Search results for ""Transcript Verlag""

The sustained expansion of the life span and the attendant demographic changes in the West have fuelled the production of cultural texts that explore alternative representations of aging and old age. The contributors to this volume show how artists in science-fiction, fantasy and the avant-garde develop visions of late life transformation, improvisation and adaptation to new circumstances. The studies particularly focus on perspectives on aging that challenge the predominant narratives of decline as well as fantasies of eternal youth, as defined by neoliberal notions of health, able-bodiedness, agency, self-improvement, progress, plasticity and productivity.

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During the early republican period, architectural interventions in rural Turkey took the form of social engineering as part of the state's modernization and nationalization policies. Özge Sezer demonstrates how the state's particular programs had a powerful effect on rural life in the countryside. She examines the regime's goals and strategies for controlling the rural people through development projects and demographic shaping to create a strong Turkish identity and a loyal citizenry. The book outlines the implementation of new rural settlements, particularly following the 1934 Settlement Law, with a geographic focus on two cities - Izmir and Elazig - with varied socio-economic and ethnic standing in the state program.

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Switzerland is known for its multilingualism, yet not all languages are represented equally in society. The situation is exacerbated by the influx of heritage languages and English through migration and globalization processes which challenge the traditional education system. This study is the first to investigate how schools in Grisons, Fribourg, and Zurich negotiate neoliberal forces leading to a growing necessity of English, a romanticized view on national languages, and the social justice perspective of institutionalizing heritage languages. It uncovers power and legitimacy issues and showcases students' and teachers' complex identities to advocate equitable multilingual education.

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Where do computer games "happen"? The articles collected in this pioneering volume explore the categories of "space", "place" and "territory" featuring in most general theories of space to lay the groundwork for the study of spatiality in games. Shifting the focus away from earlier debates on, e.g., the narrative nature of games, this collection proposes, instead, that thorough attention be given to the tension between experienced spaces and narrated places as well as to the mapping of both of these.

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Radical ideologies may manifest differently at first, but they do follow a similar logic: truth claims, promises of salvation and a unifying common enemy. In Yemen's transition process today, the secessionist movement Al-Hirak has summoned the spirit of South Yemen, the only Marxist state in Arabia. This book meticulously describes how East Germany supported the implantation of this alien ideology in Yemen through its policy of "Socialist state- and nation-building". In the same breath, the analysis captures the GDR's activities in the Middle East and their vital role in Moscow's Cold War strategy. Last but least, the study provides one of the few compact overviews of East German foreign policy in the English language of today.

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Southeast Asia is a laboratory showing current worldwide ecological issues. Environmental change, natural resource exploitation as well as global climate change increasingly threaten people's livelihoods. Environmentally-based uncertainties foster a high level of knowledge uncertainty. This poses a constantly growing threat to agricultural production. Vulnerable communities with a low degree of resilience are most severely affected. But local communities have abilities to innovate and develop locally embedded coping strategies. The contributors of this volume are most interested in environmental change that fosters knowledge uncertainties. Regions discussed include the Mekong Delta in Vietnam, Moluccas, Central Kalimantan, West Sumatra and South Sulawesi in Indonesia and Tangail Region in Bangladesh.

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In the present social and cultural transformation of South Thailand's cultural politics, ideologies involving the family, gender and home provide the cultural codes in social dramas of the state, the media and social and religious movements. This study looks at micropolitics and the nesting of the political action of everyday life in larger, ultimately global structures of power. Exploring the making of class, culture and space, the production and consumption of culture is understood as work which involves the constant negotiation of boundaries.

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Do the current changes of both geographical and symbolic boundaries lead to the emergence of a world society? How do transnational migration, communication and worldwide economic and political networks manifest themselves in globalised modernity? This book presents innovative contributions to transnationalisation research and world society theory based on empirical studies from Asia, Africa, Latin America and Europe. Practicable methodologies complete theoretical inquiries and provide examples of applied research, which also might be used in teaching.

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This book presents the first in-depth critical and historical examination of the internationally renowned National Dance Theatre Company of Jamaica (NDTC) in the context of postcolonial theatre. Combining a postcolonial theoretical framework with performance studies and dance analysis, the study examines the interrelationship of Jamaican modern dance theatre aesthetics and the Caribbean's complex cultural genealogy since 1492. Addressing issues of postcolonial nationalism and Jamaican identity politics, the book provides the first comprehensive study of the NDTC's modern dance theatre works as it situates dance theatre choreography at the centre of postcolonial independence politics and cultural theory in the Caribbean.

