Publications

Julia Drube: Zwischen den Krisen. Theologische Denkanstöße zu wichtigen Fragen unserer Zeit. Between the crises. Trier: ruach.jetzt 2024.

Climate change, wars, pandemic. We live in times of crisis. ZWISCHEN DEN KRISEN provides theological food for thought on relevant questions of our time: Does God want people to suffer? Is our democracy in danger? What use are prayers for peace? Or: Can we be happy at all despite crises? The contributors reclassify theological concepts - scientifically sound, yet understandable and comprehensible. Part of the proceeds will be donated to Diakonie and Caritas.
In addition to contributions from various theologians from German-speaking countries, the anthology includes science slams, photographs by Nina Knöll and a foreword by Anna-Nicole Heinrich, President of the Synod of the Protestant Church in Germany.

Andreas Heek/Aurica Jax/Ilse Müllner/Annegret Reese-Schnitker (eds.): Zur Sprache bringen. Biblische Texte und sexualisierte Gewalt in Pastoral und Schule. Grünewald: Ostfildern 2024.

The abuse scandal has been shaking the Catholic Church for years. Sexualized violence in church spaces is not an isolated case, but is supported by a system that combines power, violence and sexuality into a hostile combination.
In this volume, biblical texts are read critically in order to understand the systems of sexualized violence and to search for resources of strength and resilience in the texts. The authors from various fields of church activity (schools, pastoral care, adult education, academia) show examples of how these texts can be used in pastoral care and schools to find a language for sexualized violence that has a liberating character.

Susanne Schuster: Problem Theologin. Die Entwicklung des Theologinnenamtes in der Evangelisch-Lutherischen Kirche in Thüringen und der Evangelischen Kirche der Kirchenprovinz Sachsen. Leipzig: Historische Verlagsanstalt 2024 (= Historisch-theologische Genderforschung 9).

Women have been able to study theology for around a hundred years. The Protestant regional churches were confronted with the existence of "theologically trained women". How should female theologians work in the church? For around fifty years, there was a controversial debate about whether women theologians should be given the pastoral ministry. In most cases, no agreement could be reached; instead, the theologically controversial issues were settled at the legal level. This process is traced for the first time for the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Thuringia and the Evangelical Church of the Church Province of Saxony. The focus is on which groups within the two regional churches and the supra-regional church confederations were involved in this process.

Nikola Roßbach (ed.): Zensur. Handbuch für Wissenschaft und Studium.Baden-Baden: Nomos 2024.

 

Censorship is highly topical. In the context of global crises, eroding democracies and strengthening autocracies and dictatorships, it even seems to be gaining in topicality. A scientific survey of the phenomenon and its research is urgently needed. This handbook is the first to present the state of censorship research from an interdisciplinary, transhistorical and global perspective. Following conceptual and theoretical foundations, it deals with the central actors and fields of action of censorship: Politics, religion, economics, art, media and law. This is followed by an overview of the history of censorship from antiquity to the 21st century. The global dimensions of censorship are developed in contributions on various regions of the world (Africa, Asia, Australia, North, Central and South America, Western and Eastern Europe). Finally, it deals with current controversies and polemics of censorship, censorship narratives and debates (e.g. on "cancel culture" and "identity politics").
The handbook is aimed at specialists in cultural, literary and media studies, history and law who are interested in censorship, as well as advanced students.


With contributions by
Sigrun Abels | Norbert Bachleitner | Jessica Bauer | Lars Distelhorst | Jennifer Ehrhardt | Sascha Feuchert | Johannes Frimmel | Florian Gassner | Juri Häbler | Christine Haug | Thomas Keiderling | Wolfgang Stephan Kissel | Hans J. Lind | Manfred Loimeier | Siegfried Lokatis | Matthias N. Lorenz | Christian Meierhofer | Claus Oberhauser | Stephan Packard | Jörg Requate | Dirk Rohmann | Nikola Roßbach | Roland Seim | Daniel Syrovy | Jan-Henrik Witthaus | Hubert Wolf | Wolfgang Wüst

Amelie Bendheim & Jennifer Pavlik (eds.): Ästhetik des Anderen. Minoritäre Perspektiven in Literatur, Theater und (neuen) Medien. Bielefeld: transcript Verlag 2024.

How are concepts of the Other staged in literature, film or theater? The contributors look at the potential of aesthetic forms and reflect on how these can contribute to making sections of reality visible that often remain unconsidered: Perspectives of the Other. Beyond essentializing attributions, the aim is to reveal hybridities and ambiguities in order to question widespread and sometimes rigid thought patterns. Only in this way can a differentiated world and self-perception emerge that includes the other as a fundamental experience and understands it as an opportunity for irritation and amazement.

You can find more information here.

Andreas Wicke: Fünfzig Jahre voller Samstage – Paul Maars „Sams“-Romane. KinderundJugendmedien.de. Wissenschaftliches Internetportal für Kindermedien und Jugendmedien. 2023.

"Now I can only hope that you enjoy the story of Sams nearly as much as my (unfortunately not entirely objective) children", writes Paul Maar in 1971, when he sends the manuscript for A Week Full of Saturdays to the publisher Friedrich Oetinger. Since then, eleven novels have been published, selling over six million copies. The stories about Mr. Taschenbier and Sams have also been adapted as audio books and radio plays, films and plays, musicals and computer games. The first volume was published in 1973, so Sams will be celebrating its 50th birthday in 2023 - and in that time it has become one of the best-known German-language children's book characters. However, the novels are not only popular with children; there are now also many different approaches to analyzing and interpreting them in German studies. In Fifty Years of Saturdays, Andreas Wicke casts twelve literary-scientific spotlights on Paul Maar's impressive children's literary success project, and excerpts from the original Sams manuscript and the correspondence between author and publisher are also published here, some for the first time.

To the individual chapters:

  1. Origin and reception
  2. On the interpretation of the main characters
  3. Dimensions of fantasy theory
  4. Social-historical and political background
  5. Illustrations
  6. Intertextual play
  7. Sams on the stage
  8. The Sams in radio play, audio book and film
  9. Language, comedy and poetry
  10. Translations
  11. Sams at school
  12. Literature and reality

    Click here for the overview page: https://sams.kinderundjugendmedien.de/

Mark-Oliver Casper / Giuseppe Flavio Artese (eds.): Situated Cognition Research. Methodological Foundations. (Series Studies in Brain and Mind). Cham/Switzerland: Springer 2023 (=Studies in Brain and Mind 23).

