors, offering at the same time a useful approach to similar issues in other cultures and periods.
André Keet (Nelson Mandela University, South Africa)
Racism’s Knowledge/Culture – Is a Critical Decolonial Project Possible?
02.07.2019, 18-20, room 001, MFR
Abstract
Knowledge belongs to racism, and this proprietary relationship exercises steering power over cultural meaning-making processes. This is the straightforward thesis I am exploring here. Though the racism-knowledge nexus and its expression within scholarship and the academy has been a topic of academic interest for many decades, it has been dominated by debates on how racism ‘frames’ knowledge that centers the white, western subject. Another prevailing trend focuses on racism within the disciplines and its disciples, the academy, and the reproductive racialized outcomes of university education. However, my argument, is not simply that racism is inscribed into knowledge systems, but that racism provides the conceptual and pragmatic coordinates for knowledge. This disorder, so I suggest, needs to be tackled head-on to unburden the considerable possibilities for a critical, decolonial knowledge project.
Boris Buden (Humboldt University Berlin, Germany)
The End of Language as We Know it?
16.07.2019, 18-20, room 001, MFR
Abstract
This is quite old news: the German spirit is dying again. This time, however, its passing away seems to be more dramatic than ever before. The deathbed on which it is lying today is in fact its own very cradle – the German language. The latter is rapidly deteriorating in the process of its re-vernacularization. This is at least what is claimed by Jürgen Trabant in his book
Globalesisch oder Was/ Ein Plädoyer für Europas Sprachen
. He understands this process as a new socio-linguistic and cultural condition that resembles the Europe of the Middle Ages, when Latin was used on all the higher levels of social, political or intellectual life, while the lower social strata were speaking the old vernaculars. Nowadays, however, it is English that has taken the role of the new
lingua franca
. It is spoken in all the higher and more important discourses of today’s Europe, forcing German and other European “cultural languages” to retreat onto the level of everyday life and less important discourses. At stake is a regression into a neomedieval diglossia. What are the social and political consequences of this development? How does it affect cultural relations within our societies and globally? Has it an impact on the existing forms of disciplinary knowledge production? The lecture will tackle these questions from the perspective of translation as a theoretical concept and a socio-cultural practice.
Anne Waldschmidt (University of Cologne, Germany)
The Cultural Model of Dis/ability as an Analytical Tool. Key Assumptions, Strengths, and Weaknesses
13.11.2018, 18-20, room 001, MFR
Abstract
Drawing on the approach of disability studies this lecture claims the relevance of culture as an analytical category for the study of disability. It starts with differentiating several fields of research that focus on disability; then it explores the notion of culture. Next, it appreciates the social model of disability, sketches its history and resulting debates. It also provides an overview on earlier attempts of conceptualizing a cultural studies approach to disability. Further, it offers an analytical perspective that uses the concept of ‘dis/ability,’ analyses impairment, disability and normality as ‘empty signifiers,’ views dis/ability as naturalized and embodied difference, and understands this category as effected by symbolic orders, bodily practices and social institutions. Additionally, referring to the debate on independent living for persons with disabilities as an example, the lecture will highlight the heuristic value of the cultural model of dis/ability for both research and practice by describing guiding questions resulting from individual, social, and cultural models of disability. It concludes by discussing possible pitfalls of a cultural studies approach to dis/ability.
Vanessa Andreotti (University of British Columbia, Canada)
The Enduring Educational Challenges of Setting Horizons of Hope Beyond Modern-Colonial Imaginaries
04.12.2018, 18-20, room 001, MFR
Abstract
As societies face unprecedented challenges that are global in scope and “wicked” in nature, the usual educational response has been to emphasize the need for more knowledge, better policies, and more compelling arguments, in order to effectively convince more people to change their convictions, and, as a consequence, their behaviour. My research collective has been experimenting with a different educational orientation that does not see the problems of the present primarily as rooted in a methodological challenge of better strategies (i.e. the call for more effective policies and communications), nor an epistemological challenge of knowing (i.e. the call for more data, information or perspectives). Rather, we propose that the problems are rooted in an ontological challenge of being (i.e. the call to address how we exist in relation to each other and the planet). From this educational orientation, the problems lies in the universalization of a modern/colonial imaginary that creates intellectual, affective and relational economies that invisibilize the violences that subsidize modern/colonial systems, and that hide their inherent unsustainability. The modern/colonial approach to education has left us unprepared and unwilling to address our complicity in systemic social and ecological harm, and to set our horizons of hope beyond what is intelligible and desirable within it. In this talk, I will share some of the social cartographies, analyses and experiments of the “Gesturing towards decolonial futures” collective and the “In Earth’s CARE” network of social-ecological innovations focused on transformative justice.
