On_Culture: The Open Journal for the Study of Culture

Dauerhafte URI für den Bereich

jlupub.ub.uni-giessen.de/handle/jlupub/7516
Alle Ausgaben und Fortsetzung siehe: https://www.on-culture.org/

On_Culture: The Open Journal for the Study of Culture is a biannual, peer-reviewed academic eJournal created and edited by doctoral researchers, postdocs and professors working at the GCSC. It provides a platform and forum for pursuing and reflecting on the study of culture. It investigates, problematizes and develops key concepts and methods in the field. More often than not, developing such new approaches and emerging topics is a collaborative and collective process. On_Culture is dedicated to fostering such collective processes and the cultural dynamics at work in thinking about and reflecting on culture.
The journal consists of three sections: peer-reviewed academic _Articles, _Essays and _Perspectives such as video clips, interviews and visual statements. On_Culture is the result of collaborative processes and emergent structures in the field of e-publishing. On_Culture puts new approaches and emerging topics in the (trans)national study of culture ‘on the line’ and, in so doing, fills the gap____ between ‘on’ and ‘culture’. There are numerous ways of filling the gap, and the plurality of approaches is something for which we strive with each new issue..
The journal offers numerous opportunities to contribute: calls for abstracts released biannually seek contributors of peer reviewed academic articles, while ideas for shorter pieces (textual, visual, graphic…you name it!) pertaining to any and all issue topics are welcome at any time.

URN: urn:nbn:de:hebis:26-opus-120545

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Auflistung On_Culture: The Open Journal for the Study of Culture nach Auflistung nach Fachbereich/Einrichtung "GCSC International Graduate Centre for the Study of Culture"

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    Affective bodies : nonhuman and human agencies in Djuna Barnes's fiction
    (2016) Oulanne, Laura
    Djuna Barnes s work is an intriguing example of the ways fiction makes its readers face the nonhuman as having potential for agency, and shows the entanglements be-tween human and nonhuman. In the stories, objects tend to steal the attention from the main characters and become agents in their own right. At the same time, a lot of Barnes s human characters remain unreadable, and thing-like or animal-like; as such, nonhuman themselves.This article asks why readers become engaged with such texts and how we make sense of them. Drawing on new materialist and posthumanist conceptions of distrib-uted agency and affect, I explore the entangled human and nonhuman agencies that contribute to the action of the narratives and, arguably, to their affective appeal, the two being closely intertwined. To discuss the reading processes the texts invite, I employ embodied cognitive approaches to the process of reading fiction. Based on the analysis of Barnes s novel Nightwood and her less researched short fiction, I propose that reading these texts is largely a process of affective, embodied sense-making that pertains equally to human and nonhuman fictional agents, revealing their mutual dependence and their equal capacity to affect.
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    "Alle Apparate abschalten." Conceiving Love and Technology with Heidegger And Kittler
    (2020) Winkler, Robert A.
    This article explores Friedrich Kittler´s conception of the intersection of love with modern technology and illustrates the theoretical insights gained by considering Spike Jonze´s film Her (2013). The German media theorist Friedrich Kittler (1943 2011) was among the first to study the discursive and material implications of modern technologies. Recent scholarship has stressed Kittler s indebtedness to Martin Heidegger´s philosophy of technology. Accordingly, Kittler thinks through the latter´s contention that it is in and through modern technology that human beings are possibly confronted with truth events, in which the particular time-specific self-unconcealment of being takes place and this unconcealment would not least materialize in the realm of love (Gumbrecht 2013; Kittler 2014; Weber 2018).In this article, I focus on the theoretical examination of Heidegger´s philosophy of technology in general and the concomitant notion of enframing in particular to shed further light on Kittler´s reflection on love that pervades the latter´s entire oeuvre. The article then interrogates whether, and under what circumstances, modern technology might foster said truth events by focusing on: first, love among human beings, second, love among technological beings, and, third, love between human beings and technological beings. Thereby, Spike Jonze´s critically acclaimed science-fiction drama Her, depicting a romantic relationship between a human being and a computer operating system, serves as a reference point in illustrating Kittler´s multifaceted conception of the nexus of love and modern technology.