The book is dedicated to a progressive part of the philosophy of mind and cognitive science, the so-called "situated cognition" approach. This volume brings together proponents and critics of situated cognition research to assess the subtleties, presuppositions, possibilities, and scope of a methodology for this branch of research. The contributions are divided into three categories. The first category comprises contributions that deal with a methodology from the perspective of epistemology and philosophy of science. It discusses whether explanatory pluralism or monism is to be supported and discusses possible trade-offs between different positions found within situated cognition research. The second category deals with ontological questions concerning the synchronic and diachronic constitution of cognitive phenomena and the localization of cognitive processes. The third category deals with how the theoretical and practical commitments of situated cognition research lead to empirically supported investigations of various phenomena, such as the study of affordances or (chronic) pain. The book represents an overdue first step towards a systematic and positive response to methodological concerns in situated cognition research. Without this and further steps, research into the situated mind could falter. With such steps, situated cognition research can method(olog)ically structure and more promisingly realize its ambitions of having a greater impact on the research practice of cognitive science.

Andra Ioana Horcea-Milcu / Ann-Kathrin Koessler / Adrian Martin / Julian Rode / Thais Moreno Soares: Modes of mobilizing values for sustainability transformation. In: Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability (64).

There is broad agreement on the potential role of values to incite intentional transformative change towards sustainability. However, there is no proposed heuristic on how to mobilize values for sustainability transformation, especially in the context of multilevel decision-making. We aim to fill this gap based on a literature analysis conducted as part of Chapter 5 of the IPBES Values Assessment. We outline four modes of mobilizing values for sustainability transformation: enabling, including, shifting, and reflecting. They differ in terms of the mix of agency and conversely of outside steering needed for each value mobilization mode. We then explore key tensions and insights that emerge through this classification: interdependencies between the modes of mobilizing values, tensions between shifting versus enabling and including values, tensions between which values to shift and which values to enable, and tensions between levels of values intervention (individuals, community, and society).

Nikola Roßbach / Angela Schrott (eds.): Wiederholung und Variation im Gespräch des Mittelalters und der Frühen Neuzeit (Reihe Historische Dialogforschung). Berlin: de Gruyter 2023 (=Historische Dialogforschung 6).

Repetition is a basic cultural activity that occurs in all areas of human life and activity, including communication. This interdisciplinary anthology examines the creativity of repetitive patterns of conversation in the pre-modern era. The contributions from the fields of history, linguistics and literature analyze German, Spanish, French and English textual evidence from the Middle Ages and early modern period and examine the tension between the apparent identity of repetition and its potential to creatively generate differences. The fundamental linguistic and cultural functional contexts of this interrelationship between repetition and variation will be explored: Do repetitive patterns of conversation create community or do they sharpen contrasts? Is repetition an orienting principle of composition or does it have a destabilizing effect on speech constellations through variation? Does it stand for continuity and consolidation of linguistic forms of expression or for the possibility of creative renewal?
This volume explores repetition and variation under the aspects of structure and function, transformation and subversion, rhetoric and aesthetics and deals with didactic dialogues, legal texts, narrative literature and theater.

Angela Schrott / Johanna Wolf / Christine Pflüger (eds.): Textkomplexität und Textverstehen. Studien zur Verständlichkeit von Texten. Berlin, De Gruyter 2023 (=Linguistik – Impulse – Tendenzen 106).

Text comprehension is a dynamic process in which readers enter into a dialog with the text. For disciplines concerned with the comprehension of texts, it has proven extremely fruitful to define text complexity as the totality of dynamic interactions that arise when the linguistic and cultural levels of a text are activated in the process of comprehension. These activations contextualize the text in its linguistic, cultural and epistemic environments and generate a mental model of the text through semantic constructions in the process of reception. If texts are available in multimodal and multicodal formats, the demands on cognitive processing are additionally increased. This multidimensionality of text comprehension requires interdisciplinary research into text complexity and text comprehension. This volume therefore outlines a research design that combines text linguistics and text-based didactics across disciplines. The contributions propose theoretical models for interdisciplinary research into text complexity and text comprehension, provide text-type-specific analysis models and offer suggestions from the practice of language and cultural mediation.

Nikola Roßbach (ed.): Gotthelf Wilhelm Christoph Starke: Gemälde und andere Texte. Hanover: Wehrhahn 2023.

Gotthelf Wilhelm Christoph Starke (1762-1830), a poet and theologian from Anhalt-Bernburg, was considered a classic in his time, but is virtually unknown today. It is worth rediscovering his Gemählde aus dem häuslichen Leben and Erzählungen (1793-1804), which made him famous far beyond the borders of the small central German principality of Anhalt-Bernburg, even being translated into French, English, Dutch, Swedish and Russian. Working first as a teacher and then as a preacher, he was a versatile writer. In addition to stories, he wrote poems and songs, school writings and treatises, sermons, speeches and dramatic scenes.
This volume brings together 45 very different texts by Starke from the years 1785 to 1830: cheerfully humorous and psychologically profound stories, comic verse stories and hymns, sensitive poems in folk song and antique meters, poetic and programmatic sermons, prayers, sayings and scenes. They provide an insight into the diversity of his work and invite you to rediscover it.

Stefanie Kreuzer (ed.): Doris Dörrie. Kassel Grimm-Poetikprofessur 2022. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann 2023.

Doris Dörrie, Grimm Poetics Professor 2022, is one of the best-known and internationally most successful German filmmakers. She also writes screenplays, fictional (narrative) texts, children's books and non-fiction books. Many of her films are relationship comedies that often focus on eccentric (individual) characters and explore social stereotypes and role clichés, male-female relationships and gender issues in a humorous to biting way - including Männer (D 1985), Erleuchtung garantiert (D 1999), Nackt (D 2002), Kirschblüten - Hanami (D 2008), Die Friseuse (D 2010) and Grüsse aus Fukushima (D 2016). The first part of the volume documents the GPP events with film examples, audience discussions and texts from "Die Heldin reist" (2022). Constanze Engelhardt and Lea Vemino report on their experiences at the poetry seminar. The second part features film contributions - one by Stefanie Kreuzer on Frau Dörrie und die Gespenster (D 2022; dir.: Thomas Henke) and one by Jasmin Weber on Freibad (D 2022).

Nikola Roßbach: Gotthelf Wilhelm Christoph Starke (1762–1830). Entdeckung eines großen Unbekannten. Hanover: Wehrhahn 2023.

