Archives par mot-clé : cultural history

Parution – Cultural History for a Changing World (dir. Jochen Hung et Willemjin Ruberg)

Cultural History for a Changing World

Sous la direction de Jochen Hung et Willemjin Ruberg

Bloomsbury

2026

Présentation

This volume explores the changing field of cultural history to map out its new developments and future directions, covering major themes such as environment, (de)colonization, digitization, knowledge, heritage and embodied identity. After the rise of the ‘new cultural history’ in the 1980s, the field of cultural history is once again undergoing a time of change. This collection discusses and explains these changes, highlighting new themes from disability and race to technology and animals, and shows how the field has become increasingly entangled with other disciplines such as gender studies, science and technology studies, and critical heritage studies. Featuring an international team of experts working in cultural history today, Cultural History for a Changing World is an indispensable guide to the field.

Each chapter historicizes and problematizes their topics, gives an overview of the different reactions within the field, and offers an outlook about future avenues and opportunities of research the respective topic offers. Introducing relevant case studies drawn from their own research, the authors show how these new approaches can work in practice. Also highlighting the opportunities offered by new approaches such as decolonial, environmental and digital methodologies, Cultural History for a Changing World sets out how this field has been adapting to, and sometimes instigating, shifts in society, and demonstrates how global cultural, social, political and economic changes are affecting the theories, methods and practices of cultural historians.

Parution – The Politics of Culture (Christian Jacobs)

The Politics of Culture

Far-right, Feminist, and “Immigrant” Movements in France, ca. 1965 to 1985

Christian Jacobs

De Gruyter Brill

2026

Présentation

The book analyzes how three political movements used the concept of culture in France between the late 1960s and the early 1980s: the women’s liberation movement, “immigrant” movements, and a far-right movement around the group GRECE. What did culture mean to the movements and when and why did they use the concept? The book discusses intellectual labor beyond well-known thinkers in both the practice and the theory of political activists. It helps readers understand the high-brow debates around the culture wars and the cultural turn as part of a larger societal trend that surpasses the academic field. It offers historical explanations beyond academia because of its focus on primary sources from quotidian political struggles. Two contexts shaped concepts of culture in society more broadly. First, decolonization as an intellectual and political development redefined political key concepts such as culture. Second, change through culture replaced earlier visions in which the state was seen as the central instrument for political change. Methodologically, the book treats political movements as production sites of concepts, thereby, connecting intellectual history with political and social history.

 

Nineteenth-Century Transmedia Practices

Type: Call for Papers
Date: January 30, 2020 to February 1, 2020
Subject Fields: Popular Culture Studies, Journalism and Media Studies, Literature, Cultural History / Studies, Art, Art History & Visual Studies
 

CFP, International Symposium: “Nineteenth-Century Transmedia Practices”

30th January – 1st February 2020

University of Vienna, Austria

Organizers: Univ.-Prof. Dr. Monika Pietrzak-Franger (University of Vienna, Austria) and Prof. Dr. Christina Meyer (FU Berlin, Germany)

The notion that media content can proliferate and that consumption practices converge has given rise to a host of fascinating research projects in and outside of academia in the past years. Next to pedagogy, literary and cultural studies, such disciplines as economics, film and media studies along with legal studies have begun to trace, analyze and interpret various patterns and practices of transmediality. Simultaneously, numerous (globally operating) transmedia consulting companies began to invest in transmediality as a central marketing strategy (M.-L. Ryan 2017). In general, scholarship on transmediality has tended to focus on contemporary participatory media practices and media convergences in a networked culture (e.g. Jenkins, Ford, and Green 2013) along with addressing various principles of storytelling (cf. H. Jenkins 2008; M. Freeman 2017, 2018; M.-L. Ryan & J.-N. Thon 2014; etc.). In the meantime, some efforts have been made to trace historical developments and cultural specificities in transmedia practices (esp. Freeman 2014, 2016), very few of these, however, went beyond the beginnings of the 20th century.

This conference aims to instead focus on the historicity of transmedia practices, with particular focus on the long nineteenth century (roughly from 1780 to 1920), a century that famously saw the birth of the mass media and brought the “frenzy of the visible” (J.-L. Comolli 1980). We understand practices not just as activities or performative acts of an individual, or a human being, but of ‘transpersonal” institutions (such as clubs, libraries, academies, advertising companies, syndicates, etc.). We thus read practices as forms and ways of actions, agency and performance that are discursive and systemic (networked) rather than as isolated acts. Moreover, the conference is interested in how specific content(s) in multiple media that stay recognizably the same dispersed across cultures in a time before digital convergence. Tracing the processes, economics and technologies involved in transmedia practices and the aesthetics of expansion and transgression in the long nineteenth century will allow for an enhanced understanding of specific configurations in the past and reconfigurations in our present moment. We are interested in contributions, both case studies that may act as models for specific developments as well as more theory-driven investigations, that address questions like:

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