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Worldwide, scholarship and policy-making develop new ideas and models for the role of higher education and research in society and economy. This development points to changing relationships and boundaries between the public and private spheres in higher education including their public and private steering and funding, public-private partnerships between universities and firms, the rise of private higher education and of business models in the management of universities. The contributions to this edited volume investigate into the dynamics of blurring boundaries between the public and the private in higher education and their consequences for the university.

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All over the world new ideas and models emerge on how to organize the higher education sector and its institutions. The contributions in this volume identify the most influential transnational models and investigate their origins and mechanisms of dissemination as well as the resulting consequences for national systems. Will global trends in higher education lead to homogeneity or will they result in an increased differentiation? This question is addressed by higher education researchers with very different disciplinary and national backgrounds.Contributors are, among others, Jürgen Enders, John W. Meyer, Christine Musselin and Kerstin Sahlin-Andersson.

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The articles included in this Yearbook of the Sociology of Islam are focused on two perspectives: Some link the comparative analysis of Islam to ongoing debates on the Axial Age and its role in the formation of major civilizational complexes, while others are more concerned with the historical constellations and sources involved in the formation of Islam as a religion and a civilization. More than any other particular line of inquiry, new historical and sociological approaches to the Axial Age revived the idea of comparative civilizational analysis and channeled it into more specific projects. A closer look at the very problematic place of Islam in this context will help to clarify questions about the Axial version of civilizational theory as well as issues in Islamic studies and sociological approaches to modern Islam. Contributors among others: Said Arjomand, Shmuel N. Eisenstadt, Josef van Ess and Raif G. Khoury.

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This volume puts an emphasis on the question how children themselves experience and manage migration and by means of which they construct an identity for themselves which takes into account their experiences from both their places of origin and their host societies. What role does the cultural background of the society of origin on the one hand and the strategies of integration found in the host society on the other play in the creation of identity and of a concept of home, origin and belonging? How do children express processes of cultural orientation and integration (music, media, fashion, style) and what role do peer groups and social milieus play in this regard? How do migrant children experience xenophobia and a lack of acceptance on the side of the host society and how do they counter-balance such experiences? The approach taken is both comparative and interdisciplinary, the contributors having different theoretical and methodological backgrounds, the contributions dealing with different social and cultural settings both with regard to place of origin and host society.

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Music festivals have become important events for people to experience music collectively and take a break from their everyday lives. Companies and institutions like to use music festivals as opportunities for advertising their products and services through sponsorship. Dominik Nösner examines professional stakeholder's assessments of the market as well as patterns of existing procedural elements of sponsorship culture, factors determining existing communication and decision-making culture and interrelations between sponsors and audience with emphasis on university popular music festivals. Building on that, he further explores motivational constructs for popular music festival attendance via a survey study.

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?Dimensions. Journal of Architectural Knowledge? is an academic journal in, on, and from the discipline of architecture, addressing the creation, constitution, and transmission of architectural knowledge. It explores methods genuine to the discipline and architectural modes of interdisciplinary methodological adaptions. Processes, procedures, and results of knowledge creation and practice are esteemed coequally, with particular attention to the architectural design and epistemologies of aesthetic practice and research.?Collaborations: Rethinking Architectural Design?, Issue 05/2023, explores how collaboration impacts the processes, tools, and methods of design by examining the conditions of its integration into architectural practice and discourse. The contributors initiate a dialogue between theory and practice through visual essays, reports from teaching activities, theoretical reflections on the topic, and critical depictions of case studies.

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Through a series of intricate informal processes and human-centric institutional arrangements, beneficiaries of South African government-subsidized housing force formally registered properties into informality. Sandile Mbatha explores the concept of informality in relation to how such beneficiaries challenge predominant understandings of property relations. These practices are embedded in complex urban tenure dynamics that prevail in post-colonial societies; societies, in which the state's imposition of predominantly western forms of tenure and property rights ignore the anthropological nature of housing.

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Gaming has never been disconnected from reality. When we engage with ever more lavish virtual worlds, something happens to us. The game imposes itself on us and influences how we feel about it, the world, and ourselves. How do games accomplish this and to what end? The contributors explore the video game as an atmospheric medium of hitherto unimagined potential. Is the medium too powerful, too influential? A danger to our mental health or an ally through even the darkest of times? This volume compiles papers from the Young Academics Workshop at the Clash of Realities conferences of 2019 and 2020 to provide answers to these questions.