Gotthelf Wilhelm Christoph Starke (1762-1830), poet and theologian from Anhalt-Bernburg, was considered a classic in his time. His paintings of domestic life and stories made him famous far beyond the borders of his homeland. Nevertheless, as a late Enlightenment philosopher and moralist, he soon fell into the shadows of literary history - in whose cone of light others, a select few, stood and still stand. As a contemporary of Goethe, Schiller and Kant, Starke is a remarkable phenomenon of forgotten greatness. It is worth rediscovering him.
The Bernburg scholar, who experienced the French Revolution from afar and Napoleon's foreign rule from close up, was a passionate classical philologist and translator, an ambitious and courageous teacher. As an Enlightenment theologian, he preached tolerance and advocated the Protestant union of Lutherans and Reformed. With his paintings, he created a narrative oeuvre translated into French, English, Dutch, Swedish and Russian that is unmistakable: as a configuration of concise characters and vivid narrative spaces, of firm values and subtle longings, of superficial morality and subtle humor. However, he not only wrote stories, but also poems and songs, sermons and speeches, school writings and treatises as well as dramatic scenes.
This book attempts to rescue Starke's life and work from the canonical oblivion and to restore his place in literary history.

Jörg Requate: Europa an der Schwelle zur Hochmoderne (1870-1890).Berlin/Boston: de Gruyter Oldenbourg 2023 (=Grundriss der Geschichte 52).

Between 1870 and 1890, Europe changed significantly: nation states consolidated in parallel with growing global interdependencies. Scientific innovations fascinated and frightened at the same time. Economic dynamism led to new forms of social inequality. The political mass market brought participation, but also exclusion and oppression. The ambivalences of high modernity took on unmistakable contours. This volume introduces the research debates and contains a detailed bibliography.

Patrick Eser / Jan-Henrik Witthaus (eds.):Renaissancen des Realismus? Romanistische Beiträge zur Repräsentation sozialer Ungleichheit in Literatur und Film. Berlin/Boston: de Gruyter 2023 (=Mimesis 105).

Representations of social inequalities in literature and film raise the question of who represents whatand how - a problem that arises for narratives, fictions and figurations as well as for the analytical consideration of media representations and public discourses. Even traditional literature, which can always be seen as an archive of social experience, is subject to stylistic, thematic and genre-specific constraints that have been undermined or counteracted from era to era. However, the conditions of access to education and to canonical literary production and reception also reveal social inequalities in modernity and the recent present.

In this context, relevant examples of recent literary and film production prove to be extremely reflective. Not only are questions of canonization or popular culture addressed, but new modes of expression are also tested and genre boundaries explored. Moreover, such examples go beyond the mere depiction or denunciation of poverty; they address the perception and awareness of inequalities on a higher level or reconstruct, even stage, worlds of affect that are linked to social experiences.

Sarah Glim, Anita Körner, Holden Härtl, Ralf Rummer (2023): Early ERP Indices of Gender-Biased Processing Elicited by Generic Masculine Role Nouns and the Feminine-Masculine Pair Form. Brain and Language 242.

In most gender-marked languages, the masculine form is used to refer to male people specifically as well as to people of any gender generically. This dual functionality was shown in behavioral studies to lead to male-biased mental representations. Here, using EEG, we targeted the neurophysiological basis of this bias by investigating whether and how the generic masculine influences the early perceptual and cognitive processing of anaphoric references to men and women. We found that ERP amplitudes in the P200 range were larger for references to women than to men after generic masculine role nouns, while amplitudes in the P300 range were larger for references to men than to women after the feminine-masculine pair form. These findings suggest that the generic masculine primes the perceptual system towards processing men and that neither this form nor the feminine-masculine pair form elicits gender-balanced computations during early processing in the human brain.

Christine Pflüger / Angela Schrott / Johanna Wolf (eds.): Textkomplexität und Textverstehen. Studien zur Verständlichkeit von Texten. Berlin/Boston: de Gruyter 2023 (= Linguistik – Impulse & Tendenzen 106).

Text comprehension is a dynamic process in which readers enter into a dialog with the text. For disciplines concerned with the comprehension of texts, it has proven extremely fruitful to define text complexity as the totality of dynamic interactions that arise when the linguistic and cultural levels of a text are activated in the process of comprehension. These activations contextualize the text in its linguistic, cultural and epistemic environments and generate a mental model of the text through semantic constructions in the process of reception. If texts are available in multimodal and multicodal formats, the demands on cognitive processing are additionally increased. This multidimensionality of text comprehension requires interdisciplinary research into text complexity and text comprehension. This volume therefore outlines a research design that combines text linguistics and text-based didactics across disciplines. The contributions propose theoretical models for interdisciplinary research into text complexity and text comprehension, provide text-type-specific analysis models and offer suggestions from the practice of language and cultural mediation.

Anna-Carina Meywirth: Anarchitext. Andreas Neumeisters Poetik und sein erzähltes Bauen in Könnte Köln sein. Berlin: Neofelis 2023.

Creating space without building it

Although the author and artist Andreas Neumeister (*1959) is one of the best-known German pop writers, this volume is the first to take a comprehensive academic look at his collage-like texts. Under the 'guise' of the novel, Neumeister's publications merge numerous media set pieces into a dense image of contemporary society and expose the political dimension of everyday and/or urban settings.

His texts work with pop-aesthetic methods such as montages, repetitions or lists, which Anna-Carina Meywirth first classifies and then makes fruitful as an analysis scheme for Neumeister's text products. She also looks at the excessive demands placed on readers by Neumeister's dense, 'anarchic' novel form and develops a reception concept that addresses the unconventional text form.

Using Neumeister's last text Könnte Köln sein (2008) as an example, the author examines how he uses his pop-aesthetic poetics to depict cities and architecture. The narrator's profound but fragmentarily staged examination of the buildings he visits during his travels in cities such as Munich, Berlin, Moscow, New York and Los Angeles closely interweaves literary and architectural expertise. Anarchitext shows how Neumeister creates space on a literary level without building it - and follows Gordon Matta-Clark's concept of "anarchy", which describes a connection between anarchy and architecture.

Individual analyses of the metropolises vividly show how each city is given its own face through the lens of the traveling narrator and his view behind the facades of contemporary architecture, which differs from a tourist's perception. (Past) power structures, which remain all too invisible in everyday (tourist) urban life, come to the fore in the perception of the city narrated in this way.

Liliana Gómez: Archive Matter. A Camera in the Laboratory of the Modern. Zurich: diaphanes/Think Art 2023.