Conceptual Art and Music. Conceptualism as a Hot Contact Zone of the Arts
11.12.2018, 18-20, room 001, MFR
Abstract
Contemporary art describes itself very often as “conceptual.” However, what exactly does it mean? Usually, these artworks in question have little in common with the prime examples of Conceptual Art from the 1960th. It is of paramount importance for art theory today to have a clear understanding and a clear notion of the conceptual character of the arts. In my lecture, I would like to present a model of Conceptualism which allows to integrate into this model such different pieces like “One and Three Chairs” by Joseph Kosuth and the “Fettstuhl” by Joseph Beuys, or, in respect to music, 4’33’’ by John Cage and “Pendulum Music” by Steve Reich. Conceptual art arose in opposition toward the aesthetics of classical modernism. Conceptual artists tried to show that art can be separated from any aesthetic experience and reduced to one single idea. Nevertheless, the anesthetic character is not the decisive criteria for Conceptualism. My thesis is that Conceptual Music and Conceptual Art are based on the principle of an isomorphic mapping between idea and work. On the one hand, the idea of the artwork manifest itself entirely in the piece, and on the other hand, every perceivable aspect of the artwork is a representation of that idea.
Reading Well. The Trials of Bibliotherapy and the Hospital Library as Contact Zone
18.12.2018, 18-20, room 001, MFR
Abstract
Taking the idea of the hospital library as a central case study, this lecture draws on the spaces between medicine and the humanities, particularly the different ways of reading and knowing that seem inherent in each discipline. The notion of reading to get well, or ‘bibliotherapy’ is broadly established in current usage in the social sciences and humanities, but the word’s first appearance, in an issue of the Atlantic Monthly magazine in 1916 was meant as a joke. Something of this vulnerability remains on both a micro and macro level, as arts-based interventions try to justify themselves in medical contexts, and in the precarious status of the humanities in a global funding context geared towards the sciences.
A study of the East London Children’s Hospital library catalogue, which survives from the nineteenth century, is thought-provoking in the light of these contemporary questions. While we can recover something of Victorian reading habits and mores from looking at the archival material, this lecture will reflect on the difficulty of reading this (or any) hospital library space ‘well’. Articulating and placing a use-vale on a space which is, both ‘under-theorized’ (Nethersole, 2011) and riven by affective forces may be an impossible and counterproductive task. The lecture will conclude with reflections on possibilities for public engagement for those in the humanities – particularly the difficulties of translating ideas of affect and anecdote in a world dominated by measurement and evidence.
Frans Willem Korsten (Leiden University, Netherlands)
Empathy and Violence: The Chiasma of Politics and Law
17.04.2018, 18-20, room 001, MFR
Abstract
My argument starts with two different readings of George Eliot’s
Daniel Deronda
by two scholars who have a radically different idea on the force and goal of empathic reading: Martha Nussbaum and Sara Ahmed. The former bases her argument on a human subject that is coherent, stable and through an ethical mode of reading literature is able to place herself in the position of someone else. The latter takes willful, unstable, swerving subjects as her point of departure, who find themselves oppressed in such a way that the very idea of their having a will of their own is made impossible. Nussbaum is looking for an underpinning of justice on some sort of common human ground, while Ahmed accepts the irreconcilability of positions, or the principal impossibility of a common ground. Focusing on the ways in which both authors employ radically different strategies of empathy, I ask what the goals of empathic reading could be in a juridico-political context. Here, I trace a chiastic relation between politics and law that is of relevance at times in which politics is turning more and more into a power game propelled by emotions and the force of law is threatened by parties demanding that their emotions be served.
Dialogic Principles in Cultural and Visual Studies
24.04.2018, 18-20, room 001, MFR
Abstract
After Cultural and Visual Studies long time analysed representation, hegemonial power relations and identity, the field of dialogic principles had turned into a main discussion area in the last years. But disciplinary focuses on dialogic principles differ significantly within the field of Cultural and Visual Studies. While questions of participartory practices in research techniques have been raised in ethnology and anthropology since the 1960s and then from the 1980s on in museum studies, art history has widened its perspective to global arts and transcultural perpectives but recently. Here, participatory methodologies and dialogic principles of spoken sources are rarely reflected. One of the most central tools of contemporary art history – the artist interview – has never been questioned in its transcultural implications. The lecture aims to question methodological differences between the disciplines. Dialogic knowledge production in academic research, indeed, is a relatively new topic, that still has to be discussed – especially on an institutional level.
