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"Civil society and civic engagement have increasingly become topics of discussion at the national and international level. The editors of this volume ask, does the concept of 'civil society' include gender equality and gender justice? Or, to frame the question differently, is civil society a feminist concept? Conversely, does feminism need the concept of civil society? This important volume offers both a revised gendered history of civil society and a program for making it more egalitarian in the future. An interdisciplinary group of internationally known authors investigates the relationship between public and private in the discourses and practices of civil societies; the significance of the family for the project of civil society; the relation between civil society, the state, and different forms of citizenship; and the complex connection between civil society, gendered forms of protest and nongovernmental movements. While often critical of historical instantiations of civil society, all the authors nonetheless take seriously the potential inherent in civil society, particularly as it comes to influence global politics. They demand, however, an expansion of both the concept and project of civil society in order to make its political opportunities available to all."--Back cover

This collection of essays explores the idea of the efficacy, limitations and future of Cultural Studies as a theoretical and methodological approach to the analysis of recent crisis phenomena in Europe. The volume spans a wide range of topics, including: theoretical and critical approaches to the stability of the EU as a political and economic union of its 28 member states; the (not only) recent flow of refugees into Europe and other countries, and the refugee tragedies off the coast of Lampedusa; the resurgence of far-right, anti-Islam political groups throughout Europe; the negotiation of affect and crisis phenomena in literary texts; and the question of media and refugees. These and other pressing issues are addressed and discussed from a variety of historical, political, pedagogical, gender, media and aesthetic perspectives, as encompassed in Cultural Studies and Postcolonial Literatures.