Questioning the United Fruit Company archive

The establishment of the United Fruit Company as a global political agent with its banana plantations met with considerable resistance. The Company's resurgent photographic archive is at the center of this book's considerations on the historical and political agency of photography as a field. By exploring a set of practices, institutions, and relationships, as well as the aesthetic and epistemic contexts of the images in botany, archaeology and tropical medicine, this book argues that the overlooked but important photographic archive made the expansion of corporate capitalism into the Caribbean possible. "Since photographic archives tend to suspend meaning and use; within the archive meaning exists in a state that is both residual and potential,"Allan Sekula maintains.

Reading the photographic archive against the grain, this book examines the images from within their "optical unconscious" and via the archive's silences and omissions; as residues they attest to the (in)visibility and cultural implications of the violence of the radical man-made environmental alterations. The archive's powerful imaginaries, envisaged as a chronotope of the eternal transition towards modernity, a promise of modernization itself, have effectively brought the Caribbean into modernity. Yet, the aftermath of the photographs helps scrutinize this modernity and recognize the violence embodied as the foundational act of the archive.

Philip Hogh / Maxi Berger (eds.): Der Vorrang des Objekts. Negative Dialektik heute. Berlin: J.B. Metzler 2023.

The primacy of the object is a philosophical leitmotif in Theodor W. Adorno's work, which he constantly varies anew from the beginning and throughout all areas. Adorno thus indicates a changed attitude of the subject towards the objects of his reflection compared to traditional metaphysics, which aims to be nothing less than a reflection on the state of the philosophy of his time. The contributions in this volume are devoted not only to epistemological considerations, but also to the aesthetic, sociological or anthropological aspects of the primacy of the object, and attempt to rethink this figure in and for the post-metaphysical age. The authors share the view that it is a genuinely critical figure of thought whose power lies in precisely developing the aporias of human world relations without succumbing to the temptation to rid them of their points through false caesuras or simplifications.

Kleffmann, Tom: Der Römerbrief des Paulus. Eine Interpretation in systematisch-theologischer Absicht. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck 2022.

This work differs from the plethora of exegetical commentaries in that it attempts a systematically oriented interpretation. This means that it focuses on discussing the fundamental problems of understanding the Christian faith that the letter to the Romans unfolds. These include the questions: What is sin and to what extent is it universal? What do law, judgment and God's righteousness mean? What does the justification of the sinner by grace
and faith in Christ mean? What does the new life of the justified person in the community of Christ look like and what does it mean for the life of the congregation? A recurring theme is also the understanding of salvation history and the significance of Israel in it.

Mirja Kutzer / Peter Walter (2022): Maria in Geschichte und Gegenwart. Befreiende Perspektiven auf die Mutter Jesu. Freiburg i.Br.: Herder 2022.

A liberated view of Mary

Believers' ideas about Mary are often laden with legends and ideals, expectations of miracles and pious practices. The ambivalences of her stylization as a virginal and humble role model, especially for women, have long been clear. Peter Walter and Mirja Kutzer present a critical, contemporary Mariology. They subject the diverse ideas attached to the figure of the mother of Jesus to a fundamental revision and thus open up a liberated and liberating view of Mary. Inspiring impulses for a contemporary Mariology and an important contribution to the discussion about the role of women in the church.

Nils Lehnert / Ina Schenker / Andreas Wicke (eds.): Gehörte Geschichten. Phänomene des Auditiven. Berlin/Boston: de Gruyter 2022.

Also contributing to the volume from Kassel are Stefan Greif, Jan Sinning and Martin Maurach as well as a former Kassel resident, Florian Rietz.

 

"Auditory texts are booming: radio plays, readings, podcasts, audio guides and electro-acoustic experiments show the diversity of stories heard. The contributions systematize the different objects with regard to the question of genre or model theoretical-methodological approaches, which are exemplified in concrete media-specific analyses. Semiotic approaches stand alongside cultural studies and didactic perspectives."

Christine Ansari / Caroline Frank (eds.): Narrative der Flucht. Medienwissenschaftliche und didaktische Perspektiven. Berlin: Peter Lang 2022.

"The volume is divided into the sections Flight and Theater, Flight and Novels/Narratives, Flight and Fiction/Documentary Film and Flight and Comic/Graphic Novel. It brings together research contributions that can be located at the interface between literature/media studies and literature/media didactics. The focus of the contributions is on the scientific examination of current narratives on the subject of flight and displacement that have appeared in the last 20 years or so and deal in particular with refugee movements to European countries. However, diachronic perspectives are also opened up in order to place contemporary refugee movements in a broader historical framework. While some contributions make explicit suggestions for application in (school) lessons, others provide implicit suggestions for didactization through their scientific approach."

Unai Pascual/ Patricia Balvanera/ Christian B. Anderson et al: Diverse values of nature for sustainability. In: Nature (620), 813-823.

Twenty-five years since foundational publications on valuing ecosystem services for humanwell-being1,2, addressing the global biodiversity crisis3 still implies confronting barriers to incorporating nature's diverse values into decision-making. These barriers include powerful interests supported by current norms and legal rules such as property rights, which determine whose values and which values of nature are acted on. A better understanding of how and why nature is (under)valued is more urgent than ever4. Notwithstanding agreements to incorporate nature's values into actions, including the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF)5 and the UN Sustainable Development Goals6, predominant environmental and development policies still prioritize a subset of values, particularly those linked to markets, and ignore other ways people relate to and benefit from nature7. Arguably, a 'values crisis' underpins the intertwined crises of biodiversity loss and climate change8, pandemic emergence9 and socio-environmental injustices10. On the basis of more than 50,000 scientific publications, policy documents and Indigenous and local knowledge sources, the Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) assessed knowledge on nature's diverse values and valuation methods to gain insights into their role in policymaking and fuller integration intodecisions7,11. Applying this evidence, combinations of values-centered approaches are proposed to improve valuation and address barriers to uptake, ultimately leveraging transformative changes towards more just (that is, fair treatment of people and nature, including inter- and intragenerational equity) and sustainable futures.

Correspondence between the brothers Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm and Johann Martin Lappenberg, Friedrich Lisch and Georg Waitz. Edited by Berthold Friemel, Vinzenz Hoppe, Philip Kraut, Holger Ehrhardt and Roman A. Barton. Stuttgart: Hirzel 2022.

