Search results for ""Transcript Verlag""

What is 'postirony'? Foremost, it is a response to the ironic zeitgeist. Moreover, it is the key to understanding a specific form of literature. The contemporary reader is familiar with and - unfortunately - used to postmodernism's ironic, self-reflexive metafiction. Authors like David Foster Wallace and Dave Eggers chose a different path: Despite the reign of contemporary irony, they strive to reach the reader on a level beyond, cognitively as well as emotionally - they claim to be sincere and true. Focusing largely on nonfiction by said authors, Lukas Hoffmann explores the means the texts use to achieve something new - namely, a new form of sincerity.

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This book is based on almost five years of fieldwork with street-related communities in the city of Yogyakarta, Indonesia, between 2001 and 2015. The author inquires into children's and adolescents' coming of age on the streets and their remarkable social and emotional competences, instead of resorting to a dreadful discourse of pity and despair. The ethnography's multi-vocal narrative couples vivid accounts of ethnographic case studies and life stories with current theory on affect, emotion, empathy, structural violence or social interaction in the context of marginality, stigma and chronic illness.

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How do historical sources narrate or recount deviance? Is there a relationship between the manner in which divergent behaviour is recounted and the type of source in which this behaviour is presented? The articles present examples of the recounting of deviance by using, amongst others, sources such as chronicles, travel accounts and court records from 15th century England, 15th/16th century Germany, 17th century Spain, 17th/18th century Venice and 17th/18th century Italy and France. It can be asserted that different types of narrative patterns to recount deviance occur intermingled in the cases discussed.

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Digital technology permeates the physical world. Social media and virtual reality, accessed via internet capable devices - computers, smartphones, tablets and wearables - affect nearly all aspects of social life. The contributions to this volume apply innovative forms of ethnographic research to the digital realm. They examine the emergence of new forms of digital life, such as political participation through comments on East Greenlandic news blogs, the personal use of video broadcasting applications, the rise of transnational migrant networks facilitated by social media, or the effects of Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram on global conflicts.

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During the 17th and 18th century musicians' mobilities and migrations are essential for the European music history and the cultural exchange of music. Adopting viewpoints that reflect different methodological approaches and diversified research cultures, the book presents studies on central scopes, strategies and artistic outcomes of mobile and migratory musicians as well as on the transfer of music. By looking at elite and non-elite musicians and their everyday mobilities to major and minor centers of music production and practice, new biographical patterns and new stylistic paradigms in the European East, West and South emerge.

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Authors not only create artworks. In the process of creating, they simultaneously bring to life their author personae. Approaching this phenomenon from an interdisciplinary point of view, Sonja Longolius develops a concept of "performative authorship" by examining different strategies of becoming an author. In regard to the notion of her concept, this work offers a critical and comparative analysis of the works of Paul Auster, Candice Breitz, Sophie Calle, and Jonathan Safran Foer. Specifically, Auster/Calle and Breitz/Foer form a generational pair of opposites, enabling a discussion of postmodern and post-postmodern artistic strategies of "performative authorship".

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American Mobilities investigates representations of mobility - social, economic, geographic - in American film and literature during the Depression, WWII, and the early Cold War. With an emphasis on the dual meaning of "domestic," referring to both the family home and the nation, this study traces the important trope of mobility that runs through the "American" century. Juxtaposing canonical fiction with popular, and low-budget independent films with Classical Hollywood, Leyda brings the analytic tools of American cultural and literary studies to bear on an eclectic array of primary texts as she builds a case for the significance of mobility in the study of the United States.

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In recent years, the term global art has become a catchphrase in contemporary art discourses. Going beyond additive notions of canon expansion, this volume encourages a differentiated inquiry into the complex aesthetic, cultural, historical, political, epistemological and socio-economic implications of both the term global art itself and the practices it subsumes. Focusing on diverse examples of art, curating, historiography and criticism, the contributions not only take into account (new) hegemonies and exclusions but also the shifting conditions of transcultural art production, circulation and reception.

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The book brings together experts from Media and Communication Studies with Postcolonial Studies scholars to illustrate how the two fields may challenge and enrich each other. Its essays introduce readers to selected topics including "Media Convergence", "Transcultural Subjectivity", "Hegemony", "Piracy" and "Media History and Colonialism". Drawing on examples from film, literature, music, TV and the internet, the contributors investigate the transnational dimensions in today's media, engage with local and global media politics and discuss media outlets as economic agents, thus illustrating mechanisms of power in postcolonial and neo-colonial mediascapes.

