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Media narratives inform our ideas of the future - and Games are currently making a significant contribution to this medial reservoir. On the one hand, Games demonstrate a particular propensity for fantastic and futuristic scenarios. On the other hand, they often serve as an experimental field for the latest media technologies. However, while dystopias are part of the standard gaming repertoire, Games feature utopias much less frequently. Why?This anthology examines playful utopias from two perspectives. It investigates utopias in digital Games as well as utopias of the digital game; that is, the role of ludic elements in scenarios of the future.

andererseits seeks to provide a forum for unique and exciting research and reflections on topics related to the German-speaking world and the field of German Studies. Works presented in the publication come from a wide variety of genres including book reviews, poetry, essays, editorials, forum discussions, academic notes, lectures, and traditional peer-reviewed academic articles. In addition, contributions by journalists, librarians, archivists, and other commentators interested in German Studies broadly conceived. By publishing such a diverse array of material, we hope to demonstrate the extraordinary value of the humanities in general, and German Studies in particular, on a variety of intellectual and cultural levels.Contributors to this volume: Yvonne Delhey, Andreas Erb, Bernhard Fischer, Rüdiger Görner, Spencer Hawkins, Steffen Kaup, Selim Özdogan, Hugh Ridley, Gertrud Maria Rösch, Peter Stamm, Wim Wenders, and others.

This book explores the potential of the Internet for enabling new and flexible political participation modes. It meticulously illustrates how the Internet is responsible for citizens' participation practices from being general, high-threshold, temporally constricted, and dependent on physical presence to being topic-centered, low-threshold, temporally discontinuous, and independent from physical presence. With its ethnographic focus on Icelandic and German online participation tools Betri Reykjavík and LiquidFriesland, the book offers plentiful advice for citizens, programmers, politicians, and administrations alike on how to get the most out of online participation formats.

Building blocks are practical materials for playing, learning and working at kindergartens, schools, universities and companies. How did building blocks, which were primarily established as toys for children, come to be practical materials used in professional and educational settings?This study explores the historical implications of particular sets of building blocks in the interdisciplinary consolidation and transformation of techniques, materials, discourses and subjects. By mapping the genealogy of building blocks from Fröbel's »gifts« to their current systematization as interlocked blocks, this study proposes that building blocks should be understood not exclusively as concrete objects, but as the materiality of a combinatorial program, which delineates a modular system characterized by a code of composition, a context-neutrality and a semantic component.

This book deals with the values of medicinal plants and associated knowledge(s) in the field of bioprospecting in post-apartheid South Africa. Bioprospecting, the use of genetic or biological resources for commercial purposes, is a profit-oriented enterprise facing new challenges with the rise of human rights and biodiversity politics. This new situation has led to claims for political leverage made by indigenous communities, as well as to claims for national and local cultural identity and heritage. The picture presented here contributes to the widely discussed yet so far unresolved question of how to appropriately share benefits, and how to protect indigenous knowledge in this field.

Gabriela Stoicea examines how the incidence and role of physical descriptions in German novels changed between 1771 and 1929 in response to developments in the study of the human face and body. As well as engaging the tools and methods of literary analysis, the study uses a cultural studies approach to offer a constellation of ideas and polemics surrounding the readability of the human body. By including discussions from the medical sciences, epistemology, and aesthetics, the book draws out the multi-faceted permutations of corporeal legibility, as well as its relevance for the development of the novel and for facilitating inter-disciplinary dialogue.

Monarchies are facing public demands for modernization and adapting to changing societal, political, and media environments. This book proposes new directions in the research of contemporary European monarchies and offers innovative perspectives on trans/national royal public interactions and (semi-)fictional representations of monarchs. Its case studies address historic and recent developments, including newly invented royal traditions, media depictions, Meghan Markle's impact on the image of the British monarchy, and the royal family's role in Brexit negotiations. With its interdisciplinary analyses, the book reflects current academic, societal, and popular cultural interest in royalty.

