Search results for ""transcript Verlag""

Parallel to the abolition of Atlantic slavery, new forms of indentured labour stilled global capitalism's need for cheap, disposable labour. The famous 'coolie trade' - mainly Asian labourers transferred to French and British islands in the Indian Ocean, Australia, Indonesia, South Africa, the Caribbean, the Americas, as well as to Portuguese colonies in Africa - was one of the largest migration movements in global history. Indentured contract workers are perhaps the most revealing example of bonded labour in the grey area between the poles of chattel slavery and 'free' wage labour. This interdisciplinary volume addresses historically and regionally specific cases of bonded labour relations from the 18th century to sponsorship systems in the Arab Gulf States today.

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Over the last decades, studies on cultural memory have taken a "spectral turn" and have explored the potential of haunting metaphors for addressing past instances of violence that affect present cultural realities. This book contributes to the discussions on haunting by enquiring into its culturally and historically located modality: the emergence of the figure of the Jewish ghost in contemporary Polish popular culture, literature and critical art. Gathering contributions from an interdisciplinary group of scholars, it locates this new interest in Jewish ghosts on the map of other Polish (and Jewish) ghostologies and seeks to explore their cultural and political functions in the Polish post-Holocaust imaginaire.

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Michael Lent asks what role art has in colonisation and subsequent dissolution. He proposes a practice informed by the fatal strategies and 'raw' phenomenology of Jean Baudrillard as a challenge to a system of disappearance. Focusing on the otherness of space to prevent its ultimate dissolution, Lent promotes a spatial practice of radical alterity. Examining ideas of disappearance put forth by Baudrillard and Paul Virilio, he utilises art as a means for investigating loss of potentiality and experience through the representation of space, shifting their ideas - originally ascribed to objects - into a new emphasis. This book ultimately attempts to break a cyclical system that causes everything to disappear into representation and equivalency.

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What are organizations? Where do they come from? How are they transformed and adapted to new situations? In the digital age and in the global network society, traditional theories of the organization can no longer answer these questions. Based on actor-network theory, this book explains organizations as flexible, open networks in which both human and non-human actors enter into socio-technical assemblies by constantly negotiating and re-negotiating programs of action. Organizations are not macro social structures or autonomous systems operating behind the backs of individuals. Instead, they are scalable actor-networks guided by network norms of connectivity, flow, communication, participation, authenticity, and flexibility.

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"Houses, Secrets, and the Closet" investigates the literary production of masculinities and their relation to secrets and sexualities in 18th and 19th century fiction. It focusses on close readings of Gothic fiction, Sensation Novels, and tales by Horace Walpole, Ann Radcliffe, William Godwin, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Wilkie Collins, and Henry James. The study approaches these texts through the lens of domestic space, gender, knowledge, and power. This approach serves to investigate the cultural roots of the "closet" - the male homosexual secret - which reveals a more general notion of male secrecy in modern society. The study thus contributes to a better understanding of the cultural history of masculinities and sexualities.

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"Geographies of Love" is the first study to explore the cultural lifeworlds of British, Australian and Indian chick- and ladlit characters. Offering unique case studies including "Bridget Jones's Diary", "About a Boy" and "Almost Single", the book explores how women and men search for love and how they commit themselves to romances in specific spaces and places: the home and the office as well as shops, clubs and bars. This cross-disciplinary study provides scholars, students and keen readers with multiple points of access and easily-relatable situations. It applies the complex phenomenon of cultural geographies within the field of literary studies and sheds new light on a most passionate feeling.

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andererseits is a collaborative project undertaken by students and faculties of universities in the USA (Duke and the University of Notre Dame), in Luxembourg (University of Luxembourg), and in Germany (University of Duisburg-Essen). It provides a forum for research and reflection on topics related to the German-speaking world and the field of German Studies. Works presented in the publication come from a wide variety of genres including book reviews, poetry, essays, editorials, forum discussions, academic notes, lectures, as well as traditional peer-reviewed academic articles. By publishing such a diverse array of material, we hope to demonstrate the extraordinary value of the humanities in general, and German Studies in particular, on a variety of intellectual and cultural levels. This edition features special sections on the writers Reinhard Jirgl and Barbara Honigmann as well as - for example - essays on Beethoven's 'Heroic New Path', 'Antisemitism in Germany (1890-1933)', the reception of German literature in Great Britain, and a study of post-Wall East German melodrama.