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    Alterity - a category of practice and analysis : preliminary remarks
    (2017) Bachmann-Medick, Doris
    This article provides introductory remarks on the concept of alterity, which could stimulate the discussion on newsreels/media and their representation of the Other. Starting from the observation that alterity has often been overshadowed by an overestimation of identity, the article differentiates between various fields of alterity : amongst them, real alterity in societal practice, representational alterity in media contexts, and attitudes of othering in movements between alterity or alienness. It critically brings to the fore some underlying frameworks and unspoken assumptions. Finally, the article asks whether the positioning of alterity in 20th-century newsreels has provided first approaches for overcoming its binary corset in the direction of a global circulation of images. Can this perhaps be seen as a step towards turning our attention to a revaluation and new recognition of the Other?
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    Another twelve years: Hungarian newsreels and the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968
    (2017) Barkóczi, Janka
    During almost twelve years after the Soviet regime crushed the Hungarian Revolution, the Warsaw Pact allies invaded Czechoslovakia to put an end to the 1968 Prague Spring and the country s recent reformist trends. The Soviet troops were accompanied by military forces from Hungary, Poland, East Germany, and Bulgaria. Among many other serious consequences, this helped to preserve the long-term power of communist governments in the region.This paper examines the audio-visual and conceptual elements of the official newsreel series published by the Socialist state of the Hungarian People s Republic between May and October 1968, focusing on the representation of the intervention and the depiction of Czechoslovakia as an Eastern Bloc state. The essay argues that the official media of the regime led by János Kádár dealt with this topic in a highly sensitive way because of the possible echoes of the 1956 uprising. In the editorial guidelines of the newsreels, a special ritual manner was introduced to inform and orient the audiences according to the interests of the central propaganda.The techniques and forms of media argumentation are examined based on the collection of Hungarian newsreels of the Hungarian National Film Archive, using both qualitative and quantitative methods.
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    Blogging to Let Go: Life Writing, Maternal Cancer and Death
    (2021) Joutseno, Astrid
    Illness memoirs gained popularity in the last decades of the 20th century. From the early 21st century, illness narratives proliferate online. This article examines illness life writing and near-death narratives by mothers living with stage IV cancer. I read two blogs, Suspicious Country by Nina Riggs and Julie Yip-Williams: My Cancer Fighting Journey by Julie Yip-Williams, and their published memoirs. I draw from life writing studies, motherhood studies, queer death studies, and narrative medicine, analyzing the overlap of mothering and illness in the contexts of life writing and med-icine. Working with Eve Sedgwick s reparative practice, I suggest that while illness, dying, and mothering appear incompatible at first, narrating from this position holds the possibility of sustenance and the potential for redefining how stories of ill and dying mothers are told. The blogs and memoirs are counter-narratives to the healing imperatives and closure demanded by the normative cancer narrative. They flesh out an approach to living with illness and dying, while writing about it. The article illus-trates how illness blogging constructs an entangled story of grief, loss, and joy which becomes an instrument in living with the acute awareness of dying.
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    Bringing Intimacies into the Discussion: On the Relevance of Addressing Intimate Relationships in a Migration Context
    (2020) Röhm, Mona
    Topics such as gender, sexualities, and intimacies, recently experienced processes of instrumentalization and culturalization in European public and political discourses on migration matters. Culturalization is particularly the case when it comes to questions of integration where the cultural Other is contrasted to European values to legitimate political objectives. Romantic love as a marker of living a morally right intimate relationship is in this regard implicitly used to illustrate an incompatibility of Muslim migrants to European ideals of intimacy. Based on conceptual thinking and literature review, this theoretical paper highlights the relevance of addressing intimacies, practices, and intimate ideas within current migration debates in Europe and Austria in particular. It is illustrated that there is a need to link the rising research stream on mobile intimacies to recent Anti-Muslim developments in European discourses. With the concept of belonging, the paper provides a possible approach to understand processes of exclusion and inclusion based on intimate ideas and shows their negotiable character. Further, this paper emphasizes the importance of thinking about Euro-Centric precategorizations and encourages micro-sociological inductive research to grasp the diverse understandings and practices of intimacies.