Randall Halle (University of Pittsburgh, United States)
Framework for a Critical European Culture Studies
15.05.2018, 18-20, room 001, MFR
Abstract
Over a long history, Europe and culture are interwoven as terms. And within the contemporary context of European Unionization, the complex connection of the two has taken on new forms. The EU project is a singular project because it strives for economic, political,
and
cultural union. The globe is crisscrossed by free market-oriented projects to foster economic union, as well as supranational organizations that strive to accomplish various forms of political agreement. Only in the space of Europe does the project include a cultural component and of the three aspirational dynamics that drive European unification, culture remains both the least studied and yet the most compelling of the three. Nevertheless, Europe is not the EU, nor is culture equivalent to the current EU culture industry policy. This presentation will propose a framework for critical studies of European culture through attention to each of the terms: critical, Europe, and culture. Such a framework helps us better answer a number of questions. How do we approach culture in this political and economic context? How do we assess the European commercialization of cultural heritage? How does the striving for transnational cultural union differ from that cultural union produced in the nation state? In what way does the contemporary understanding of Europe call forth new histories? Among others.
How to Engage Critically and Responsibly with Cultural Neuroscience?
29.05.2018, 18-20, room 001, MFR
Abstract
Since a couple of years, the new sub-discipline of cultural neuroscience announces the neurosciences to be ready to address and investigate the fabric of culture in its relation to its natural substrates. Especially the means of functional imaging are mobilized to show intricate differences and similarities among the neurophysiological basis of highly specific cultural tasks. Is cultural neuroscience a new and viable approach bridging between nature and culture – or rather a problematic example for the dominance of neuro-talk? And what can be a productive role of cultural studies in critiquing its more problematic aspects?
Tanvi Solanki (Cornell University, New York, United States)
Cultural Acoustics: Sound Studies and the Study of Culture
12.06.2018, 18-20, room 001, MFR
Abstract
Without doubt, Sound Studies has become a burgeoning field for rich, eminently interdisciplinary initiatives in the humanities. One of the major contributions of the field has been to mark out the neglect in theories of medial modernity that focus entirely on various kinds of visual culture and their historicity. What I call "cultural acoustics," while under the broad rubric of sound studies, specifically draws attention to the potent role that acoustic practices could play in distinguishing, comparing, establishing, and dispersing cultures, whether scientific, musical, political, national, trans-national, or religiously bound. Examples include the work of Ana Maria Ochoa on listening and knowledge in nineteenth-century Colombia, Jonathan Sterne’s work on the centrality of sound, hearing, and listening to the “cultural life of modernity,” or Charles Hirschkind’s on the “ethical listening” of sermons and its role in the social and political transformations in Egypt. In my talk, I will use my own research on eighteenth-century Europe to discuss the key role played by listening practices and conceptions of sound in formative ideas of culture, nation, and anthropology and what these findings offer to the contemporary study of culture.
The Road Not Taken: Ethics, Reciprocity, and Non-Negative Non-Agency
19.06.2018, 18-20, room 001, MFR
Abstract
The term “agency” has played – and still plays – a rather strange role in our moral philosophies in general, and in ecocriticism specifically, as it represents one term of one binary that has proven almost indeconstructable: that of activity and passivity. It is hardly possible to turn around – let alone overcome – the highly normatively charged connotations of these two terms, which would be a first step to deconstruct this binary. I will, in a first step, try to draw out the implications – both linguistically and ethically – of the fact that we are not able to formulate a non-negative concept of the contrary to "acting" or "agency", and relate this fact to two key terms in the moral philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas: that of passivity and that of irreciprocity. In a second one, I will try to gauge the implications this has for traditional moral philosophy, arguing that our incapability to disentangle agency from moral subjecthood has severe repercussions for our thinking of ethics. In a last part, I will reconnect these thoughts to one of the most influential theories in posthumanism: Bruno Latour's "Actors Network Theory."
Stefan Iversen (Aarhus University, Denmark)
Strange Narratives in Rhetorical Discourse
14.11.2017, 18-20, room 001, MFR
Abstract
During the last decade, narrative theory has seen a burst of interest in what has been called the nexus of mind and narrative (Herman 2013), carried forth by ideas of the similarities between understanding real life and understanding fiction (Zunshine 2007; Palmer 2010). This interest has been accompanied, and at times directly challenged, by an equally energetic interest in how experimental and strange narratives found in literature, film and other media may obstruct, subvert, or deconstruct real-world protocols for sense making by presenting readers with “strange” (Caracciolo 2016), “unreadable” (Abbott 2014), or “unnatural” phenomena (Richardson 2015; Alber 2016; Iversen 2013).