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The volume addresses the philosophical, epistemological and interdisciplinary aspects of the link between psychoanalysis and topology. Looking at the historical developments of psychoanalytic theory, one can hardly overlook the significant presence of architectonic and geometrical references that traverse Freud's writings. Lacan's return to Freud made a decisive step in taking these metaphors seriously and engaged with the mathematical correspondence of Freud's topological models. He thereby intensified the link with topology, which obtained an important didactic and conceptual value. The contributions highlight the ongoing relevance of this "topological turn" in psychoanalysis by exploring both concrete topological objects and outline the philosophical framework that supports the relation of psychoanalysis to topology.

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This book takes a close look at the interrelated phenomena of international business migrants and rural migrant workers in Shanghai. Through separate case studies it observes them in parallel and sheds light on the spatial implications of both groups' migrant status. The authors' uncovering of harsh and inadequate living and working conditions affecting rural migrant workers in the construction industry in Shanghai leads to the development of a concept of "Fair Building", a socially-conscious architecture that calls for accountability in ensuring that stakeholders involved in the construction process contribute to a sustainable urbanization.

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Until recently still a blank spot on the world map of art, China today occupies one of the top positions in the rankings of the global art market and has moved into the center of the speculations and the covetousness of its protagonists. But what is really happening on the spot, beyond the ethnocentric distortions of the Western viewpoint? What social representations and uses of art can be identified? A research team from the University of St. Gallen has taken up such questions in an ethnographical field research project which enables the actors in this emergent and nonetheless already market-dominated art field to have their say.

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Everyday articulations of music, place, urban politics, and inclusion/exclusion are powerfully present in Istanbul. This volume analyzes landscapes of music, community, and exclusion across a century and a half.An interdisciplinary group of scholars and artists presents four case studies: the rembetika, the music of the Asiks, the Zakir/Alevi tradition, and hip-hop, in Beyoglu, Üsküdar, the gentrifying Sulukule neighborhood, and across the metropolis.

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How is transnational cooperation practically conducted in the East African country of Rwanda, and how is it organised? Can the worlds of development aid and private business be compared? In this ethnography, Robin Pohl identifies the organisational patterns used by Rwandan, European and Indian partners. Different types of agencies, companies or projects each relate foreign activities differently to their local environment. The effects of potential divisions at the global level turn into assets or liabilities on the operative level of transboundary cooperations, depending on their context.

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"Digital Culture & Society" is a refereed, international journal, fostering discussion about the ways in which digital technologies, platforms and applications reconfigure daily lives and practices. It offers a forum for critical analysis and inquiry into digital media theory. The journal provides a venue for publication for interdisciplinary research approaches, contemporary theory developments and methodological innovation in digital media studies. It invites reflection on how culture unfolds through the use of digital technology, and how it conversely influences the development of digital technology itself. The inaugural issue "Digital Material/ism" presents methodological and theoretical insights into digital materiality and materialism.

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"Roman Charity" investigates the iconography of the breastfeeding daughter from the perspective of queer sexuality and erotic maternity. The volume explores the popularity of a topic that appealed to early modern observers for its eroticizing shock value, its ironic take on the concept of Catholic "charity", and its implied critique of patriarchal power structures. It analyses why early modern viewers found an incestuous, adult breastfeeding scene "good to think with" and aims at expanding and queering our notions of early modern sexuality. Jutta Gisela Sperling discusses the different visual contexts in which "Roman Charity" flourished and reconstructs contemporary horizons of expectation by reference to literary sources, medical practice, and legal culture.

