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=Chronik

In recent years, there has been a pronounced (re-)turn to questions of ontology, matter, and realism in the humanities and social sciences. What all these theoretical formations have in common is their profound challenge to human exceptionalism. Taken together, these approaches have productively been described as constituting a “nonhuman turn.” This article is a theoretical exploration of the relationship between the intellectual and political practice of Cultural Studies on the one hand and the nonhuman turn on the other. For this purpose, it brings both “into encounter” (Donna Haraway), investigating points of affinity, tension, and compatibility. The essay argues that such a theoretical encounter could prove to be tremendously fruitful, both intellectually and politically, and that Cultural Studies should thus take a genuine interest in these new approaches, engage with them, put them to the test, and, when needed, “translate” and “re-articulate” them. The result could be a Cultural Studies for the Anthropocene which would have a lot to contribute to the critical (cultural/political/social/economic) struggles being fought today.

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Fat Studies beschäftigen sich mit hohem Körpergewicht, ohne es auf die Wahrnehmung als Gesundheitsgefahr zu reduzieren. Sie fokussieren auf den gesellschaftlichen Umgang mit ›Übergewicht‹ als Ordnungs- und Herrschaftskategorie und analysieren, wie dicke Körper normiert und pathologisiert werden. International bereits weit entwickelt, sind die Fat Studies im deutschsprachigen Raum noch kaum bekannt. Die multidisziplinären und internationalen Beiträger*innen des Glossars präsentieren erstmals eine breite Palette zentraler Begriffe dieser jungen Disziplin: von A wie Aktivismus über I wie Intersektionalität bis Z wie Zucker.

Das Wechselmodell gehört in Deutschland zu denjenigen Betreuungsmodellen, die als Alternative zum traditionellen Residenzmodell diskutiert werden. Während das Wechselmodell in anderen Ländern bereits rechtlich abgesichert wurde als zu präferierendes Modell nach der Trennung von Eltern, konnte sich Deutschland bislang dazu nicht durchringen. Die Diskussion über das Wechselmodell ist in Deutschland emotional stark aufgeladen und geprägt von den unterschiedlichen Interessen der Lobbyverbände getrenntlebender Väter und Mütter. Um eine Diskussion über elterliche Nachtrennungsfamilien objektiv führen zu können, braucht es deswegen empirisches Datenmaterial. Die vorliegende Studie analysiert die Perspektiven von betroffenen Müttern, Vätern und Kindern auf das Wechselmodell. / Shared parenting as a model of joint custody after divorce or separation has been internationally discussed as a new form of family live for several years now. Whereas other countries have already legally fixed shared parenting as normative model, the German family policy and jurisdiction seems to be still dominated by the traditional residential custody. Moreover, the model of shared parenting has raised controversial discussions of different lobby groups in Germany. The presented study examines the perceptions of parents and children practicing shared parenting in Germany. It especially analyzes the different perceptions of fathers and mothers towards shared parenting and gives emphasize to the well-being of teenagers being raised in shared parenting models.

In many Western societies, support for policies concerning the secularization of the public sphere or the state often seems to be driven by secularized majority populations considered to be largely homogeneous. In this article, by contrast, I draw on the case of the Canadian province of Quebec to show that, as a fundamental element of conflicts over secularism, secularist activism emerges from particular generational dynamics, especially those of the so-called ‘baby boomers’. My main argument is that while the baby boomers’ collective experiences have shaped their secularist outlook, there are a variety of biographical trajectories and engagements with spirituality that the public image of this generation tends to hide. The article is based on biographical and ethnographic research carried out between 2012 and 2018.

Innovation and entrepreneurship are buzzwords that fit any policy discussion on economic development. In this sense, innovation is not only a category of analysis employed by (social) scientists to circumscribe a defined set of economic practices for analytical purposes. Innovation is simultaneously a category of practice employed by practitioners and academics with their own, sometimes concealed, political agendas. Providing a situated sketch for a socio-spatially more attuned definition of innovation as a category of analysis, the article primarily asks what kind of innovation practices are imagined and / or enacted by both academic and policy circles. Thus, the article aims at scrutinizing the politics involved in thinking, doing, and relating innovation in the context of Armenia’s and Georgia’s quest for viable economic trajectories. We assess the legal and organizational framework in both countries and funding patterns of Georgia’s Innovation and Technology Agency (GITA) and Armenia’s Enterprise Incubator Foundation (EIF). Locational analysis of grant holders suggests company concentration within metropolitan areas of Tbilisi and Yerevan. Analysis of selection criteria of funding program allows for the assertion that a developmentalist project is advanced. Rather than reifying the actors’ language of innovation, we wish to highlight that current imaginations and practices of innovation are analytically better understood through the concept of “internationalized developmentalist agglomeration project”.

