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Taking media scholar Henry Jenkins’s concept of ‘convergence culture’ and the related notions of ‘participatory culture’ and ‘transmedia storytelling’ as points of departure, the essays compiled in the present volume provide terminological clarification, offer exemplary case studies, and discuss the broader implications of such developments for the humanities. Most of the contributions were originally presented at the transatlantic conference Convergence Culture Reconsidered organized by the editors at the Georg-August-Universität Göttingen, Germany, in October 2013. Applying perspectives as diverse as literary, cultural, and media studies, digital humanities, translation studies, art history, musicology, and ecology, they assemble a stimulating wealth of interdisciplinary and innovative approaches that will appeal to students as well as experts in any of these research areas.
This volume maps the international academic debate on secularity. It places seminal contributions from within ‘Western’ academia alongside less well-known texts from various parts of the world; in several cases this is the first time that they have been translated into English. The volume demonstrates that the academic debate on secularity was and is a global debate, with contributions from many regions. The collected texts relate to each other either directly or indirectly by referring to similar arguments – whether reinforcing or criticising them – and thus create a discourse. When speaking of global secularity, we therefore do not insinuate a uniform ‘world secularity’ resulti...
This comparative study examines the transmission of religion in families in Germany, Italy, Hungary, Finland and Canada. The authors rely on the widely shared argument that religious change can primarily be understood as an intergenerational process. Based on a mixed-methods design, the book investigates the question of how, when exactly and under what conditions the following generations become less religious than the previous ones. From the perspective of familial and historical generations, the authors examine the significance of (religious) socialization for the transmission of (non-)religious worldviews, affiliation, practice, and identity. According to a central finding, religious change takes place primarily in the phase of adolescence against the background of the respective social context.
Drawing on the sociology of Max Weber, Barbara Thériault investigates today's relations toward difference within German police forces. Accompanying and interviewing police officers whose job it is to contribute to the acknowledgement of difference, the sociologist outlines three ideal types of actors – an empathetic, a principled, and an opportunist one – and the motives underlying their actions. A fourth type, the specialist, is conspicuously absent. Why is that so? Solving this enigma helps depicting the relations to difference within police forces: it points to a specific »spirit« of diversity and a singular way to apprehend the individual in Germany.
Die Pluralisierung des Religiösen, die ein besonders prägnantes Kennzeichen gegenwärtig stattfindender gesellschaftlicher Wandlungsprozesse ist, stellt eine enorme Herausforderung für viele Akteure in Kirche, Zivilgesellschaft, Wirtschaft und Politik dar. Das Ziel dieses Buches ist es, den Begriff der religiösen Pluralisierung zu schärfen, indem er am Beispiel konkreter religiöser Phänomene und Praktiken entfaltet wird. Der Band umfasst Beiträge zu zwölf Themenfeldern, die für die praktisch-theologischen Diskurse in Südafrika und in Deutschland prägend und gegenwärtig von hoher Relevanz sind (Armut und Reichtum, Bildung, Schwellenriten und Passagen, Gesundheit, Religiöse Verge...
Religious Diversity, Secularism and Nationhood -- Theorizing Religious Diversity and Secularism -- Contesting Religious Diversity and Secularism -- Spatializing Religious Diversity: Urban Administration, Infrastructure and Emplacement -- The Limits of Religious Diversity: Regulating Full-Face Coverings -- Making Claims to Religion as Culture: The Rise of Heritage Religion.
This book explores the profound transformations that prisons and offender rehabilitation programmes in Eastern Germany have undergone with respect to religion. Drawing on participant observation and interviews of inmates, ex-prisoners, chaplains and prison visitors, this book connects the institutional to individual: focusing on the religious changes individuals experience when they are imprisoned and released. Including comparative studies from Italy and Switzerland, Becci reveals that despite diverse local, historical, denominational, political and social contexts the transformation patterns of individuals' relationship to religion, and their use of religious resources, are strongly shaped by the total character of prisons. Becci also explores the difficulties faced by released people in keeping their religious life alive under the harsh conditions of social stigma in a highly secular outside society.
The most common explanations view either the socialist past or larger scale processes of modernization to be the cause of eastern German secularization. The volume attempts to discover historically variable reconfigurations of religion and the secular at the local level.
This collection of essays focuses on the way blurred boundaries are represented in pre-modern texts and visual art and how they were received and perceived by their audiences: readers, listeners, and viewers. According to the current understanding that opposing cognitive categories that are so common in modern thinking do not apply to pre-modern mentalities, we argue that individuals in medieval and pre-modern societies did not necessarily consider sacred and secular, male and female, real and fictional, and opposing emotions as absolute dichotomies. The contributors to the present collection examine a wide range of cultural artifacts – literary texts, wall paintings, sculptures, jewelry, ...
This book describes how Christian communities in South Africa have responded to HIV/AIDS and how these responses have affected the lives HIV-positive people, youth and broader communities. Drawing on Foucault and the sociology of knowledge, it explains how religion became influential in reshaping ideas about sexuality, medicine and modernity.