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We are witnessing a worldwide resurgence of reactionary nationalist, religious, racist, and antifeminist ideologies and movements, as well as a rapid process of global de-democratization. Nevertheless, most studies remain tied to a methodological nationalism, while comparative research is almost exclusively limited to European countries and the USA. But authoritarian transformations in the Global South and the struggles against them have not only been at least as dramatic as in the North, they also often date back longer - and have been studied and theorized by Southern scholars for many years. Twenty scholar-activists from the Global South show in their in-depth studies how national processes of authoritarian capitalism have undermined political systems on a global scale.

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How is a new intranet involved in an ongoing merger integration process? Katja Schönian analyses internal communication and branding strategies in connection with the implementation of a new company intranet. Based on qualitative data, the study contrasts managerial expectations and everyday usage of the intranet in distinct work settings. Relying on social practice theories and research in Science & Technology Studies, Katja Schönian unpacks the different logics the intranet brings together and, furthermore, interrogates the characteristics that make an (un-)workable technology. The book sheds light on the informal practices and politics surrounding the technology implementation process. It provides readers with new insights into the dynamics of a merger integration process and the increasing digitalization of contemporary knowledge work.

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How do digital media technologies shape or restructure social practice? And which transitions and demarcations of different forms of publicness arise in this context? Simon Holdermann examines this question in his ethnography of everyday life in the High Atlas Mountains of Morocco. In order to approach the ongoing, historically situated social transformations of the region, he analyses a variety of media practices concerning the organizational work and transnational cooperation that take place there - in particular at the intersection of mountain tourism, NGO work, and local self-government.

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What makes up a public, what governs dominant discourses, and in which ways can counterpublics be created through narrative? This edited collection brings together essays on affect and narrative theory with a focus on the topics of gender and sexuality. It explores the power of narrative in literature, film, art, performance, and mass media, the construction of subjectivities of gender and sexuality, and the role of affect in times of crisis. By combining theoretical, literary, and analytical texts, the contributors offer methodological impulses and reflect on the possibilities and limitations of affect theory in cultural studies.

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How can higher education empower students as agents of the social transformations that our societies need so urgently? Linn Friedrichs connects John Dewey's education theory, current research on globalization, and inclusive curriculum design approaches to propose a new educational model for our age of complexity, crisis, and innovation. Drawing lessons from NYU's efforts to globalize its research, pedagogy, and social impact, she presents building blocks for a new curricular core that is structured around the key challenges of our time and the competencies of "complexity resilience". It becomes the essential foundation for action-oriented partnerships across cultural, disciplinary, generational, and institutional boundaries.

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This new go-to reference book for global melodrama assembles contributions by experts from a wide range of disciplines, including cultural studies, film and media studies, gender and queer studies, political science, and postcolonial studies. The melodramas covered in this volume range from early 20th century silent movies to contemporary films, from independent "arthouse" productions to Hollywood blockbusters. The comprehensive overview of global melodramatic film in the Lexicon constitutes a valuable resource for scholars and practitioners of film, teachers, film critics, and anyone who is interested in the past and present of melodramatic film on a global scale. The Lexicon of Global Melodrama includes essays on All That Heaven Allows, Bombay, Casablanca, Die Büchse der Pandora, In the Mood for Love, Nosotros los Pobres, Terra Sonâmbula, and Tokyo Story.

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How is the Internet produced as an infrastructure in post-socialist Lithuania? Migle Bareikyte contributes to the growing field of STS and media studies with a distinct focus on Eastern Europe. She situates the Internet development in Lithuania's telecom industry with the exploration of its labor practices, geopolitical imaginaries, and critical negotiations from a bottom-up perspective. Bareikyte further explores how fieldwork-based research can foster new theorizations of media infrastructures. Finally, she argues for a situated investigation of new places and actors beyond the United States and Western Europe-such as post-socialist regions-in order to explore the diversity of media infrastructures.

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Recent portrayals of the private sector as the engine of poverty alleviation in Africa's agricultural growth corridors have sparked critique by scholars and activists alike. Land acquisitions by investors are the most criticized, but the private sector engages in corridors in other ways, on which research remains scarce. Idil Ires provides a political economy analysis of whether smallholders prosper when they coordinate with input suppliers, banks, and crop buyers through markets and contract farming in the Southern Agricultural Growth Corridor of Tanzania. This book will appeal to scholars and practitioners from diverse fields, offering timely insights into a critical debate.

