Overview

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.

Full Product Details

Author:   Simone Pfleger ,  Carrie Smith
Publisher:   University of Toronto Press
Imprint:   University of Toronto Press
Dimensions:   Width: 15.90cm , Height: 2.50cm , Length: 23.50cm
Weight:   0.700kg
ISBN:  

9781487508456

ISBN 10:   148750845
Pages:   368
Publication Date:   30 September 2022
Audience:   College/higher education ,  Professional and scholarly ,  Tertiary & Higher Education ,  Professional & Vocational
Format:   Hardback
Publisher's Status:   Active
Availability:   Manufactured on demand  
We will order this item for you from a manufactured on demand supplier.

Table of 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

Reviews

Transverse Disciplines has a wonderful spirit of shared purpose. Each contribution in this collection is frank, fierce, courageous, and revealing. The blend of public research, activist approaches, methodological meditations, and experimental epistemologies makes this a perfect introductory book for graduate students. Black, Indigenous, decolonial, and feminist interventions are well represented, timely, and substantive. The knowledge-making and -sharing is fresh, compassionate, humane, and radical. What a triumph. - David Gramling, Professor of German Studies, University of British Columbia An important contribution to the field, Transverse Disciplines poses exactly the right questions about the future of German studies. The essays in this collection model the kinds of innovative teaching and research that are really going to be important in the coming years. This book will be of interest to professors of German studies, both advanced scholars who want to learn how the discipline is changing, as well as junior professors who are contributing to these changes. It will be a priceless resource for graduate students who are learning how to navigate the field and trying to determine what possible contribution they could make. - Priscilla Layne, Associate Professor of German and Adjunct Assistant Professor of African and Afro-American Studies, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Author Information

Simone Pfleger is an assistant professor of Gender Studies and German Studies at the University of Alberta. Carrie Smith is the vice dean of the Faculty of Arts and a professor of German Studies at the University of Alberta.

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