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    Building New Concepts: Concepts in Indigenous Architecture as Interdisciplinary Enhancement Factor?
    (2018) Tochtermann, Verena
    In contrast to the marginalization of indigenous cultures in architectural analysis, research on indigenous architecture has revealed extraordinary uses of concepts. The difficulty of analyzing the often decategorized buildings not only uncovers the need to improve methods of analysis, but also offers new approaches to analytical methodologies. In particular, the unconventional way of conveying concepts in indigenous architecture offers parameters for rebuilding the limiting boundaries. Following challenges in and research on new methodologies in other disciplines, as represented by Mieke Bal in cultural analysis with the idea of travelling concepts, indigenous architecture promises new perspectives. This contribution therefore presents selected indigenous architectural traditions in Central America, along with their conceptual contents and potential to expand analytic criteria. To stress the diversity of concepts, the first part introduces selected buildings by presenting differences and similarities between architectural principles and intentions. After exposing the limits of typological analysis and the potential of entangled concepts, the article analyzes case studies through terms from Bal s book Travelling Concepts in order to converge the character of indigenous architecture. Finally, the article considers how entangling concepts could generate new perspectives in the architectural discourse as well as in other disciplines.
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    Bypassing the law in a homeless vehicle: Alan Bennett's The Lady in the Van
    (2017) Schniedermann, Wibke
    In The Lady in the Van, British playwright Alan Bennett recounts his two-decade acquaintance with a homeless woman who ended up living in a van in his driveway for 15 years. The story has gone through several incarnations, from Bennett s diary entries (published 1989) to a stage play (1999) and a film adaptation (2015). Subverting and disabling the law and its institutions with the help of a vehicle is a key theme in all these versions of the story. Laws regulating the activities and whereabouts of the unhoused poor have notoriously criminalized poverty and excluded the poor from social and economic participation. Legislatures from the 1970s onwards abandoned former attempts to mitigate the circumstances that lead to a loss of shelter. Lawmakers instead adopted a more punitive neoliberal approach that targets homeless individuals through a plethora of new, highly specified illegalities. This essay discusses how Bennett s narrative and its adaptations expose and question the heteronormative, bourgeois-centric practices of anti-homeless laws via a disruption of dominant tropes of poverty and homelessness. Through these subversions, the texts also grapple with the very practical conflicts around invasion of personal space and the mundane inconveniences that are inevitable results of sharing one s private space with a physically and mentally unstable homeless woman. A specific focus will be on the fluidity of the division between public and private spaces that requires constant negotiation within the social microcosm of The Lady in the Van. The socially alien presence of a homeless woman and her unwieldy vehicle complicates the neighbors private and professional lives and, in the process, rattles the structures dictated by different sections of the law, such as parking restrictions, property laws, income support, and traffic regulations.
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    Caring like a State: Politicizing Love, Touch, and Precarious Lives in the Time of COVID-19
    (2020) D´Aoust, Anne-Marie
    This essay builds on the extraordinary circumstances brought about by the COVID-19 pandemic to tease out some of the ways in which love has been played out politi-cally in relation to migration. In Canada, as elsewhere in the world, the pandemic suddenly rendered visible the oft-invisible care work traditionally performed by women, and now increasingly so by women of color and asylum seekers. Building on queer theorist Sara Ahmed s understanding of immigration policies as a form of con-ditional love, I investigate various processes of (de)politicization that occurred when love and care became politically mobilized in response to the health crisis. I use the love-body-care constellation as working points to tease out some disciplining and transformative possibilities brought about by love. After discussing Lauren Berlant s and bell hooks reflections on love, I then examine how the pandemic unexpectedly made visible, and sometimes challenged, the politics of touch, love, and care between state-sanctioned hierarchized bodies. While so doing, I notably unpack the guardian angel metaphor that was mobilized to speak of those doing care work, and especially those working as continuing care assistants for the elderly overwhelmingly asylum seekers and women of color in Quebec. Running through the discussion lie lingering existential, political questions: who cares (in both the practical and emotional under-standings of the term), and how do we care about each other with what political consequences?