"This volume documents Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm's collaboration with three of the most important historians of their time: Johann Martin Lappenberg, Friedrich Lisch and Georg Waitz. Lappenberg, Hamburg's city archivist, was considered one of the best specialists in the history of the Hanseatic League and the early history of England. Like Waitz, he made major and significant contributions to the collection and publication of medieval European historical sources. Lisch, archivist in Schwerin and Mecklenburg antiquarian, corresponded with the Brothers Grimm mainly about prehistory, archaeology and medieval manuscripts. Later disciplinary differentiation has led to the extent to which the Grimm brothers were also recognized by the historians of the time and integrated into their circle being forgotten, which also applies in political terms. Jacob Grimm's correspondence with Waitz documents a significant change in his political opinion after the experiences of 1848 (both were members of the National Assembly). The hitherto almost unpublished correspondence is made accessible through detailed factual commentaries."

Klumbies, Paul-Gerhard: Neutestamentlische Debatten von 1900 bis zur Gegenwart. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck 2022.

"The New Testament debates of the past 125 years cover three main topics: They discuss the relationship between the ancient worldview and the enlightened worldview of the present; they deal with the relationship between Jesus as a historical personality and the Christology related to him; and they wrestle with the relation between Judaism and Christianity.

In view of the diversity of detailed exegetical research, Paul-Gerhard Klumbies traces the overarching threads of discussion in New Testament scholarship since 1900. His retrospective shows how movements of thought have been further developed under changing historical circumstances and how old themes have been continued in new formulations. The selection of voices is based on the extent to which the contributions have significance for New Testament scholarship from a theological point of view."

Hendrick Heimböckel / Jennifer Pavlik (eds.): Ästhetisches Verstehen und Nichtverstehen. Aktuelle Zugänge in Literatur- und Mediendidaktik. Bielefeld: transcript 2022 (=Literaturdidaktik und literarische Bildung 2).

"Understanding and non-understanding are key concepts in cultural studies and the history of ideas. Depending on the theoretical orientation and epistemological interest, they are mutually exclusive, complementary or build on each other. While approaches to understanding are part of the literary didactic toolkit and research on non-understanding is more strongly located in literary and cultural studies, the many-voiced perspectives in this volume explore whether and to what extent the mediation of understanding and non-understanding is possible in literary and media didactic issues."

 

Köchy, Kristian: Beseelte Tiere. Umwelten und Netzwerke der Tierpsychologie (=Cultural Animal Studies 13). Berlin: J.B. Metzler 2022.

At the beginning of the 20th century, animal psychology was a prominent field of research between biology, psychology and philosophy. It investigates the mental capacities of animals. In essay-like studies on well-known protagonists, the book presents research contexts of animal psychology. The selected positions understand human perception just as gestalt-like as the objects of research, the animals in their environments. The book examines the relationship between philosophy and science, but also outlines a philosophy of animal research that recognizes the interaction between human and animal subjects.

Kreuzer, Stefanie (ed.): Terézia Mora. Grimm-Poetikprofessur 2021. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann 2022.

 

This is the third volume in the Grimm-Poetikprofessur publication series by Königshausen & Neumann, edited by Stefanie Kreuzer.

In addition to her, Caroline Frank and Karin Terborg from Kassel have contributed essays to the volume. In addition, Kassel students have contributed short literary texts in the form of so-called "minute novellas": Christoph Diehl, Sarah Engelhard, Nelli Fust, Vanessa Möller, Flora Saß, Svenja Schmidt, Antonin Steinke, Lea Vemino and Julia Wienczkewicz.

 

"Terézia Mora, Grimm-Poetikprofessor 2021, is a highly honored contemporary author, translator and Büchner Prize winner, not only in the German-speaking world. Experimenting linguistically with a variety of voices, narrative and perceptual perspectives, she breaks with established narrative traditions. To date, she has published two volumes of stories, Seltsame Materie (1999) and Die Liebe unter Aliens (2016), as well as the novel Alle Tage (2004) and the trilogy of novels about the IT specialist Darius Kopp - Der einzige Mann auf dem Kontinent (2009), Das Ungeheuer (2013) and Auf dem Seil (2019). The documentation of the digital GPP events also includes the film script and making-of for the accompanying film SIE SAGEN IMMER TERÉZIA MORA (D 2021; dir.: Thomas Henke). In addition to research contributions by Caroline Frank and Karin Terborg, an exchange of letters between Terézia Mora and the writer Andreas Jungwirth at the time of the coronavirus pandemic is also integrated as an audio piece."

Stederoth, Dirk: Reale Avatare. Zur Versponnenheit des Menschen in der Netzkultur. Berlin: J.B. Metzler 2022.

 

"The rapid technological developments of recent decades give the impression that humanity is about to enter a radically new, digital age. This book shows that much of this is not as new as it first appears. Rather, digitalization is the realization of a dream of universal quantification and metrization that was already germinating in the early modern era - in all areas of society: from the economy, administration, the public sphere and education to politics.

The book poses the question of the extent to which these universal quantifications and metrizations inscribe themselves into people's self-image and thus progressively turn them into images of digital structures (real avatars), as well as identifying factors that oppose such a digital incorporation of people."

 

Sezi, Murat: China Miéville, Terry Pratchett, Kazuo Ishiguro and the Ambivalence of Knowing: An Analytical Model for the Representation of Knowledge in Fantasy Literature. Trier: WVT 2022.

 

The guiding question of this study is how the theme of knowledge is realized in the genre of fantasy. Drawing from the research fields of literature and knowledge, theory of fantasy, narratology, and memory/orality studies, China Miéville, Terry Pratchett, Kazuo Ishiguro and the Ambivalence of Knowing: An Analytical Model for the Representation of Knowledge in Fantasy Literature furthermore investigates how societal struggles over knowledge are negotiated in contemporary fantasy literature, with specific foci on the depiction of technology and risk in China Miéville's The Scar, culture and identity in Terry Pratchett's Nation, and memory and repression in Kazuo Ishiguro's The Buried Giant.

The study finds that while the worldviews the novels espouse with regard to their attitude to knowledge differ considerably, they all contain the general notion that knowledge can be dangerous, in that the discovery or revelation of hitherto secret knowledge threatens the stability of the society itself or the personhood of individuals. Knowledge conflicts are staged by means of contrasting worldviews, which are realized through the novels' character systems. This particularly pertains to the questions of whether it is better to remember or to forget, and whether the old or the new society is to be preferred.

Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim. ed. Daniel Göske, transl. Michael Walter. Munich: Hanser, 2022.

 

Joseph Conrad's most famous novel "Lord Jim": a rousing adventure story, a classic. Prepared in 640 pages, 100 of which are apparatus.