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In Slavic studies, aging and old age have thus far been only marginal concerns. This volume brings together the scattered research that has been done up to now on aging as represented and narrated in Slavic literatures. The essays investigate Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian, Polish, Russian, Slovak, Slovene and Ukrainian representations of age/aging in various literary genres and epochs and analyze age as a powerful marker of difference and as constitutive of social relations and personal identity.

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How has "ethnic entrepreneurship" emerged and developed since the late eighties in Berlin? In his study, Baris Ülker answers this question by relying on the experiences of immigrants from Turkey. Most academic studies on "ethnic entrepreneurship" have focused either on the "most unitary" structure available in the "natural flow of history" or on the pre-given "cultural" characteristics of immigrants. This book instead sets historical ruptures, conditions of possibility and individual practices in context. It analyzes how human beings have been turned into "ethnic entrepreneurs" and explains the ways of governing the self and others in the neoliberal urban context.

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Media discourses always consider Vienna as a "cultural city". This study shows how such a perception is skilfully shaped by political constructions of cultural imaginaries in and of the city. The book unveils how simplistic cognitive interpretations of culture not only define an unquestioned, reductionist idea of the city's cultural character - it also explains how these imaginaries influence the recent urban development practice in one of Europe's globalizing cities.

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Newsreel cinema and television not only served as an important tool in the shaping of political spheres and the construction of national and cultural identities up to the 1960s. Today's potent televisual forms were furthermore developed in and strongly influenced by newsreels, and much of the archived newsreel footage is repeatedly used to both illustrate and re-stage past events and their significance. This book addresses newsreel cinema and television as a medium serving the formation of cultural identities in a variety of national contexts after 1945, its role in forming audiovisual narratives of a "biopic of the nation", and the technical, aesthetical, and political challenges of archiving and restaging cinematic and televisual newsreel.

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During the last four decades the German Revolution 1918/19 has only attracted little scholarly attention. This volume offers new cultural historical perspectives, puts this revolution into a wider time frame (1916-23), and coheres around three interlinked propositions: (i) acknowledging that during its initial stage the German Revolution reflected an intense social and political challenge to state authority and its monopoly of physical violence, (ii) it was also replete with "Angst"-ridden wrangling over its longer-term meaning and direction, and (iii) was characterized by competing social movements that tried to cultivate citizenship in a new, unknown state.

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How are individual and social ideas of late-onset dementia shaped and negotiated in film, literature, the arts, and the media? And how can the symbolic forms provided by popular culture be adopted and transformed by those affected in order to express their own perspectives? This international and interdisciplinary volume summarizes central current research trends and opens new theoretical and empirical perspectives on dementia in popular culture. It includes contributions by internationally renowned scholars from the humanities, social and cultural gerontology, age(ing) studies, cultural studies, philosophy, and bioethics. Contributions by Lucy Burke, Marlene Goldman, Annette Leibing and others.

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Spatial and identity research operates with differentiations and relations. These are particularly useful heuristic tools when examining border regions where social and geopolitical demarcations diverge. Applying this approach, the authors of this volume investigate spatial and identity constructions in cross-border contexts as they appear in everyday, institutional and media practices. The results are discussed with a keen eye for obliquely aligned spaces and identities and relinked to governmental issues of normalization and subjectivation. The studies base upon empirical surveys conducted in Germany, France, Belgium and Luxembourg.

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Writings on the metropolis generally foreground illimitability, stressing thereby that the urban ultimately remains both illegible and unintelligible. Instead, the purpose of this interdisciplinary study is to demonstrate that mentality as a tool offers orientation in the urban realm. Nora Pleßke develops a model of urban mentality to be employed for cities worldwide. Against the background of the Spatial Turn, she identifies dominant urban-specific structures of London mentality in contemporary London novels, such as Monica Ali's "Brick Lane", J.G. Ballard's "Millennium People", Nick Hornby's "A Long Way Down", and Ian McEwan's "Saturday".

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This book offers a compelling perspective on the striking similarity of art and commerce in contemporary culture. Combining the history and theory of art with theories of contemporary culture and marketing, Maria A. Slowinska chooses three angles (space, object/experience, persona) to bridge present and past, aesthetic appearance and theoretical discourse, and traditional divisions between art and commerce. Beyond both pessimistic and celebratory rhetorics, "Art/Commerce" illuminates contemporary phenomena in which the aestheticization of commerce and the commercialization of aesthetics converge.

