Suchergebnisse

"More than thirty years after German reunification, Life Stories from the German Democratic Republic addresses how life in the GDR is remembered, thereby enriching and complexifying the narratives of East German life found in public history, museums, tourist venues, film, media and popular fiction. The frequent stress on material lack, social restrictions and the repressive state is expanded and reconfigured by interviewees who variously both challenge and confirm widespread assumptions about what it meant to live in the GDR. Aimed at a wide readership, this book gives English-speaking readers access to varied and detailed accounts of everyday life, individual engagement with state institutions and different views of GDR politics, society and culture"--

Looks at how different cultural narratives and practices work to constitute identity for individuals and groups in multi-ethnic, 'postcolonial' societies. This book is useful for students in cultural studies, sociology of culture, literary studies, history, race and ethnicity studies, media and film studies, and gender studies

Clemence Dane (1888-1965) was one of the newly enfranchised women eligible to vote for the first time under the suffrage act of 1918. An articulate novelist, actress and sculptor, her writings and speeches about women for magazines and the radio give us an insight into some of the complexities that faced women as they formed opinions on topical issues in the political sphere. In 1926 she collected those articles in a volume putting, as she phrased it, The Women's Side. In this chapter I look at Dane's explorations of The Women Question in her 1926 collection The Women's Side, and in her own novel Legend (1919) her plays Wild Decembers (1932) about the Brontë family and Bill of Divorcement (1921) which can be read as a reflection on the story of Jane Eyre. Her imaginative talent was stimulated by the gaps in biography where the historian had to give ground to the creative artist and she drew on the licence of the actress in the interpretative performance of a personal story to create a narrative of women's genius. Dane's adopts the popular card game "Speculation" from Austen's Mansfield Park as a trope to explore the tensions and stresses for women as they left the familiar and expected conventions of Victorian womanhood and took up an uncertain and contested new role in society.

Tough Mudder, a market-leading event in the burgeoning practice and industry of mud running, is a 21 km "military-style" obstacle course with a curiously collaborative ethic. Teams of runners traverse the course in the name of fun, fitness, bravado, and much more besides, galvanized around Tough Mudder's distinctive ethos of togetherness. This essay sets out to reassemble the "camaraderie" for which Tough Mudder is renowned as an element and outcome of material, corporeal, and symbolic enactments, and, with actor-network theory as a guiding sensibility, recasts it as a profoundly shared endeavor, one in which a whole host of actors, human and otherwise, make dramatic and subtle contributions.

Traitorous cowards or courageous heroes? Military resisters elicit fervent responses not simply because they polarize perspectives on war, nation, and citizenship, but because they encounter and embody a moral quandary which marks all conflict: The fear of harming another when one's own life, and sense of self, is endangered. With recourse to Judith Butler's meditations on the precarity of life and the finitude of liberal humanist ontologies, this article contemplates the ethical imperative of eschewing both the valorization and demonization of individual resisters who found perpetrating war too much to bear. My focus lies in 21st-century U.S. military resisters who journey to Canada in search of refuge, residency, and "peace of mind." While their experiences are imbued with ethical promise for amplifying oppositional political perspectives on war, this promise is inhibited by the legal and political apparatuses in which they are constituted, through which they are individuated, and to which they remain bound.

This article explores the experiences of acculturation recounted by migrant youth footballers following their migrations to Premier League academies. Whereas problems of acculturation have been documented in research exploring the migratory experiences of senior professional athletes, the framing of migrant youth footballers as a problematic collective in academic, public and media discourse has tended to deflect from consideration of the individual athletes in transition. By drawing on a series of interviews with migrant youth players from a range of cultural and ethnic backgrounds and their 'acculturating groups' ( Ward et al., 2001 ) of academy staff including Directors, Managers, Coaches and Education and Welfare Officers, I aim to explore the prevalent issues of acculturation associated with being at once a migrant, an adolescent, and an elite athlete, adjusting to the demands of an intensive physical training programme whilst encountering and negotiating an unfamiliar social and cultural environment. In conceptualizing the process of acculturation as the experiential facet of the glocalization thesis, the article reflects on the interplay between the distinct political economy within which youth players migrate and their individual experiences of acculturation.