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"Digital Culture & Society" is a refereed, international journal, fostering discussion about the ways in which digital technologies, platforms and applications reconfigure daily lives and practices. It offers a forum for critical analysis and inquiries into digital media theory and provides a publication environment for interdisciplinary research approaches, contemporary theory developments and methodological innovation.The third issue "Politics of Big Data" edited by Mark Coté, Paolo Gerbaudo, and Jennifer Pybus, critically examines the political and economic dimensions of Big Data and thus details its contestation. The contributions focus on the materialities and processes which manifest Big Data and explore forms of value beyond the state and capital. These range from open data initiatives, social media metrics, machine learning algorithms, data visualisation to data dashboards, critical data analysis, and new modes of data action research and practice.

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Nobel Prize winner Pearl S. Buck's engagement with (neo-)missionary cultures in the United States and China was unique. Against the backdrop of her missionary upbringing, Buck developed a fictional project which both revised and reaffirmed American foreign missionary activity in the Pacific Rim during the 20th century. Vanessa Künnemann accurately traces this project from America's number one expert on China - as Buck came to be known - from a variety of disciplinary angles, placing her work squarely in Middlebrow Studies and New American Studies.

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Since well before the debates about global warming and climate change, images have played an important part in bringing changes in nature and the environment to the attention of the general public. Moreover, most of these images have historic precursors. Gisela Parak illuminates how the synergy of photography and science gave rise to a class of photographs of environmental phenomena in the history of the United States of America, and how these images supported and instructed the scientific pursuit of knowledge, and were furthermore used as a persuasive means for directing public opinion.

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Video is a part of everyday life, comparable to driving a car or taking a shower. It is nearly omnipresent, available on demand and attached to nearby anything, anywhere. Online Video became something vital and independent. With all the video created by the cameras around us, constantly uploading, sharing, linking, and relating, a blue ocean is covering our planet, an ocean of video. What might look as bluish noise and dust from the far outside, might embed beautiful and fascinating living scapes of moving images, objects constantly changing, re-arranging, assembling, evolving, collapsing, but never disappearing, a real cinema. Andreas Treske describes and theorizes these objects formerly named video, their forms, behaviours and properties.

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How is ethnicity viewed by scholars of different academic disciplines? Can its emergences be compared in various regions of the world? How can it be conceptualized with specific reference to distinct historical periods? This book shows in a uniquely and innovative way the broad range of approaches to the political uses of ethnicity, both in contemporary settings and from a historical perspective. Its scope is multidisciplinary and spans across the globe. It is a suitable resource for teaching material. With its short contributions, it conveys central points of how to understand and analyze ethnicity as a political resource.

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Conflicts are everyday situations and experiences with which people have to cope. Focusing on particularly conflict-prone parts of Asia, the contributions to this book analyze the dynamics of conflicts from the perspectives of the actors involved, and pay particular attention to aspects like mobilization, exclusion, segregation, the role of institutions and the construction of antagonistic identities. The book gathers case studies based on long-term fieldwork from conflicts in Kyrgyzstan, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Kashmir.

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Climate change will impact ecosystems and production processes. Thus, adaptation to climate change has become a prevalent concept in environmental politics worldwide. In South Korea, climate change is expected to be above the global average. As response, the South Korean government has initiated climate change adaptation in diverse sectors. In this book, the entire process, from formulation and development, implementation and reaction of involved people is examined in a particular sector, agriculture. Theoretically framed as an Actor-Network, this study highlights current developments of South Korean politics, the tensions of urban-periphery development, and the status of agriculture.

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How to account for the peculiar attraction of certain photos? How to deal with the specific use of images in particular contexts? Monika Schwärzler presents a variety of photographic case studies exploring visual phenomena from the point of view of media analysis as well as from sociological, aesthetic, and psychoanalytic perspectives. The topics range from a new reading of Thomas Struth's street photographs to CERN photos with their charged rhetoric, from the assault of photographic close-ups to speculations on an anonymous slide collection featuring a woman with an ever-present white handbag. The book is intended for an audience receptive to the analytical appeal of images, prepared to go beyond what can be taken at face value.