Raoul Schrott discussed the book in the SRF Literature Club:

https://www.srf.ch/play/tv/-/video/-?urn=urn:srf:video:18244b6f-2c63-443e-b21d-ada569ea2186

Stefanie Jakobi/JulianOsthues/JenniferPavlik (eds.): Adoleszenz und Alterität. Aktuelle Perspektiven der interkulturellen Literaturwissenschaft und Literaturdidaktik. Bielefeld: transcript 2022.

The examination of literary adolescence has developed into a productive field of work in literary studies, especially since the turn of the millennium. Research into children's and young adult literature and literary didactics in particular have benefited from this. But how are adolescence and alterity connected? The contributors use exemplary literary and media studies analyses to develop links between adolescence and intercultural and postcolonial issues and address current topics such as flight, migration, racism and (post-)colonial experiences. Didactic considerations in terms of racism-sensitive, intercultural teaching are also brought into focus.

Platini, Vincent: Démons du crime. Les pouvoirs du truand dans l'entre-deux-guerres. Paris: Classiques Garnier 2022.

Throughout the inter-deux-guerres, figures of truands ambiguës appear in literature. Cet ouvrage examine les discours à l'œuvre dans la construction de personnages qui transgressent une norme de vie. The public reappropriates these figures and becomes the creators of new cultural practices.

Holden Härtl: „Syntax des Englischen.“ In: Linguistik im Sprachvergleich. Germanistik – Romanistik – Anglistik. ed. by Ralf Klabunde, Wiltrud Mihatsch & Stefanie Dipper. Berlin: Springer 2022, pp. 155-187.

"This textbook introduces the linguistic description and analysis of German, English, French, Italian and Spanish from a comparative perspective. The characteristic sound properties, inflectional features and word formation processes as well as the sentence structure peculiar to these languages are presented. Separate chapters are devoted to the historical developments of these languages as well as the socially and geographically influenced varieties, resulting in a comprehensive presentation of these five languages, their structures, their use and their historical development. Two chapters on semantics and pragmatics, which explain universal aspects of meaning analysis and the principles of language use respectively, complete the picture. - In a two-color layout with definitions, in-depth explanations and exercises."

Annegret Reese-Schnitker/Daniel Bertram/Dominic Fröhle (eds.): Gespräche im Religionsunterricht. Einblick – Einsichten – Potenziale. Stuttgart: W. Kohlhammer 2022.

"A lot is expected of conversations in religious education. In order to use their potential, they must be evoked; furthermore, it is important to respond to pupils' questions, to bring pupils into exchange with each other and to go through a learning process that enriches everyone. Conceptual questions about conversations are dealt with first: Their importance for lesson dramaturgy and for religious language education, communicative methods, etc. Then results of an extensive video study will be presented: What types of conversations are found in lessons? What contribution do they actually make to (religious) learning? What conclusions can be drawn for better practice?"

Tobias Jammerthal, David Burkhart Janssen, Jonathan Reinert, Susanne Schuster: Methodik der Kirchengeschichte. Ein Lehrbuch. Tübingen 2022.

"Historical work is an essential part of the study of theology. This tried-and-tested textbook provides an introduction to the methodology of church history using the latest scientific knowledge. It offers a basic orientation and, in conjunction with a corresponding website, accompanies studies and teaching from the proseminar to the exam."

Finkbeiner, Claudia (ed.) in collaboration with Hesse, Yvonne: Erzählen und Zuhören: Generationentandems (Eine Dokumentation). Berlin: Edition 7 2021.

"Biographical events and life stories are at the center of this volume, which are remembered, told from a new perspective and reconstructed through conversations between students at the University of Kassel and senior citizens in intergenerational tandems. With their reports from a wide range of geographical, socio-cultural and historical perspectives, contemporary witnesses lend their voices and contribute to the collective memory. The result is a multi-perspective picture of a war and post-war generation that inspires reflection on one's own identity and touches the soul.

This university project finds its structural framework in the ABCs of Cultural Understanding and Communication approach, which has been tried and tested and researched internationally. This has been implemented in various adaptations in university research and teaching as well as in civil society for several years and enables the development of learning potentials to stimulate and further develop cultural understanding processes."

 

The project was funded as part of PRONET (professionalization through networking) at the University of Kassel from 2015 to 2018 with the project P 5 "Interlinking the study workshops" and the project P 9 "Multilingualism potentials in bilingual subject teaching" and as part of PRONET2 from 2019 to 2023 with the project P9 "Multilingualism-related teacher action in bilingual subject teaching: Professionalization of prospective and active teachers", which is funded by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research under the funding code 01JA1805 as part of the joint federal and state "Quality Offensive for Teacher Education" (www.qualitaetsoffensive-lehrerbildung.de). Some students conducted their interviews with senior citizens abroad and were supported with travel grants as part of Shosta. In addition, there is a direct link to project P 5, which will be continued in PRONET2 from 2019 to 2023 with the topic "Interlocking and further development of study workshops into teaching-learning laboratories".

Susanne Bach/Klaus Isele (eds.): Im ewigen Eis der Arktis. Alte Expeditionsberichte und Fotos. Eggingen 2021.

From the foreword:
The intention of this illustrated anthology is to reveal the bizarre beauty, but also the dangers of the Arctic in old expedition reports by polar explorers. The historically most significant reports were written in a period of just under 150 years, roughly from 1830 to 1970; before that, the source material is sparse, after that the reports get out of hand without offering any significant gain in knowledge. In the century and a half mentioned above, discoveries were made in the Arctic and historical achievements were made for which mankind had been waiting a long time: After many hundreds of years of futile searching, the Northwest and Northeast Passages were discovered and navigated. And the North Pole, the subject of many bizarre myths, was finally reached by man. There are just as many myths about who exactly discovered it: Was it the Inuit who lived there? Was it Robert Edwin Peary or Frederick Cook, as they themselves claimed but could not prove? Was it Frederick Cook or Richard Evelyn Byrd, who claimed to have flown over it in his Fokker monoplane?
What is documented, however, is the means by which these bold men approached the northernmost point on earth. Contrary to expectations, it was initially technical aids such as airships, icebreakers or submarines that made the North Pole accessible at all; then, surprisingly, the dog sled. It was not until 1968 that the American Ralph Plaisted was able to claim to be the first man at the North Pole to reach this in every respect extreme destination by crossing the ice.
The all-dominant element in the Arctic is ice in its many forms. Ships froze in place in adverse conditions, were slowly crushed and sank. Quite a few of the reports collected here tell of the horrors of ice and darkness. The long, bitterly cold, pitch-dark winters, in which the crew had little to do and little exercise, took their toll on their nerves and health. Traditionally, expedition reports from the Arctic come mainly from Norwegian, English, Swedish and Danish sources. An editor could easily have compiled five or ten times as many texts. Perhaps even had to do so in order to do justice to the complexity of the subject. However, as this was not possible for reasons of space, representative expedition reports were selected - with a focus on accounts by German, Austrian and Swiss polar explorers for the German-speaking readership.

