Publications

The representation of the Chinese immigrant in Spanish culture has mainly hewed to hackneyed stereotypes of machine-like and constant productivity, as well as homogeneity. In Alejandro González Iñárritu’s film Biutiful (Citation2010), the Chinese are reduced to childminders and exploitative bosses, while in Almudena Grandes’s novel Los besos en el pan (Citation2015), a group of Chinese hairdressers are presented as identikit and docile, deprived of any individuality. Elvira Navarro’s novel La ciudad feliz Navarro (Citation2009) fictionalizes the coming-of-age of a young Chinese immigrant male child and the travails of his Chinese immigrant family as they settle into Spanish society. The novel reconceives Chinese immigrant integration into Spanish society as a complex phenomenon, forged at the interface of converging linguistic, emotional, gender, and mnemonic factors in both the country of origin and the host country. In so doing, it underscores the complexity of Chinese assimilation to Spain, which has been reduced to ghettoization, while also reconceiving Chinese immigrants as sentient, historical beings and unique individuals who enact idiosyncratic gender performances. Drawing on a wide range of affect, gender, migration, and linguistic theories, I analyze the representation of Chinese immigrant masculinity and femininity within the novel, which encompasses the categories of the tiger mother, the traumatized male immigrant, the father-son relationship, the ageing male immigrant, and the second-generation male immigrant. In so doing, I highlight the heterogeneity of the representation of the Chinese immigrant, thus expanding the current understanding of it.

In today's world, democracy is recognized as both a theoretical idea and a form of government that holds a unique position, largely unaffected by intense academic or worldly controversies. Presently, no scholar can dismiss or oppose democracy and expect to be taken seriously. However, in the Polis of Athens, the birthplace of democracy, the prominent philosophers were critical and often disparaging of this system of governance. This article seeks to demystify prevailing discourses surrounding Western democracy by illustrating how they frequently depend on hierarchizing citizens, peoples, and countries, as well as compartmentalizing human experiences. Moreover, it endeavors to demonstrate that the discourses of democracy and liberalism have often been used by Western powers to interfere in the global south and exploit its peoples. The article also offers a non-evaluative approach to studying democracy, taking into consideration non-Western experiences to preserve the concept’s utopian appeal.

This article explores the aesthetics and ethics of the diva by offering a comparative analysis of Fassbinder’s penultimate film, Veronika Voss (1982), and the filmmaker’s self-presentation as a diva. Veronika Voss offers a unique mode of engagement with the past in the form of its central female figure, the outsized Nazi-era actress Voss. Voss is not only, like Fassbinder, a drug addict; she is also unlike the divas who came before her in Fassbinder’s films, for she is not rendered a fetish. Fassbinder’s film presents a cinescape of “diva time and space.” Diva time evokes a nonlinear, expansive temporality of queer longing that eschews restorative nostalgia, blending past and present in a manner that complicates Manichean notions of victimhood and capitalist exploitation. And diva space is likewise expansive, as the diva spreads out and multiplies, engulfing space in a manner that is both narcissistic and generous.

In recent years numerous streaming series, books, and films focusing on Elisabeth of Austria have generated intense interest among readers and viewers. This plethora of pop cultural 'Sisi' products both reflects and produces a cult affect surrounding the figure of 'Sisi'. Recent films by female auteurs Frauke Finsterwalder ( Sisi und Ich, 2023) and Marie Kreutzer ( Corsage, 2022) present especially complex, partly fantastical pictures of this figure. I will argue here that these recent filmic 'Sisi' iterations embody a unique mode of female fetishism that invites us to reconsider the fetish from a feminist perspective.