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Media depictions of Arabs and Muslims continue to be framed by images of camels, belly dancers, and dagger-wearing terrorists. But do only Hollywood movies and TV news have the power to frame public discourse? This interdisciplinary study transfers media framing theory to literary studies to show how life writing (re-)frames Orientalist stereotypes. The innovative analysis of the post-9/11 autobiographies "West of Kabul, East of New York", "Letters from Cairo", and "Howling in Mesopotamia" makes a powerful claim to approach literature based on a theory of production and reception, thus enhancing the multi-disciplinary potential of framing theory.

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Based on a multi-sited ethnographic case study on transnational care chains between Milan (Italy) and Lima, Huancayo, and Cuzco (Peru), the book explores how social inequalities are reproduced through the care practices that follow the introduction of Peruvian migrants into home-based elderly care. Anna Katharina Skornia adopts an innovative approach in combining research on transnational care and migration with a perspective on entangled inequalities. In particular, the study sheds light on the role of state regulations in contributing to these inequalities as well as their ambiguous implications from the perspectives of both caregivers and receivers.

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This volume discusses a practical approach to cultural transfer and exchange through the concept of "memory box". Ideas of displacement, transfer, and cultural memory are explored through case studies from Scotland to Italy and Germany and from Finland and France to the American colonies. The authors develop an understanding of memory boxes as cultural constructions that are involved in the process of making and disputing memory - but which, simultaneously, are important agents for cultural transfer over space and time. This book emphasises "memory box" as an idea that allows us to study the cultural processes of transfer in conjunction with cultural memory.

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Taking its cue from contemporary western debates on presence in the social sciences and the humanities, this volume focuses on 'presence' both as everyday experience and as an experience of intense moments. It raises questions about diverse social configurations of presence as well as about the specific cultural repertoires which encode, articulate, and shape discourses of presence. The contributions take as a premise that phenomena of presence are connected to particular forms of knowledge. Especially tacit knowledge (pre)determines experiences of individual and collective presence and becomes tangible in moments of presence or presentification.

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The omnipresence and popularity of American consumer products in Japan have triggered an avalanche of writing shedding light on different aspects of this cross-cultural relationship. Cultural interactions are often accompanied by the term cultural imperialism, a concept that on close scrutiny turns out to be a hasty oversimplification given the contemporary cultural interaction between the U.S. and Japan. "Embracing Differences" shows that this assumption of a one-sided transfer is no longer valid. Closely investigating Disney theme parks, sushi, as well as movies, Iris-Aya Laemmerhirt reveals a dialogical exchange between these two nations that has changed the image of Japan in the United States.

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Michael D. Fowler presents an interdisciplinary approach to investigating the sound world of traditional Japanese gardens by drawing from the diverse fields of semiotics, acoustic ecology, philosophy, mathematical modelling, architecture, music, landscape theory and acoustic analysis. Using projects - ranging from data-visualisations, immersive sound installations, algorithmically generated meta-gardens and proto-architectural form finding missions - as creative paradigms, the book offers a new framework for artistic inquiry in which the sole objective is the generation of new knowledge through the act of spatial thinking.

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The ubiquitous Partisan narrative in Yugoslavia served well as founding myth of its newly united people. Its retrospective deconstruction has absorbed most of the academic attention for the Yugoslav Partisans since the break-up. This edition in contrast looks into the (hybrid) nature of partisanship itself as it appears in film, art, and literature. It explores the Partisans in Yugoslavia in Partisan novels, films, and songs, analyzes the - still ongoing - transformation process of the Partisan narrative, and reviews its transitions into popular (visual) culture.

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In the current environment of a growing Muslim presence in Europe, young Muslims have started to develop a subculture of their own. The manifestations reach from religious rap and street wear with Islamic slogans to morally "impeccable" comedy. This form of religiously permissible fun and of youth-compatible worship is actively engaged in shaping the future of Islam in Europe and of Muslim/non-Muslims relations. Based on a vast collection of youth cultural artefacts, participant observations and in-depth interviews in France, Britain and Germany, this book provides a vivid description of Islamic youth culture and explores the reasons why young people develop such a culture.