Das Working-Paper argumentiert für einen intensiveren Einbezug der Wechselwirkung von materieller Infrastruktur und sozialen Praktiken bei der Erforschung von Verräumlichungsprozessen während des sogenannten Kalten Krieges. Hierfür wird das Raumformat des „Sicherheitsraumes“ näher beleuchtet. Dieser entstand vor dem Hintergrund des durch die Systemkonkurrenz gesellschaftlich empfundenen Bedrohungsszenarios und die politisch initiierte Implementierung neuer Infrastrukturen entlang der neuen ideologischen und territorialen Grenze. Als Variante des Sicherheitsraumes wird anhand der Beispiele des innerdeutschen Grenzraumes und des privat organisierten Paketverkehrs zwischen der BRD und Polen zudem das Konzept des „Fließraumes“ diskutiert. Letzterer hebt auf die Etablierung gesicherter Verbindungen und Anschlüsse innerhalb des eher statischen – weil auf territoriale Begrenzungen bezogenen – Sicherheitsraumes ab. Obwohl Europa und insbesondere Deutschland während der weltpolitischen Spannungslage nach dem Ende des Zweiten Weltkrieges als besonders stark von Grenzen geprägt erschien, muss der „Eiserne Vorhang“ daher unter den Bedingungen der Globalisierung als eine letztlich anachronistische und in historischer Perspektive auch erfolglose Bemühung verstanden werden, der fortschreitenden räumlichen und ideologischen Verflechtung politischer Systeme entgegen zu wirken. / This working paper argues for a more intensive consideration of the interaction of material infrastructure and social practices in the study of spatialisation processes during the so-called Cold War. For this purpose, the spatial format of “Sicherheitsraum” (security space) is examined in more detail. It emerged against the backdrop of the context of a socially perceived threat scenario caused by system competition and the politically initiated implementation of new infrastructures along the new territorial border. As a variant of the security space, the concept of the “Fließräume” (spaces of flow) is also discussed using the examples of the inner-German border space and the privately organised parcel traffic between the FRG and Poland. The spaces of flow concept emphasises the establishment of secure connections and links within the rather static (because related to territorial boundaries) security space. Although Europe, and Germany in particular, seemed to have been particularly marked by borders during the world-political tensions after the end of the Second World War, the “Iron Curtain” must therefore be understood under the conditions of globalisation as an ultimately anachronistic and (in historical perspective) unsuccessful effort to counteract the progressive spatial and ideological entanglement of political systems.

Until now, tracing the genealogical lines of EEC/EU Antibiotic Resistance policy has been a gap in social science research that has focused on the policies of individual countries. This Working Paper raises the question how Antimicrobial Resistance (AMR) has developed as an epistemic object in terms of biopolitical and spatial regulatory design of EEC/EU. It also asks what cultural ideas and imaginations have been associated with antibiotics since their introduction. To this end, a historical discourse analysis was conducted combining the perspectives of human geography and historical sociology. First cases of resistance occurred at short intervals with the introduction of new antibiotics in both human and veterinary medicine, and the discovery of the mechanism of horizontal gene transfer attracted global attention in the 1960s. Nevertheless, the belief in the need for an expansionary mode of production outweighed scientific doubt and the longer-term health of the population, so that regulatory interventions were more appearance than substance. Only in the wake of the geopolitical rise of the EU and BRICS countries and new ‘pandemic risks’, a general turn to security dispositif and neoliberal-individualist governmentality rearranged the coordinates of AMR policy to some extent. The interpretation of our present as a “multi-crisis”, which has become increasingly established in the “West” in the wake of climate crisis and Covid19, is apparently contributing to an increasing assessment of AMR as an unintended side-effect of an expansionary economy and lifestyle, with no regulatory responses to date that address systemic causes rather than suggesting a fiction of control.