Publications

Against the backdrop of general considerations of the interview as a genre, the paper discusses under which theoretical conditions interviews are suitable instruments for discourse analysis. With a special interest in questions of the linguistic constitution of shared knowledge in discourse, the authors outline the discourse-linguistic status of interviews in a systematic way.

Publication of the University of Bremen and University of Vienna international student conference »Debattieren, Opponieren, Protestieren – Interdisziplinäre Perspektiven auf sprachliche Praktiken des Widersprechens« 2023.

In the psychology of music and basic auditory research, there is talk of “paradoxes of hearing” or “musical paradoxies” (Deutsch 1986, 275-280; Utz 2015, 22-52; Deutsch 1995). But can auditory impressions really be paradoxical? What exactly should it mean what exactly should it mean to “hear paradoxes” or even to “hear paradoxically”? We will pursue this question in the following and in doing so, we will first define the concept of paradoxia for the present context – namely in the sense of ambiguity and discrepancy ambiguity and a discrepancy. We will then develop a typology, which at the same time shows the fundamental significance that ambiguities have for music – or more precisely: for the enduring appeal of pieces of music.

Corona infections, childhood memories, presidential elections, avalanches: everything we experience and witness and all external events can be ordered in time – according to their succession. Time is therefore an ordering parameter, or dimension, of events. There is disagreement about what else time is on the “battlefield of eternal disputes” – as Kant once called philosophy (or more precisely: metaphysics): Is time relative or absolute? Is it continuous or discrete? Is it a substance in its own right or is it constituted by relationships between events?

On 13.11.2024, a group of 113 members of the German Bundestag tabled a motion to initiate proceedings to ban the Alternative for Germany (AfD) party. The debate to date has focused on the requirements and prospects of success of a (partial) ban of the party from a constitutional perspective (in particular here and here). The national perspective threatens to distort the view of transnational interlegalities and does not do justice to the state of European integration.

The Bremen Überseestadt, constructed as a new harbor between 1875 and 1913, reflects the close connections between harbor infrastructure and European colonialism. The increase in cargo handling, particularly of colonial commodities, necessitated new port facilities and the deepening of the Weser River. Despite its transformation into a modern urban area, the colonial past remains inadequately addressed to this day. The text calls for making the colonial entanglements visible as an integral part of Bremen’s trade history.

This volume shows why it is misleading to view time as an object, exploring the insights that can be gained from analogies between sequences and by comparing event timings. Incorporating extensive references to music and, more broadly, to the act of listening provides illuminating glimpses into these fundamental structural properties of reality.

In this paper Jonas Trochemowitz and Lara Herford aim to analyze the talking format of Change my Mind by Steven Crowder and its adaptation by the former spokesperson of the right-wing extremist group Identitäre Bewegung in Austria. By employing the concept of ›genre of dissent‹ we ask the question how democratic values of deliberation are strategically used to gain legitimacy for far right positions in discourse.

The need for reform of the global health system is openly on the table. Many stakeholders agree that the WHO has not been able to adequately address the political and social problems, global health emergencies triggered or exacerbated by epidemics and pandemics, malnutrition, and access to clean water in recent years. Against this backdrop, there is a widespread call for more equity and solidarity in the global health system.

The paper deals with discursive portrayals of language learning and language learners. In a combination of quantitative and qualitative approaches, it asks whether the status of the language learner is constituted as a phenomenon of marginality or of centrality in current discourses in Germany, and […]

The COVID-19 pandemic exposed systemic problems in the global health system. It revealed that the global health system perpetuates global health inequalities rather than effectively reducing them: The international community, particularly the countries of the Global North, failed to make COVID-19 vaccines widely available to the populations of the world’s poorest countries. This blog debate takes stock of the reform debate about a just and decolonizing transformation of the health system. Bringing together scholars from various disciplines, the contributions of this debate ask what a fair global health system could look like and what role the law plays in it.