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    "Che tempo, che tempo": geology and environment in Max Frisch's Der Mensch erscheint im Holozän
    (2016) Völker, Oliver
    Critical readings of Frisch s Der Mensch erscheint im Holozän [Man in the Holo-cene] have tended to read its heterogeneous and inter-medial form as a code for the mental disintegration of its protagonist. This paper argues instead that this feature can be seen as a poetological engagement with geological and climatic timescales. Due to its hybrid form, the incorporation of a multiplicity of textual fragments and pictorial representations, the text undermines both conventional definitions of narra-tive and representations of nature. Holozän s non-linear structure establishes an aes-thetic of slowness that ushers in an awareness of the utterly different time schemes of geological and climatic processes. Furthermore, the importance of the material features, such as an interplay between text and image and the disconnected, paratac-tical arrangement of sentences mirrors the novel s focus on natural phenomena. Frisch s narrative establishes a poetics that tries to reach beyond the confinements of an anthropocentric perspective and thereby subverts the borders between culture and environment.
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    A Coordinated Europeanization of the Comics Industry through Distribution: The Politics of the Global Journey of Astérix and Tintin through the Strategic Distribution of their Magazines and Contents in the 1960s
    (2019) Burton, Jessica
    Researchers have usually focused on the Tintin and Astérix series global book diffusion through translation. However, little has been discussed about the distribution policies of the comics magazine format, a key factor in the development of European comics. This paper will consider the continentalization of western European national comics industries via the intra-EEC networking of distribution channels during the 1960s. By facilitating the exchange of comics features in the Franco-Belgian area, publishers such as Casterman, Le Lombard, and Dargaud ensured the rise of the industry and of the products they wanted to disseminate. Contemplating the motivations of publishers this article will delve deeper into the emergence of cooperative and competitive distribution channels among national publishers and between countries. Through the archives of Casterman and primary sources this article intends to contribute to a greater understanding of how the carefully planned distribution network of comics influenced the development of the European industry as a whole.
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    Curating as research
    (2016) Gschrey, Raul
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    Data Troubles: Digital Distribution in the Platform Economy
    (2019) Holt, Jennifer
    This essay examines the distribution of content in the global market and how it has become imbricated with cloud policy through online platforms, remote data storage, and the patchwork of international laws, Terms of Service agreements, and policies currently regulating the 1s and 0s being stored and streamed as digital media. Distributing and protecting digital data as it travels all over the world poses challenges that often defy legal paradigms, national boundaries, and traditional geographies of control. Moreover, the incursion of platforms and other intermediaries into the digital distribution landscape has created challenges for everyone from tech companies and theater owners to regulators and audiences. Looking at some of the industrial, cultural, and political dynamics connecting the governance of data with the shifting realities of digital distribution, I will address the growing data troubles faced by the media industries and relate them to the growing stakes for the futures of culture, information, and citizenship in the platform era.
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    de[re]territorialisation
    (2019) Allen, Marilyn
    de[re]territorialisation adopts a bi-column structure as a method to explore how meaning is distributed between human and digital voices. This bi-discursive paper was generated via a performative gesture where words spoken by a human subject, occupying the left-hand column, were translated by a digital subject to produce text for the right-hand column. de[re]territorialisation explores the potentiality for new narrative flows to be produced through errancy and anomaly, and the capacity for the interplay between the human voice and computational voice recognition systems to deterritorialise and reterritorialise content.
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    Design and modeling as processes of creating culture
    (2016) Trischler, Ronja