Borders are much more than territorial markers on a map. In recent years, borders have gained more and more scholarly attention, and the field of border studies has become increasingly diversified when it comes to different trends and analytical approaches. This edited collection reflects these latest developments and proposes an understanding of borders as effects and generators of complex formations. The contributors discuss such bordertextures from various theoretical and conceptual viewpoints, supported by empirical examples. By introducing the concept of bordertextures and the approach of bordertexturing, this edited collection opens up new and fine-tuned perspectives on borders and borderlands.

How are art, architecture, critical research, and activism entangled with the politics of urban transformation under the regimes of modern capitalist colonialism and contemporary neoliberalism? Accelerated developments heighten classed, gendered, and radicalized urban injustices.Addressing these issues, Urban Curating is concerned with the interconnectedness of economy, ecology, and labor in urban history as well as practices of remembrance. Drawing on the author's work as an urban curator in cities such as Hong Kong, Vancouver, and Vienna, the focus is on caring repair, refusal, and resistance - fighting the spatialization of injustice by building feminist solidarities and emancipatory imaginaries.

When queer Jewish people migrated from Central Europe to the Middle East in the first half of the 20th century, they contributed to the creation of a new queer culture and community in Palestine. This volume offers the first collection of studies on queer Jewish lives between Central Europe and Mandatory Palestine. While the first section of the book presents queer geographies, including Germany, Austria, Poland and Palestine, the second section introduces queer biographies between Europe and Palestine including the sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld (1868-1935), the writer Hugo Marcus (1880-1966), and the artist Annie Neumann (1906-1955).

Lesbian Web Series narrate female-centred stories, strengthen identity construction, and generate transnational communities beyond cultural barriers. Julia Obermayr explores the first definition of a new format, the first representations of lesbian women in US-American, Canadian, and Spanish web series from 2007 and onward, as well as their reciprocal effects regarding identity construction and community building of their transnational, mainly female, audience.The analyzed corpus comprises scenes taken from Venice the Series (2009) and its backstory »Otalia« on the soap opera Guiding Light (1952-2009), Seeking Simone (2009), Out With Dad (2010), Féminin/ Féminin (2014), Chica Busca Chica (2007) and its cinematic sequel De Chica En Chica (2015), as well as Notas Aparte (2016).

Aesthetic disgust is a key component of most classic works of drama because it has much more potential than to simply shock the audience. This first extensive study on dramatic disgust places this sensation among pity and fear as one of the core emotions that can achieve katharsis in drama. The book sets out in antiquity and traces the history of dramatic disgust through Kant, Freud, and Kristeva to Sarah Kane's in-yer-face theatre. It establishes a framework to analyze forms and functions of disgust in drama by investigating its different cognates (miasma, abjection, etc.). Providing a concise argument against critics who have discredited aesthetic disgust as juvenile attention-grabbing, Sarah J. Ablett explains how this repulsive emotion allows theatre to dig deeper into what it means to be human.

In the late 18th and early 19th centuries, the American theater emerged as a crucial cultural space for debates around gender stereotypes, gendered conduct, sexual desire, the politics of intimacy and domesticity, female authorship, as well as the complex intersections of gender and other markers of cultural difference, such as race, ethnicity, socioeconomic class, age, or nation. This collection explores the role of gender in the formation of American theatrical culture in this period. It features essays on well-known early American dramatists such as Susanna Rowson or Judith Sargent Murray, but also sheds light on anonymous authors and more obscure theatrical practices.

Which everyday practices allowed women to sustain and fulfill individuality and agency under dictatorial rule? This book adds to a rich scholarship on the history of late Francoism and the transition to democracy in Modern Spain through the lens of oral history and life writing. Aurora Morcillo tells the stories of anonymous individuals from both student and working class backgrounds - crucial sites of active resistance against the dictatorship at the time - and provides an interdisciplinary feminist analysis of the inevitable modernization of Spain in the 1960s and 1970s. This study uncovers a Deleuzian rendition of historical unfolding/becoming rather than simply being a collection of oral histories: a historical narration which proposes to be a creative historical ontology.