"Only silence is there and peace and freedom."
-Roald Amundsen

Karin Aguado/Kathrin Siebold (eds.): Unterrichtsinteraktion - Begriffe, Kontexte, Entwicklungen. ZIAF vol. 1 no. 1 (2021). Marburg.

The Zeitschrift für Interaktionsforschung in DaFZ (ZIAF) is aimed at researchers, teachers and students in the field of German as a foreign and second language and offers an international platform for scientific exchange on the topic of "Interaction in foreign and second language acquisition".

The ZIAF is an open access publication that is operated with the support of the Marburg University Library via the Open Journal System (OJS) program. Publication and access to the articles are free of charge. The aim of the editors is to provide all those interested in the topic of "Interaction in the GFL context" with direct and quick access to the latest developments in GFL-related interaction research and thus enable them to participate directly in international scientific exchange.

In addition to conventional articles, innovative publication formats such as texts with digital footnotes (access to additional text/audio/video data, e.g. text analyzed videographed teaching sequences) or video contributions are also welcome.

Pfannkuche, Walter: Die Legitimität von Zwang. Versuch über den Zusammenhang von Recht und Moral. Paderborn: Brill mentis 2021.

The pronounced moral pluralism in modern societies makes it increasingly difficult to prove the legitimacy of the applicable law to all those subject to the law.
This book examines the forms of argumentation that supporters of different morals can use to convince each other of the acceptability of a particular legal framework. This includes agreement on a constitution that guarantees basic protection and establishes procedures for the resolution of normative conflicts. In addition, it becomes clear that a modern law can only be legitimate if it reduces the danger of a tyranny of the majority by offering possibilities for regionalization of law and secession.
With the concluding analysis of tolerance as a virtue adapted to the concept of legitimacy, a central requirement for the citizens of modern states is specified.

Angela Oster/Jan-Henrik Witthaus (eds.): Pandemie und Literatur.. Vienna: Mandelbaum 2021.

The whole world is talking about corona. Literature has always written about pandemics. Boccaccio and Manzoni's descriptions of the plague in The Decameron and The Betrothed are part of Europe's collective memory and have been recommended as lockdown reading. In a collection of essays, these and other texts are re-read in the light of the current Covid-19 crisis. It turns out that these narrative texts are astonishingly topical, as thanks to Manzoni, Heine and co. we are currently seeing a ghostly return of long-known reaction patterns. However, it is also apparent that texts such as Camus' The Plague invite a deeper philosophical reflection that undermines the current European crisis discourse. As an indispensable time-lapse of crises, narrative literature shows us what is really essential for survival: creativity. And the current coronavirus debates in Italy and France - see further essays on this subject - are evidence of reflections of a social or ideological nature that hint at a horizon beyond the mere hypnosis of news and incidences.

Iris Meinen / Nils Lehnert (eds.): Öffnung – Schließung – Übertritte. Körperbilder in der deutschsprachigen Gegenwartsliteratur. Bielefeld: transcript 2021.

Texts in contemporary German-language literature confront recipients with images of the body that are drawn along various forms of exclusion, inclusion and transgression. In this context, authors such as Benjamin von Stuckrad-Barre, Sibylle Berg, Clemens J. Setz, Charlotte Roche, Jonas Lüscher and Daniel Kehlmann should be mentioned. The contributors to this volume show how they design bodies that stand in contrast to the ideal, beautiful body image of the consumer and commodity world of our present and renegotiate the question of body boundaries by means of the operations of 'opening', 'closing' and 'crossing'.

Kreuzer, Stefanie (ed.): FilmZeit - Zeitdimensionen des Films. Marburg: Schüren 2021.

The phenomenon of time is reflected in film and film history in very different and diverse manifestations. In principle, however, a heuristic differentiation can be made between the time aspects of histoire, on the level of action, and the time aspects of discourse, on the level of representation - or in other words: the constellation of film and time refers both to the time in the film and to the time of the film, i.e. film time. The title-giving composite of the present volume on FilmZeit is to be understood as a neologism that encompasses both time dimensions of film. In this way, FilmZeit describes on the one hand all temporality phenomena in film, and on the other hand FilmZeit refers specifically to cinematographic intrinsic time(s).

Contributions by Andreas Becker, Matthias Brütsch, Susanne Kaul, Julia Eckel, Henry Keazor, Thomas Köhler, Lucia Krämer, Stefanie Kreuzer, Markus Kuhn, Susanne Marschall, Jörg Schweinitz, Stefan Tetzlaff, Birk Weiberg, Hans Jürgen Wulff and Sabine Zubarik.

Óscar Loureda/Angela Schrott (eds.): Manual de lingüística del hablar [= Manuals of Romance Linguistics 28. Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter 2021.

"The Manual presents the state of the art of the research about discourse and communication within the Romance languages. It offers introductory articles which explain in a simple and clear way the current research topics of a broad variety of disciplines like Linguistics, Pragmatics, Discourse Analysis, Communication Theory, Text Linguistics and Philology.

The authors of the Manual collectively explain complex theoretical problems concerning communication and discourse, and texts as its products. The contrastive descriptions contain examples in different Romance languages which show the outreach of the theoretical approaches and address a public with interests in a variety of disciplines and languages. Furthermore, it shows possibilities of application and transfer of the research about communication in different professional contexts."

Tom Kleffmann: Kleine Summe der Theologie. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck 2021.

"In this study, Tom Kleffmann develops the basic conceptual context of Christian faith as a theology of communication. He justifies the relevance of speaking of God and discusses the question of what a revelation of God can mean. He also defines the meaning of faith, the reason for faith and the task of theology. He begins the material explanation with the Christian understanding of the untrue life and finds the center in the idea of the revelation of God as man, which establishes the community of God. This is followed by the Christian understanding of the world as an expression of God, which must also reflect the relationship between faith in creation and natural science, as well as the idea of true life and its eternity emanating from the spirit of that community. In the final section, the author attempts to answer the question "who is God" and summarizes it in the idea of the triune life of God."

