Simone Knewitz - Böcker

Since the 1960s, liberal values such as nondiscrimination, equal participation of all in social, political, and cultural spheres, and individual freedom have driven processes of democratization in Western societies – a trend that has recently been countered by the resurgence of illiberal forces, right-wing populism, and authoritarianism.This volume examines processes of democratization and de-democratization from an interdisciplinary perspective, showing how they unfold in language, cultural discourses, and communicative practices. In particular, the collection highlights research on changing roles and social positions: who has access to which social roles, how these roles are performed, and how individual actors are positioned or position themselves within social power structures has undergone profound changes in recent decades, not least in the context of new media environments that challenge established power structures and forms of discourse. Bringing together contributions from linguistics, cultural studies, and related disciplines, the volume seeks to expand our understanding of (de-)democratization beyond the theoretical frameworks of the social sciences.This book will be of interest to students and scholars in fields such as applied linguistics, discourse analysis, cultural studies, education, political science, and sociology.

Located at the intersections of law and culture, The Politics of Private Propertyprovides a fresh perspective on the functions of private property within U.S. cultural discourse by establishing a long historical arch from the early nineteenth to the twenty-first century. The study challenges the assumption of an unquestioned cultural consensus in the United States on the subject of individual property rights, instead mobilizing property as an analytical category to examine how social and political debates generate competing and contested claims to ownership. The property narratives arising out of political conflicts, the book suggests, serve to naturalize the unequal social and economic structures and legitimize the hegemonic order, which however remains to be shifting and subject to challenges. Analyzing the property narratives at the heart of the U.S. American self-conception, The Politics of Private Property addresses the gap between the ideal of the U.S. as a universal middle-class society, characterized by a wide diffusion of property ownership, and the actual social reality which is defined by unequal dissemination of wealth and race-based structures of exclusion.

Rather than turning backward and remembering 9/11, this book sets out to reflect on how the events of September 11, 2001, have shifted our perspectives on a whole series of political, economic, social, and cultural processes. Beyond 9/11 raises the question how the intense debates on the 2001 terrorist attacks and their aftermaths have come to shape our present moment and frame what lies ahead. At the same time, this collection acknowledges that the label «9/11» has often bracketed cultural complexities we have only begun to understand. In Beyond 9/11, contributors from the fields of American studies, political science, economics, history, theology, and the arts reappraise the cultural climate and the global impact of the United States in the second decade of the twenty-first century.