Suchergebnisse

Cover -- Title Page -- Copyright Page -- Table of Contents -- List of Figures -- Foreword -- Preface -- Acknowledgments -- List of Abbreviations -- Introduction -- Chapter 1: Germany and the European Union: The Most European of Europeans? -- Chapter 2: German Citizenship: From Ethnic to Civic Nation? -- Chapter 3: "German Virtues" and "Bad Nationalism": Football Reporting and National Identity -- Chapter 4: The Ethno-Cultural Nation in the Kitchen: Food and National Identity -- Conclusion -- Endnotes -- References -- Index.

Based on qualitative interviews conducted with local guilds, charities and community groups in England, this article highlights the public service older women provide for their communities by volunteering their labour to local textile craft groups. Driven by an ethics of care, they make up for a lack of services formerly provided by the welfare state, such as public transport and mental health support. We mobilise existing literature on 'quiet activism' to argue that their community work constitutes a form of political activism, albeit one that stops short of overtly challenging the political system. While highlighting the ways in which older women quietly go about helping their communities, we argue that by being 'louder' about the public service they provide, they could help disrupt the narrative of a system that has failed their communities and exploits their free labour.

This article explores the discursive construction of environmental citizenship in German and British public service television. We ask whether television discourse describes environmental protection as a matter of citizen duties or a question of individual rights, and we explore the
extent to which the role of a global civil society is highlighted. While the themes of responsibility and civil society have a clear presence in our sample, they often appear in conjunction with the dominant themes of the free market and the autonomy of consumers. Placing television discourse
in its sociopolitical context, the main argument of this article is that television discourse sustains a liberal approach to environmental politics, currently favoured by governments in Germany and Britain.

Based on focus groups and interviews with first-time voters in the UK, this study reflects critically on the role of popular culture as a resource of political engagement. Unlike previous studies, it looks at a wide range of popular culture and suggests that entertainment television, video games and popular music provide young citizens with some of the resources they need actively to engage in the public sphere. Young citizens struggle to see the relevance of formal politics in their everyday lives, yet they see themselves as part of a political community and connect with its concerns. They use media texts to learn about social and political issues and to explore the moral values that underpin the society in which they live. While some critics have suggested that the media disconnect citizens from their communities, the findings of this study suggest that media texts are a resource which prepares young people for their engagement in the public sphere.

While the importance of news media to politics is widely acknowledged, it is only relatively recently that entertainment media have received similar recognition. There is now a substantial body of research on the impact of popular culture on various aspects of the political process, from political knowledge to political engagement. This article is intended as a further contribution to this literature. It reports on a study into how young people in the UK use forms of media entertainment (television, music and video games) to reflect upon the wider world of politics and their role within it. It reveals that, while popular culture does act as a source of political knowledge and does serve to motivate feelings about the conduct of politics, it does not do so straightforwardly, but rather by way of the aesthetic and other judgements made by young people of the 'authenticity' and 'realism' of the sources of their cultural pleasure. This has policy implications for the attempt to re-engage young people in politics by means of popular culture and 'celebrity politics'. Adapted from the source document.