The starting point for this talk is the observation that storytelling constellations that defy, test or mock everyday processes of sense-making also exist outside of the realms of generic fiction. Elaborating on a rhetorical reading of the concept of defamiliarization, the aim of the talk is to show that not only do experimental, strange and unnatural narratives materialize across contemporary public discourses; they also come to serve communicative functions. This will be shown trough readings of cases from a range of traditionally nonfictive rhetorical genres such as the discourse of humanitarianism, NGO-branding, protest movements and present-day political rhetoric.
It is a truism that history of science and – more generally – cultural studies was not interested in the role of visualisation in the process of knowledge production before the 1990s. Knowledge, it was said, was often produced without and sometimes with images, but in principle they were regarded as marginal. Why did the situation change so profoundly? In my lecture, I shall argue that the rise of images is part and parcel of the postmodern condition. My main point is not that this condition is characterized by an aesthetization of the world, but by a combination of new digital technologies of producing images and a new understanding of the status of knowledge. I will analyse the postmodern status of image and knowledge by focussing on the work of Lyotard and Latour, and then interpret neuroimaging as a paradigmatic case for the new regime of visualisation.
Diana Hummel (Institute for Social-Ecological Research Germany)
Social Ecology as Transdisciplinary Science of Societal Relations to Nature
12.12.2017, 18-20, room 001, MFR
Abstract
The discourse on sustainable development in the Anthropocene is, essentially, centered on the question of how the complex relations between society and nature can be conceptualized, analyzed, and shaped. In my lecture, I present a specific interpretation of social ecology as an attempt to address this question. The basic idea of Frankfurt social ecology is to put the modern distinction between nature and society at the start of a critical analysis. Theoretically, relationships between humans, society and nature are conceived as societal relations to nature. This concept focuses on patterns and modes of regulation, as well as on the entanglement of material-energetic and cultural-symbolic aspects of the relationship in different areas of action such land use, mobility, or water, energy and food supply. Using an approach that conceptualizes social-ecological systems as provisioning systems, I will show in which way theory and empirical research practice can be linked. Research that aims at contributing to sustainable development needs to integrate different kinds of scientific and non-scientific knowledge. It must combine scientific research with societal practice, in order to offer solutions for real-world problems while at the same time producing generalizable knowledge. Therefore, I will discuss transdisciplinarity as the research mode of choice for social ecology as a problem-oriented science.
Tim Cresswell (Trinity College, Connecticut, United States)
Space, Place and the Humanities: The Emergence of GeoHumanities
16.01.2018, 18-20, room 001, MFR
Abstract
In this talk I outline the development of the new interdisciplinary field of the GeoHumanities linking relatively recent developments in the digital humanities and GIS to ancient concerns for space, place and ways in which we inhabit the world, the flowering of spatial theory since the 1970s in geography, and the spatial turn across the humanities and social sciences of the last few decades. In addition, I link the fusion of all of these histories with the embrace of ‘geo’ themes in the creative arts ranging from geo-poetry to conceptual art. While the emergence of GeoHumanities is not without problems and dangers I argue that the new field presents many theoretical, creative and strategic opportunities for scholars across the humanities and social sciences.
Prof. Ramón Reichert (University of Vienna, Austria)
Emerging Topics in the Study of Culture: Introducing Digital Literacy
30.01.2018, 18-20, room 001, MFR
Abstract
The term literacy has become a ubiquitous metaphor in recent years, particularly in connection with digital technologies. Literacies remain an attractive option to describe the use of new communication technologies and different communication modes for the production of medially-mediated utterances. This lecture gives an overview of the theories and methods of the new literacy studies and shows in this context their critical potentials and the latest developments in the research field of the digital literacies. Digital literacy involves an understanding how search engines function, how hypertexts and links are structured to encourage us to navigate in particular ways, how information is gathered about users, and how the activity of users is governed and constrained by technological and commercial forces. Digital Literacies develop a theoretical framework of their own owing to the media specificity of digital media culture. In another sense digital literacies focus on technological application competencies when it comes to using convergent media. Finally, i would like to point out that the idea of digital literacy is not only as a question of technological transformation but also as a question of social practices.