Fohr, Tanja: „Kunst erleben mit der Applikation Actionbound: Chancen und Grenzen eines digitalen Lernarrangements für DaFZ-Lernende im Kunstmuseum.“ In: Sprache, Kulturen, Identitäten: Umbrüche durch Digitalisierung. [= BFF 16] Edited by Maria Eisenmann and Jeanin Steinbock. Baltmannsweiler: Schneider Verlag Hohengehren 2021.

This article is about art and the language-sensitive and digital support of reception processes at the extracurricular learning venue "Neue Galerie" in Kassel. In her study, the author explores the question of whether and to what extent the smartphone can be used during a museum visit to support the approach to works of art and provide the necessary linguistic means for independent and creative engagement. Based on the presentation and analysis of selected results, the learning opportunities, but also the limitations of a digital learning arrangement with the Actionbound application can be demonstrated.

Fohr, Tanja: Integrierte Sprachbildung im Fach Kunst. Eine Studie zur Sekundarstufe I, Klasse 5 [= DaZ-Forschung 21]. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton 2021.

In this study on "Integrierte Sprachbildung im Fach Kunst. Eine Studie zur Sekundarstufe I, Klasse 5.", the author explores the question of what contribution the subject of art can and should make to the development of visual literacy and the associated language skills of pupils in relation to the current discussion about language education and language-sensitive subject teaching.
It discusses how selected current language education approaches can be reconciled with existing art education requirements. The basis for the qualitative teaching research on integrated language education in art lessons is a pilot and main study spanning two school years, which focuses on fifth graders aged 10 to 12 with language support needs.

Jan Knobloch/Antonio Lucci (eds.): Gegen das Leben, gegen die Welt, gegen mich selbst. Figuren der Negativität. Heidelberg: Winter 2021.

The volume, which goes back to a conference at the IFK Vienna, brings together contributions from philosophy, literary studies, religious studies and cultural studies in order to systematically investigate the question of negativity from a conceptual and factual historical perspective. What is new here is the approach of deliberately pluralizing the concept of negativity: on the one hand by detaching it from its attachment to (post-)Hegelian readings, and on the other hand by concretizing it. This means placing negativity in its discursive, media and cultural contexts, illustrating it with examples and relating theoretical positions to cultural artifacts. The focus is not only on texts, but also on figures, narratives, images and practices in which negativity manifests itself.

Stefan Greif/Turgay Kurultay/Nikola Roßbach (eds.):  Kein Ende des Gerüchts. Antisemitismus in Kultur und Literatur des 20. und 21. Jahrhunderts  [= Intervalle 15]. Kassel: university press 2020.

As the recent attacks on Jewish institutions and individuals show, the unspeakable 'rumor about the Jews', who supposedly want to conjure up the downfall of the West and seize world domination, is still rampant in Germany and even intensifying. Such hate messages are spread by means of right-wing conspiracy theories, among other things, which fuel a dull rage at the supposedly dark machinations of democratic states, while at the same time reactivating a communication of fear that calls for authoritarian leadership. Based on the thesis that the current hatred of Jews not only perpetuates age-old prejudices, but also aggressively attempts to refute the enlightened responses to anti-Semitic stereotypes, the essays collected here from literary studies, philosophy and history are dedicated to the question of how the defamation of 'Jewishness' was able to develop historically, how anti-Semitic persecution was attested to in literature and what arguments are used to conduct the new debates about what can be said in the context of anti-Semitism. The spectrum of material examined ranges from the infamous Protocols of the Elders of Zion to the literary shaping of contemporary testimony in the face of the Shoah and to anti-Semitism and criticism of anti-Semitism in contemporary culture, media and music.

 

„Literatur aus Kassel für Kassel“ is a home project. We give away reading time - without technical studio conditions. For browsing, we also recommend the Kleine Kasseler Literatur-Lexikon. Autorinnen und Autoren (Wehrhahn Verlag Hannover, 2018) with over 450 articles.

The project "Literature from Kassel for Kassel: online readings" is a collaboration between the University of Kassel (Prof. Dr. Nikola Roßbach) and Kassel City Library.

Reading for you:Jessica Bauer, Friedrich Block, Thomas Bündgen, Raphael Döhn, Holger Ehrhardt, Andreas Gebhardt, Stefan Greif, Hans Grote, Matthias Henke, Michael Kelbling, Maria Knissel, Sabine Köttelwesch, Dietfrid Krause-Vilmar, Stefanie Kreuzer, Urania Milevski, Hartmut Müller, Ilse Müllner, Sophia Nordheim, Thorwald Proll, Nikola Roßbach, Eva Schulz-Jander, Andreas Wicke, Marlis Wilde-Stockmeyer and Kerstin Wolff.

We would like to thank all contributors for their commitment. Special thanks go to Andreas Wicke not only for reading but also for his technical support. And finally, some things would not have been possible without the help of our colleague and IT expert Oliver Schuster.

The authors granted permission for the digital readings of contemporary literature and permitted publication on the City of Kassel's website.

For the current texts by Maria Knissel, Thorwald Proll and Friedrich Block, the exact sources are given - with an invitation to read more.

Martin Böhnert: Methodologische Signaturen. Ein philosophischer Versuch zur Systematisierung der empirischen Erforschung des Geistes von Tieren. Paderborn: mentis 2020.

How do we know if animals can think? Extending the previous debate on human-animal relations, this volume analyzes the conditions and contexts of the scientific acquisition of our knowledge of animals.
Current discussions within animal philosophy revolve around the three central questions of whether we can attribute a mind to animals, what the difference between humans and animals is, and how humans should behave towards animals. Our knowledge about animals is mostly taken from empirical research. The methods, theories and contexts of empirical research have not yet been addressed. This volume aims to close this gap with the central concept of methodological signatures, which allows the systematic comparison of research approaches on the basis of their fundamental methodological, ontological and epistemological assumptions.

Dagobert Höllein/Nils Lehnert/Felix Woitkowski (eds.): Rap – Text – Analyse. Deutschsprachiger Rap seit 2000. 20 Einzeltextanalysen. Bielefeld: transcript 2020.

Rap has recently hit the headlines in a negative light. Anti-Semitism, sexism and homophobia have dominated media coverage for good reason, as the results of this research show. However, this does not exhaustively cover German-language rap. The music genre has long since ceased to be a niche phenomenon; instead, the rap scene is characterized by diverse forms, styles and attitudes. This anthology is dedicated to German-language rap since 2000 and focuses for the first time on individual text analyses that approach this musical genre and its artists from multiple perspectives and disciplines.

The edited anthology by Dagobert Höllein, Nils Lehnert and Felix Woitkowski was presented on 27.02.2020 on Deutschlandfunk Kultur.