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Stability is at the core of every discussion of order, organization or institutionalization. From an "inside" perspective, the stability of each order-constituting element is assumed. In contrast, in critical discourses instability (e.g. through ambiguity or non-control) is located at the outside of the social order as its negative. By treating this argumentative symmetrical structure as "idioms of stability and destabilization", the articles try to rethink order: How can we describe structures from a perspective in which instability, non-control and irrationality are not contrary to ordering systems, but contribute to their stability? How might the notions of identity, knowledge and institutions in social and cultural studies be contested by this change of perspective?

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Besides products and services multinational corporations also sell myths, values and immaterial goods. Such "meta-goods" (e.g. prestige, beauty, strength) are major selling points in the context of successful marketing and advertising. Fashion adverts draw on deeply rooted human values, ideals and desires such as values and symbols of social recognition, beautification and rejuvenation. Although the reference to such meta-goods is obvious to some consumers, their rootedness in philosophical theories of human nature is less apparent, even for the marketers and advertisers themselves. This book is of special interest for researchers and students in the fields of Cultural Studies, Media Studies, Marketing, Advertising, Fashion, Cultural Critique, Philosophy, Sociology, Anthropology and Psychology, and for anyone interested in the ways in which fashion operates.

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Trauma has become a hotly contested topic in literary studies. But interest in trauma is not new; its roots extend to the Romantic period, when novelists and the first psychiatrists influenced each others' investigations of the "wounded mind". This book looks back to these early attempts to understand trauma, reading a selection of Romantic novels in dialogue with Romantic and contemporary psychiatry. It then carries that dialogue forward to postmodern fiction, examining further how empirical approaches can deepen our theorizations of trauma. Within an interdisciplinary framework, this study reveals fresh insights into the poetics, politics, and ethics of trauma fiction.

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(Dis)Orientation appears to be a phenomenon that is connected to media in numerous respects: today, finding your way in the world often means finding your way with the help of as well as within media, which in turn creates new virtual realms of (dis)orientation. This book deals with recent media technologies and structures (navigation devices, databases, transmediality) and unconventional narrative patterns (narrative complexity, plot twists, non-linearity), using the ambivalent concept of (dis)orientation as a shared focus to analyse various phenomena of contemporary media, thereby raising overarching questions about current mediascapes.

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This collection brings together new and original critical essays by eleven established European American Studies scholars to explore the 1960s from a transatlantic perspective. Intended for an academic audience interested in globalized American studies, it examines topics ranging from the impact of the American civil rights movement in Germany, France and Wales, through the transatlantic dimensions of feminism and the counterculture movement. It explores, for example, the vicissitudes of Europe's status in US foreign relations, European documentaries about the Vietnam War, transatlantic trends in literature and culture, and the significance of collective and cultural memory of the era.

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The binary construction of "young" and "old", which is based on a biogerontological model of aging as decline, can be redefined as the ambiguity of aging from a cultural studies perspective. This concept enables an analysis of the social functions of images of aging with the aim of providing a basis for interdisciplinary exchange on gerontological research. The articles in this publication conceive the relationship between living and aging as a productive antagonism which focuses on the interplay between continuity and change as a marker of life course identity: aging and growing older are processes which cannot be reduced to the chronology of years but which are shaped by the individual's interaction with the changing circumstances of life.

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While feminists have long recognised the importance of self-managed, alternative media to transport their messages, to challenge the status quo, and to spin novel social processes, this topic has been an under-researched area. Hence, this book explores the processes of women's and feminist media production in the context of participatory spaces, technology, and cultural citizenship. The collection is composed of theoretical analyses and critical case studies. It highlights contemporary alternative feminist media in general as well as blogs, zines, culture jamming, and street art.

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In "Call Me Ishmael", Charles Olson exclaims "SPACE to be the central fact to man born in America". Indeed, from the start, history and identity in America have been intricately tied to issues of space: from the idea of the "city upon a hill" to the transnational (soft) power of the United States, space has always served as an important parameter of power gained or lost and of the struggles to maintain or resist it. With contributions that range from the construction of America in (European) academic discourses to children's fiction, this collection provides an extensive and insightful study of how space influences our understanding of America.

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Global risks, mobilities and interdependencies transnationalize local life and working worlds. These processes lead to an inner globalization of societies in which worldwide constellations of "reflexive" (Ulrich Beck), "multiple" (Shmuel N. Eisenstadt), "entangled" (Shalini Randeria) and "global" (Arjun Appadurai) modernities simultaneously and immediately clash in social action: a process of cosmopolitanization in which "the global" is localized and "the local" is globalized in radical new ways. In this book, an international selection of prominent critical thinkers address this premise and provide their interpretations of imminent challenges, concomitant social dynamics and political implications.With contributions by Arjun Appadurai, Zygmunt Bauman, Ulrich Beck, Elisabeth Beck-Gernsheim, Edgar Grande, Maarten Hajer, Ronald Hitzler, Wolf Lepenies, Anna Tsing, Angela McRobbie, Bruno Latour, Ted Nordhaus & Michael Shellenberger, Hans-Georg Soeffner, Natan Sznaider, Anja Weiß and Yunxiang Yan.

