Full Description
For at least a decade, university foreign language programs have been in decline throughout the English-speaking world. As programs close or are merged into large multi-language departments, disciplines such as German studies find themselves struggling to survive.
Transverse Disciplines offers an overview of the current research on the humanities and the academy at large and proposes creative and courageous ideas for the university of the future. Using German studies as a case study, the book examines localized academic work in Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom, and the United States in order to model new ideas for invigorated thinking beyond disciplinary specificity, university communities, and entrenched academic practices. In essays that are theoretical, speculative, experimental, and deeply personal, contributors suggest that German studies might do better to stop trying to protect existing national and disciplinary arrangements. Instead, the discipline should embrace feminist, queer, anti-racist, and decolonial academic practices and commitments, including community-based work, research-creation, and scholar activism.
Interrogating the position of researchers, teachers, and administrators inside and outside academia, Transverse Disciplines takes stock of the increasingly tenuous position of the humanities and stakes a claim for the importance of imagining new disciplinary futures within the often restrictive and harmful structures of the academy.
Contents
Preface: Forging Alliances in the Burning Present
Simone Pfleger and Carrie Smith
Introduction: Transversal Thinking, Accountabilities, and Commitments
Simone Pfleger and Carrie Smith
Part One: Situating Disciplinarity: Diagnoses, Genealogies, and Possibilities
1. Recomposing the Humanities: Transversal Legacies, Localized Futures
Claudia Breger
2. Beyond Germanistik: Transverse Approaches to German Studies in Australia
Brangwen Stone
3. Imagining German Studies for the Future
Carol Anne Costabile-Heming
4. Trying to Be a Bit Radical: Decolonizing the German Curriculum and Empowering Students in German Studies at Leeds
Helen Finch with Chloé Elliott and Poppy McDonnell
Part Two: Against Insularity
5. Critical Interventions in Land-Grant Epistemologies
Hester Baer and Bradley Boovy
6. Unsettling Memory: Taking Holocaust Studies at a United States Prison
Anke Pinkert
7. Anxious Trajectories: Game Studies and German Studies
Evan Torner
8. Thinking Inconveniently: A Neuro-queer Project on Mathematics and Lyrik Poetry
Jennifer M. Hoyer
9. Making Academic Publishing More Public
Rebecca Ross
Part Three: Speculative Methodologies and Radical Relationality
10. Collaborative Infrastructures for Feminist German Studies
Carrie Smith
11. "Sometimes I dream of different kinds of plants": Assemblage, Defiance, and Tenuous Connection
Maria Stehle
12. Anti-Blackness in German Studies
Jamele Watkins
13. Beyond Disciplinary Belonging: Constructing a Scholarly Self through Interactions and Relationality
Simone Pfleger
14. German Studies, Home, Hospitality: Decolonial Possibilities and a Politics of Place?
Beverly Weber