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The anticipatory logic of speculation and preemptive politics of risk are increasingly gaining significance in a globalizing neoliberal world. This study traces risk and speculation as aesthetic and political-economic strategies in factual and fictional discourses emerging at the North American Pacific Rim within a decade around 2000. Its exemplary close readings in particular focus on three fictional texts (Kathryn Bigelow's Hollywood film "Strange Days", 1995, Karen T. Yamashita's novel "Tropic of Orange", 1997, and Larissa Lai's novel "Salt Fish Girl", 2002) whose intricate aesthetics pass perceptive critique on concurrent political-economic discourses and their subtle reconfiguration of race, class, and gender. The speculative near-future scenarios projected by these artifacts expose the rise of risk as a new rationality of governance. At the same time they illustrate neoliberal speculation as a new paradigm of subject formation at a hyper-capitalist, millennial Pacific Rim.

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In the late 19th century, the so-called "German Method", which employed spoken language in deaf education, triumphed all over the Western world. At the same time as deaf German schoolchildren were taught to articulate and read lips, an emancipation movement of signing deaf adults emerged across the German Empire. This book tells the story of how deaf people moved from being isolated objects of administration or education, depending on welfare or working in the fields, to becoming an urban middle class collective with claims of self-determination. Main questions addressed in this first comprehensive work on one of the world's oldest movements of disabled people include how deaf organisations emerged, what they fought for, and who was left behind.

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In the domain of health, the relation between bodies, citizenship, nations and governments has changed beyond recognition over the past four decades, especially in Africa. In many regions, populations are now faced with a total lack of medical care, and the disciplinary regimes of modernity are faint memories. In this situation, new critical insights beyond the critique of old "modernization" and the "disciplinary regimes" of imperial times are needed. How can we keep up our sophisticated criticism of knowledge regimes and our doubts with regard to narratives of development, when so many people in Africa are dreaming about modernity and are envisioning their own renaissance?

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Abundant, salutary, problematic - energy makes history. As a symbol, resource and consumer good, it shapes technologies, politics, societies and cultural world views. Focussing on a range of energy types, from electricity and oil to bioenergy, this volume analyzes the social, cultural and political concepts and discourses of energy and their implementation and materialization within technical systems, applications, media representations and consumer practice. By examining and connecting production, mediation and consumption aspects from an international and interdisciplinary perspective, the book offers an innovative view on how energy is imagined, discussed, staged and used.

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What is the cultural dimension of sustainability? This book offers a thought-provoking answer, with a theoretical synthesis on "cultures of sustainability". Describing how modernity degenerated into a culture of unsustainability, to which the arts are contributing, Sacha Kagan engages us in a fundamental rethinking of our ways of knowing and seeing the world. We must learn not to be afraid of complexity, and to re-awaken a sensibility to patterns that connect. With an overview of ecological art over the past 40 years, and a discussion of art and social change, the book assesses the potential role of art in a much needed transformation process.

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Using the theoretical frameworks of Freud, Todorov, and Bahktin, this book explores how American writers of the late 20th century have translated the psychoanalytical concept of "the uncanny" into their novelistic discourses. The two texts under scrutiny - Paul Auster's "City of Glass" and Toni Morrison's "Jazz" - show that the uncanny has developed into a crucial trope to delineate personal and collective fears that are often grounded on the postmodern disruption of spatio-temporal continuities and coherences.

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The terms "mind" and "matter" appear to signify two concepts irreplaceable and permanent in nature. The increasing challenges and modes of reflection of digital life and cultural creation have contributed to a productive doubting of said dichotomy. Net culture has exposed the causality of the two only superficially contradictory systems and translated these into new technological realities. This publication, using an interdisciplinary approach, strives to investigate the entanglement of cultural, artistic and technical praxis, to document the developments, to clarify the status quo of the scientific community in a practical and exemplary fashion and to enable glimpses of potential future developments.