This article examines the agency and incentives that drive the activism of diasporic political influencers on “Facebook Malawi,” an online imagined political community. In their seminal work on “social media dissidents” and “social media self-made activists” in the Global South, Matsilele and Sharra demonstrate that social media activists engage with different strategies to initiate movements, mobilize citizens, and create their brands in strong opposition to authoritarian regimes which repositions them as freedom fighters in the eyes of the masses and enemies of the state. Correspondingly, we frame diasporic political influencers as actors aided by digital technologies who engage in “long-distance nationalism” on Facebook against authoritarianism in the homeland. We deploy a qualitative mixed methods approach to analyze Facebook data of two diasporic political influencers, Onjezani Kenani and Manes Winnie Hale, who gave informed consent to use their Facebook data generated in 2018 and 2021, a period preceding and following the 2019 Malawi tripartite elections. A thematic analysis of 250 Facebook posts and interview data with the two influencers illustrates how they exercise their agency in their quest for a vision of a better Malawi while navigating a complex and ambivalent web of online and offline threats, incentives, and interests. Implicated in the political communication and mobilization of the two are different strategies that include verbal inventiveness, trolling, and exposing. The article also shows how the concept of long-distance nationalism needs to be adapted in studying diasporic political influencers.

In Moskopp, Werner & Stefan Neuhaus (Hrsg.), Figurationen des Bösen. Ein Kompendium, 185-198. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann.

In Hanna Acke, Silvia Bonacchi, Carsten Junker, Charlotta Seiler Brylla & Ingo H. Warnke (eds.), Religious and national discourses. Berlin/Boston: de Gruyter Volume 33 in the Series Diskursmuster/ Discourse Patterns eBook ISBN: 9783111039633 PrintISBN: 9783111027739

The living body and the capitalist thinking of the modern economy seem to be irreconcilable objects. Nevertheless, their history and perception have been inextricably linked, at least since the times of industrialization and capitalization in the 19th century. Our volume follows this entangled history and the various contradictions it develops.
Since Pierre Bourdieu, we known that the body forms an incorporated cultural and social capital. It is a commodity and means of production, a sign of belonging to a social class, a place where sex, gender and power relations are negotiated or a pretext for social exclusions and racism. The body is the object of punishments, sanctions and social control, a support for affects, obsessions and illnesses as well as a site of rebellion and resistance. The 19th century novels analyzed in the contributions to this volume tell all this. From the perspective of current body studies, we propose a new reading of the great stories from Balzac to Zola, via Mirbeau, Maupassant, Louise Michel, Georges Sand, Rachilde, Eugène Sue and Huysmans to demonstrate, through their texts, how the images of the body and the policies of capital are entangled and, thus, form a central part of the imagination and the memory of 19th century French (and Northern/Western) society.
Contributions in French and German.

Arbeit und Wirtschaft in Bremen (43).

In Chojnicka, Joanna & Hornidge, Anna-Katharina & Knopf, Kerstin & Chatterjee, Sukla (eds.) Postcolonial Oceans: Contradictions, Heterogeneities, Knowledges, Materialities, 219-236. Heidelberg: Heidelberg University Publishing. DOI: 10.17885/heiup.1046.c17310

In Nele Austermann, Andreas Fischer-Lescano, Heike Kleffner, Kati Lang, Maximilian Pichl, Ronen Steinke, & Tore Vetter (Hrsg.), Recht gegen rechts, 307–314. Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer.

In Chojnicka, Joanna & Hornidge, Anna-Katharina & Knopf, Kerstin & Chatterjee, Sukla (eds.) Postcolonial Oceans: Contradictions, Heterogeneities, Knowledges, Materialities, 1-19. Heidelberg: Heidelberg University Publishing. DOI: 10.17885/heiup.1046.c17297

In Auteri, Laura, Natascia Barrale, Arianna di Bella & Sabine Hoffmann (eds.) Jahrbuch für internationale Germanistik. Wege der Germanistik in transkultureller Perspektive. Akten des XIV. Kongresses der Internationalen Vereinigung für Germanistik (IVG) 6: 511-515. Bern:  Peter Lang Verlag.