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Urban agglomerations host the most vital and creative societies. This applies particularly to Africa, where cities have the highest growth rates world-wide and where the urban population is younger than anywhere else. Urban life-worlds are the basis for the development of new lifestyles and new cultural phenomena. Based on empirical ethnographic research, this book presents case studies that enhance our understanding of the dynamics of urbanity in Africa and beyond - by envisioning cities as crossroads where cultures, biographies and networks meet.

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The generation of meaning is the primary precondition for acting and thinking. The essays in this volume contribute to a discourse on this matter with a decentred, globalized world in mind. The notions civilization, humanism and modernity - far from being exclusively Western ideas - may facilitate joint efforts of reflecting on the universality of current human conditions, particularly since such reflexion is possible from particular cultural perspectives. Modernity presents us with a second Axial Time in which the quest for a plural, but shared, humane world is the challenge.

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This volume examines the challenges cinemas in small European countries have faced since 1989. It explores how notions of scale and "small cinemas" relate to questions of territory, transnational media flows, and globalization. Employing a variety of approaches from industry analysis to Deleuze & Guattari's concept of the "minor", contributions address the relationship of small cinemas to Hollywood, the role of history and memory, and the politics of place in post-Socialist cinemas.

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Authenticity is one of the most crucial, but also most contested concepts in literary and cultural studies. Hollowed out by postmodernist theory, it paradoxically enough persists as an important backdrop for the discussion of literature, film, and the visual arts. The essays in this volume explore perspectives on authenticity and case studies dealing with "the authentic". They thereby seek to show how the paradoxical persistence of authenticity in contemporary critical discourse can be turned into a fruitful point of departure for an analysis of literary texts, but also films, and the visual arts.

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What is the current state of discussion in Cultural History? Which European institutions engage exclusively in Cultural History and which topics do they address? And how will Cultural History develop in the future? These and other questions are raised by European scholars in the discussion of Institutions, Themes and Perspectives of Cultural History in this volume. It provides a profound overview of contemporary developments in Scandinavia, Finland, Great Britain, Latvia, Poland, Hungary, Austria, Switzerland, Germany, Italy and Spain.

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This book gives an insight into the media constructions of historical remembrance reflecting transnational, national or nationalistic forms of politics. Authors from post-Yugoslavia and neighbouring countries focus on the diverse transnational (such as Austro-Hungarian, Yugoslav etc.) and national (such as Bosnian, Croatian, Serbian etc.) memory cultures in South-Eastern Europe, their interference and rivalry. They examine constructions of memory in different media from the 19th century to recent wars. These include longue durée images, breaks and gaps, selection and suppression, traumatic events and the loss of memory, nostalgia, false memory, reactivation, rituals and traces of memory.

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Popular representations of history are taking on new forms and reaching wider audiences. The search for usable pasts is branching out into active appropriations of history such as historical theme parks, housing developments, and live-action role play. Drawing on themed environments across the continents, the articles in this volume focus on how these appropriations bypass, are different from, or even contradict traditional as well as scientific modes of disseminating historical knowledge. Bringing together theorists and practitioners, they provide the basis for an interdisciplinary as well as a transcultural theory of how pasts are staged in various social contexts.

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Since discourses on humanistic traditions have so far largely been focused on European cultures, this volume attempts to open the field to counterparts within Chinese culture which, as a matter of fact, has a rich autochthonous tradition of humanism as well. The contributors explore Confucian and Daoist dimensions of humaneness in Chinese philosophy and history up to the first half of the 20th century, when Chinese and Western concepts of humanism first merged. This book addresses a non-sinological audience as well as specialists in this field and contributes to a non-eurocentric view on humanism history.

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Current culturally oriented media studies have significantly advanced central concepts such like "mediality", "media culture", "media discourse" and "procedures of media". Focused on this newly defined terminological field, this volume presents landmark contributions for media studies providing new insights into the current state of research on media theory and media culture, simultaneously developing an agenda for future research.

