Was a kosher butcher with a US passport in small-town Croatia part of an international human trafficking ring? Or was he really enjoying the healthy waters? Ulf Brunnbauer explores a life story to consider migration, border and identity regimes in modern Europe and the Americas.
How can binaries be effectively unbuilt? How does this impact constructions of identity, conceptual frameworks and scholarly fields? These are some questions explored by the graduate researcher team behind the workshop “Unbuilding binaries”
Sasha Shestakova explores intersections of climate change, extractivism and the destruction of indigenous cultures in Russia’s Far North, querying human/nature and North/South binaries while tracing colonialism’s long-term legacies.
Must Germany be studied as a nation-state? Or could it be viewed as an area, through lenses positioned on the inside and outside? How does the Nazi past affect the analytical and conceptual frameworks open to researchers today? Marcus Hahn and Frederic Ponten discuss their efforts to reconfigure German studies as transregional or trans-imperial area studies with Tamara Heger.
Conspiracy theories are often in the (fake) news today. Although they are closer to fiction than reality, Chloé Chaudet, a recent visiting researcher at the ScienceCampus, shows that cultural and literary studies lack the tools to develop a transmedial narratology of conspiracy discourses which could investigate them in their historical and transatlantic dimensions.
How does it feel to change history? Is it right to play out fantasies of Nazi-German military success? Jon Matlack explores how strategy-based computer games such as Hearts of Iron IV make this possible for millions of players and what this means for public history.
In this thought-provoking text, Jana Stöxen reflects on her experiences of developing her research topic for her master’s thesis. She explores the social, disciplinary and material barriers she faced before outlining how she overcame them to produce an innovative piece of research. Her words offer encouragement to her peers – and others – who might be struggling with similar challenges.
Jana Stöxen, winner of the inaugural Regensburg Prize for Prize for Outstanding Master’s Theses, presents a photo essay based on her ethnographic field research conducted in Bucharest. She traced the ways post-socialism forms part of everyday life, shaping the community in a block of flats in the Berceni district of the Romanian capital. The texts are in English and German.
Dirk Wiemann explores recent British fiction, including the works of Jonathan Coe and Ali Smith, to consider how novels have approached Brexit and its impact on the ability to conduct dialogue and form national imaginaries. Adopting a Bakhtinian lens, he considers the ways novels negotiate the polarized agonism that threatens to undo social cohesion with models of meaning-making rendered ineffective in new conditions.
In collaboration with international partners from U Michigan and U Arizona, the ScienceCampus explored how migration experiences, in the past and today, are mediated through a variety of formats, giving expression to the liminality of global and regional mobilities.