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As a concept that increasingly gains importance in contemporary cultural discourse, authenticity emerges as a site of tearing tensions between the fictional and the real, original and fake, margin and centre, the same and the other. The essays collected in this volume explore this paradoxical nature of authenticity in the context of various media. They give ample proof of the fact that authenticity, which depends on giving the impression of being inherent or natural, found not created, frequently turns out to be the result of a careful aesthetic construction that depends on the use of identifiable techniques with the aim of achieving certain effects for certain reasons.

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Luxembourg - international financial center, European administrative center, destination country for immigration? This empirical study provides insights about a society that has hitherto largely eluded scientific investigation and observes the processes of identity construction in globalised conditions. The interdisciplinary team of authors exposes the processes of subjective appropriations and institutional attributions at work in the fields of languages, spaces, perceptions of self and others as well as everyday cultures, and identifies for the first time socio-cultural milieus in the Grand Duchy. The findings of the three-year research project uncover the ambivalences and dynamics of a multicultural and multilingual society.

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Globalization euphoria and enthusiasm for the West are on the decline in contemporary China. Critical voices make themselves heard in artistic and cultural circles, turning towards their personal everyday lives to take stock. Their questions revolve around concrete experiences in the radical upheaval of lifeworlds, the continued significance of traditions after many of them have been thoroughly uprooted, and the paradoxes produced by the predominance of neo-liberalism. The 17 positions assembled in this volume provide a vivid illustration of such a "new thoughtfulness" in a wide variety of aspects ranging from aesthetics and art to theatre and photography.

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This book is a breakthrough in illuminating humanism. For the first time it is presented in an intercultural perspective. It introduces Chinese, Indian, African, Islamic, and Western traditions into the intercultural discussion about basic issues of understanding the human world. By this means it recognizes different disciplinary perspectives: history, philosophy as well as religious, literary and gender studies. Special emphasis is put on the controversial relationship between humanism and religion. This complex network of argumentations is an answer to the challenge of cultural orientation at the age of globalization. Humanism is brought to life as a synthesis of transcultural values and a mutual and critical recognition of cultural differences.

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The book analyzes the multifarious exchange of algorithmic technologies and concepts between the military and the media industry from the early 1990s until now. Unlike most related scholarly work which focuses on digital games, it drafts a model of programmable media which is grounded in a close-reading of the key technologies, most notably the paradigm of object-oriented programming, and reconsiders technical disciplines from a humanities perspective. This model is then applied to analyze the effects of algorithmic logic on the military-civilian continuum, including economic practices, patterns of media usage and military decision-making.

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War correspondents are prominent actors in the media world. They took hold in the cultural imaginary soon after their profession had been created in the mid-19th century. With a particular focus on Britain, this study investigates the representation of war correspondents from Victorian times to the present, in memoirs, novels and films. Such representations react to prevailing notions that exist about war reporters and participate in their further construction. With its cultural approach, this book complements studies of war correspondents in media and communication studies, history and ethnology.

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Drawing upon a common conceptual framework of political webcampaigning the book offers theoretical reflections on Internet-based campaign politics. It provides a comparative overview on the use of the Internet as a campaigning instrument by diverse intermediary political actors. Taking the empirical findings of Internet appropriations into consideration, the book discusses the impact of political webcampaigning on (transnational) democracy and the transformation of public spheres.

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Diverse musical cultures of migrant and minority communities have existed in Europe for centuries and shaped its countries significantly. As part of an EU-funded project this volume deals with the musical activities of minorities and their impact on musical traditions in Europe. It also raises questions such as: How are musical traditions of minorities integrated in education and the public music life? Can music facilitate transcultural dialogue? And to what extent do musical practice and performance reassert the own cultural tradition in a foreign environment? Answers to those and similar questions as well as a review on what can be observed in the 21st century Europe are gathered in various thematic approaches. The book also provides model projects with a practical insight into the life and work with music of migrant and minority cultures across Europe.

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