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The shift to prevention and health promotion is an example of how policy makers aim to rationalise and organise both health systems and patients' health practices. By applying a perspective from empirical science & technology studies (STS), based on qualitative research methods, the chapters of this book present a view behind the scenes and zoom into the micropolitics of prevention and health promotion. They analyse how patients are framed as being "at risk", how preventative regimes shape medical practices, and what its practical consequences are in patients' everyday lives. This makes the insights of this book relevant for prevention and health promotion practitioners, public health policy-makers and researchers.

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This book presents new developments in Scandinavian memory cultures related to World War II and the Holocaust by combining this focus with the perspective of history didactics. The theoretical framework of historical consciousness offers an approach linking individual and collective uses and re-uses of the past to the question how history can and should be taught. It also offers some examples of good practice in this field. The book promotes a teaching practice which, in taking the social constructivist notions of historical consciousness as a starting point, can contribute to self-reflecting and critical thinking - being fundamental for any democratic political culture.

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Is it possible to work with sound in sociology rather than being about sound? Can there be a "sonic sociology"? Rémy Bocquillon reflects on the process-oriented character of sociology as an experimental science by including aesthetic practices of sounding and listening as constitutive for the making of sociological theory. Following new materialist and speculative philosophies, this study is thus a combination of sociological theory, philosophical thought and aesthetic practices, not understood as discrete fields of inquiry, but co-constituting each other. It also features an audio chapter, "feeding-back" the sonic experimentations at the core of the research in new and engaging ways.

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The Lower !Garib, or Orange River flows through the historical Namaqualand and since 1990 has formed the international border between Namibia and South Africa. The contributors to his volume focus on this hardly discussed stretch of the Orange River to understand the region's social history, geography, and economy. It brings together scholars from Namibia, South Africa, and overseas, as well as the knowledge and analysis from people living in the region. In concise chapters and short portraits, they discuss the region's past and present from a variety of perspectives.

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Non-conformist, non-linear, unruly thought and action have always led to great works of art, pathbreaking inventions and forward-looking perspectives. But how can this precious good find its way into our everyday working life to help us deal with social, ecological and economic challenges? The crucial step, Ursula Bertram contends, is to reach a synergy of logically justifiable knowledge and the capacity to navigate in open systems. To find out how such synergy could come about, Ursula Bertram has observed the strategies and principles of artists, choreographers, musicians and unruly thinkers and compared them with the statements of physicists, mathematicians, managers and researchers. She shows that when artistic thought is circulated and probed in non-artistic fields, an extremely efficient pattern called artistic transfer emerges.With contributions by Werner Preißing and others.

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Being a home to more than 80 ethnic groups, Ethiopia has to balance normative diversity with efforts to implement state law across its territory. This volume explores the co-existence of state, customary, and religious legal forums from the perspective of legal practitioners and local justice seekers. It shows how the various stakeholders' use of negotiation, and their strategic application of law can lead to unwanted confusion, but also to sustainable conflict resolution, innovative new procedures and hybrid norms. The book thus generates important knowledge on the conditions necessary for stimulating a cooperative co-existence of different legal systems.

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This collection consists of eight essays that examine the way narratives determine our understanding of old age and condition how the experience is lived. Contributors to this volume have based their analysis on the concept of "narrative identity" developed by Paul Ricoeur, built upon the idea that fiction makes life, and on his definition of "trace" as the mark of time. By investigating the traces of aging imprinted in a series of literary and filmic works they dismantle the narrative of old age as decline and foreclosure to assemble one of transformation and growth.

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Reverse Engineering is a term that comes originally from the field of mechanical engineering. Reverse Engineering indicates the process of analysing an existing object or system by laying out its construction plan to then rebuild it in every detail. This manner of reconstruction allows for modifications and adjustments to new demands and requirements, it signifies creative appropriation, democratisation of knowledge, further development. The contributions in this volume take Reverse Engineering to another level, applying it to the fields of arts, sciences and politics in an attempt to reveal the procedures of culture and technology at work, and the importance of access, knowledge and skills in reshaping our present times and future.

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Emerging forms of alternative economic frameworks are changing the structure of society, redefining the relationship between centre and periphery, and the social dynamics in the urban fabric. In this context, the arts can play a crucial role in formulating a concept of complex and plural citizenship: This economic, social and cultural paradigm has the potential to overcome the conventional isolation of the arts and culture in ivory towers, and thereby to gradually make the urban fabric more fertile. This volume faces such sensitive issues by collating contributions from various disciplines: Economists, sociologists, urbanists, architects and creative artists offer a broad and deep assessment of urban dynamics and their visions for the years to come.

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