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Are robots taking away our jobs? Those who ask this question have misunderstood digitalisation - it is not an industrial revolution by other means. Sabine Pfeiffer searches for the actual novelties brought about by digitalisation and digital capitalism. In her analysis, she juxtaposes Marx's concept of productive force with the idea of distributive force. From the platform economy to artificial intelligence, Pfeiffer shows that digital capitalism is less about the efficient production of value, but rather about its fast, risk-free, and permanently secured realisation on the markets. The examination of this dynamic and its consequences also leads to the question of how destructive the distributive forces of digital capitalism might be.

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How do Mexican migrants in Germany perceive themselves and their lives? Innovatively combining theories of interculturality and social imaginaries, Yolanda López García uses the anthropological method of life stories to investigate the understudied area of Mexican migration to Germany. She discusses areas such as quality of life as a motivation for migration, the role of banal nationalism in imaginaries, the dynamic subjective re-construction of Mexicanness, and the process of (imagined) "Germanisation". Yolanda López García ultimately argues that individuals, as social agents, engage with and construct new emerging imaginaries, which may be viewed as important engines of social change.

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If pictures can be sexist, can analysing sound reveal sexism, too? Where is the language to discuss sexism in music? L.J. Müller tackles these important questions in their 2018 German book titled Sound und Sexismus, which was awarded the IASPM 2019 book prize. Analysing the voices of Kurt Cobain, Kate Bush, Björk and others, Müller demonstrates how gender is performed vocally and interacts with gendered aspects of embodiment and affect. The book is written from a strongly positioned and personal feminist perspective and is appealing to readers from various backgrounds -- singers, producers, music lovers, as well as academics and anyone with an interest in feminist takes on pop culture.

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Comparisons not only prove fundamental in the epistemological foundation of modernity (Foucault, Luhmann), but they fulfil a central function in social life and the production of art. Taking a cue from the Practice Turn in sociology, the contributors are investigating the role of comparative practices in the formation of eighteenth-century literature and culture. The book conceives of social practices of comparing as being entrenched in networks of circulation of bodies, artefacts, discourses, and ideas, and aims to investigate how such practices ordered and changed British literature and culture during the long eighteenth century.

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Scientific practices of removing waste in mega-cities of the global South are embedded in socio-cultural belief systems which reproduce existing social hierarchies. Thus going beyond a techno-managerial approach in waste management, Sneha Sharma critically interrogates the politics around urban waste disposal in Mumbai, India. She undertakes an ethnographic journey to the city's most unwanted space, a dumping site, to reveal how spaces and people are made into waste through exclusionary formal and informal practices. Offering new insights on topics of urban marginality, informality, urban planning this book will attract scholars from sociology, urban studies, and human geography.

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Research on electronic dance music communities has been initiated by scholars in the fields of sociology, cultural studies, public health research and others. Linguistic aspects, however, are rarely considered. Anita Jóri fills this gap of research and suggests a new perspective by looking at these communities as a discourse community. She gives an overview of the language use and discourse characteristics of this community while applying a mixed methodology of linguistic discourse analysis and cultural studies. The book is aimed at researchers and students in the fields of applied linguistics, popular music, media, communication and cultural studies.

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Digital sovereignty has become a hotly debated concept. The current convergence of multiple crises adds fuel to this debate, as it contextualizes the concept in a foundational discussion of democratic principles, civil rights, and national identities: is (technological) self-determination an option for every individual to cope with the digital sphere effectively? Can disruptive events provide chances to rethink our ideas of society - including the design of the objects and processes which constitute our techno-social realities? The positions assembled in this volume analyze opportunities for participation and policy-making, and describe alternative technological practices before and after the pandemic.

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Algorithms are not to be regarded as a technical structure but as a social phenomenon - they embed themselves, currently still very subtle, into our political and social system. Algorithms shape human behavior on various levels: they influence not only the aesthetic reception of the world but also the well-being and social interaction of their users. They act and intervene in a political and social context. As algorithms influence individual behavior in these social and political situations, their power should be the subject of critical discourse - or even lead to active disobedience and to the need for appropriate tools and methods which can be used to break the algorithmic power.

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The emergence of artificial intelligence has triggered enthusiasm and promise of boundless opportunities as much as uncertainty about its limits. The contributions to this volume explore the limits of AI, describe the necessary conditions for its functionality, reveal its attendant technical and social problems, and present some existing and potential solutions. At the same time, the contributors highlight the societal and attending economic hopes and fears, utopias and dystopias that are associated with the current and future development of artificial intelligence.

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Many children in Namibia find themselves facing a social crisis. They have been abandoned or abused, are malnourished, homeless, or live in shacks that barely provide any protection. However, amidst these disastrous living conditions, children have developed remarkable survival skills, and come up with equally clever and disillusioned analyses of their situation. For three years, Michaela Fink and Reimer Gronemeyer conducted interviews in Namibia with women who take care of vulnerable children. The book gives these children a voice in interviews and essays.

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Digital archives are transforming the Humanities and the Sciences. Digitised collections of newspapers and books have pushed scholars to develop new, data-rich methods. Born-digital archives are now better preserved and managed thanks to the development of open-access and commercial software. Digital Humanities have moved from the fringe to the centre of academia. Yet, the path from the appraisal of records to their analysis is far from smooth. This book explores crossovers between various disciplines to improve the discoverability, accessibility, and use of born-digital archives and other cultural assets.

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Perhaps unexpectedly, English travel writing during the long eighteenth century reveals a discourse of global civility. By bringing together representations of the then already familiar Ottoman Empire and the largely unknown South Pacific, Sascha Klement adopts a uniquely global perspective and demonstrates how cross-cultural encounters were framed by Enlightenment philosophy, global interconnections, and even-handed exchanges across cultural divides. In so doing, this book shows that both travel and travel-writing from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries were much more complex and multi-layered than reductive Eurocentric histories often suggest.

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What constitutes a data practice and how do contemporary digital media technologies reconfigure our understanding of practices in general? Autonomously acting media, distributed digital infrastructures, and sensor-based media environments challenge the conditions of accounting for data practices both theoretically and empirically. Which forms of cooperation are constituted in and by data practices? And how are human and nonhuman agencies distributed and interrelated in data-saturated environments? The volume collects theoretical, empirical, and historiographical contributions from a range of international scholars to shed light on the current shift from media to data practices.

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We know that robots are just machines. Why then do we often talk about them as if they were alive? Laura Voss explores this fascinating phenomenon, providing a rich insight into practices of animacy (and inanimacy) attribution to robot technology: from science-fiction to robotics R&D, from science communication to media discourse, and from the theoretical perspectives of STS to the cognitive sciences. Taking an interdisciplinary perspective, and backed by a wealth of empirical material, Voss shows how scientists, engineers, journalists - and everyone else - can face the challenge of robot technology appearing "a little bit alive" with a reflexive and yet pragmatic stance.

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In contrast to buildings divided by walls, monospace buildings are determined far less by its shell than by a reciprocal relationship between space and practices, objects, materials, and human bodies. Using the example of such one-room-architectures, this book explores the potential of an actor-network-theory (ANT) approach to space in the field of architecture. Sabine Hansmann focuses on the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts in Norwich, England by Foster Associates (1978) to investigate the mutual entanglement of people, objects and building. She traces the work that is necessary in "doing" space and thus suggests a re-conceptualisation of space in architectural theory.

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The multidisciplinary anthology Religious Fundamentalism in the Age of Pandemic provides deep insights concerning the current impact of Covid-19 on various religious groups and believers around the world. Based on contributions of well-known scholars in the field of Religious Fundamentalism, the contributors offer about a window into the origins of religious fundamentalism and the development of these movements as well as the creation of the category itself. Further recommendations regarding specific (fundamentalist) religious groups and actors and their possible development within Buddhism, Christianity, Islam and Judaism round up the discussion about the rise of Religious Fundamentalism in the Age of Pandemic.

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In the summer of 2015, an extraordinary number of German residents felt an urge to provide help to refugees. Doing good, however, is not as simple and straightforward as it might appear. Practices of solidarity are intertwined with questions of power. They are situated, relative and contested, unfolding in an ambivalent space between humanitarianism and political activism. This ethnographic account of the German "welcome culture" provides insights into the contested practices, imaginaries, interests and politics of refugee solidarity. Drawing on works from critical migration studies to social anthropology, Larissa Fleischmann develops an empirically grounded understanding of solidarity in migration societies.

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