Bodies are immanent element of socio-cultural negotiation. Since the 19th century, Egyptology has produced vast knowledge on the ancient Egyptian bodies (human, divine, animal), however, mainly by focusing on funerary aspects of ancient Egyptian culture. Different paradigm shifts and turns of the last few decades (hermeneutics, semiotics, social-constructivism, ontology etc.), echo through Egyptology, but are still not part of the dominant discourse. This is also the case for the so-called “body turn”, an important epistemological turning point, that came largely unnoticed in Egyptology. Previous body centred Egyptological publications are either too specific in their focus or too broad in their presentation of Ancient Egyptian corporealities. To balance this out and reflect the latest state of research, this volume brings together selected contributions from the fields of Egyptology and Northeast African Archaeology. The focus is on both conceptualizations of the bodies by ancient Egyptians and Egyptologists. The topics of the contributions cover familiar but also new aspects. They range from division of labour, disability, gender roles, erotic, magic, fragmented and narrated bodies, other-than-human corporealities, to questions of ethics and the place of Egyptology in current approaches to past bodies. Various textual, pictorial, and archaeological sources, as well as human remains, are analyzed both from synchronic and diachronic perspectives. From the theoretical and methodological point of view, the publication provides deeper insights into a number of different approaches and their application to the ancient material (among others: osteoarchaeology, socio-cultural anthropology, semiotics, new materialism, ontology, etc.), which makes the book an important reading for all career stage Egyptologists (students to professionals) and the broader interested public.

Wie haben Autor*innen wie Fakir Baykurt, Emine Sevgi Özdamar, Kemal Yalçın und Rauf Ceylan das Ruhrgebiet literarisch geprägt? Nesrin Tanç zeigt, wie Literatur kollektive Erinnerung, Migrationserfahrungen und kulturelles Erbe dokumentiert. Dabei verbindet sie Analyse mit Kulturpraxis: Übersetzungen, Hörstücke und Literaturkarten machen Literatur erfahrbar und bieten einen neuen Blick auf transnationale Literatur für alle, die sich mit Bildung, Kultur und Erinnerung beschäftigen.

This article provides the first comprehensive account of the forms and functions of apologies in Nigerian English, with a view to examining the factors that condition speakers’ choice of the linguistic forms of apologies in different text types as well as potential differences between apologies elicited via discourse completion tasks and those found in corpus data. Analysing the data from a postcolonial pragmatics approach, the article identifies nativised forms of apologising due to influence from indigenous Nigerian languages and reveals that the linguistic forms of apologies produced by Nigerian English speakers are systematically conditioned by the communicative situation. It suggests that it is the written mode of language production that allows speakers to choose speech acts without time pressure rather than the type of data as such, which influences the choice of linguistic forms of speech acts. Thus, the study contributes to the description of pragmatic variation in Nigerian English.

The extant literature largely ignores the micro-governance of collaborative networks (CNs), that is, the day-to-day functions that CN coordinators need to perform to produce a collaborative environment that stimulates joint action. This paper aims to identify which configurations of micro-governance functions foster an internal collaborative environment in CNs. We collected data from 36 CNs for water protection in Brazil and performed a Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA). Results show two configurations that may be adopted in different situations. Although the first configuration requires all six micro-governance functions to be performed, the second one does not require high monitoring. This configuration is adopted by CNs whose stakeholders do not have a previous history of conflict. Our study advances the theory of collaborative governance by empirically demonstrating how micro-governance functions enable effective implementation in natural resources management. We contribute to the practice of collaborative governance by describing how CN coordinators may enhance their day-to-day activities.

The shift to hybrid work has introduced new organizational challenges for higher education institutions (HEIs), especially when balancing academic freedom, managerial oversight, digital infrastructure, and global mobility. This study explores how three German universities are developing hybrid work policies in the context of institutional complexity. Using the Field-Level Deduction framework and the institutional logics perspective, we examine how these universities balance professional, managerial, market, and digital logics in their formal policies on mobile work and workation. Drawing on a comparative case study of mobile work agreements and expert interviews with the involved key actors, we identify three emerging modes of creative assembly: (1) flexibility oriented toward academic freedom, (2) structured balance through procedural clarity, and (3) standardization with strong risk aversion. Although these universities operate under the same legal framework, their hybrid work models vary considerably, suggesting different ways in which institutional logics can be selectively coupled. The study provides exploratory insights into the diversity of hybrid work in German HEIs and introduces creative assembly as a conceptual lens for understanding how universities navigate institutional complexity. The findings are not statistically representative but serve the purpose of analytic generalization, offering conceptual insights. These insights lay the theoretical groundwork for future empirical research examining the effects of different assemblies on outcomes such as academic productivity, collegiality, student engagement, and international competitiveness.

The rise of remote work, coupled with evolving traveler preferences, has created a new phenomenon called workations. This study explores the impact of workations on the hospitality industry and their role in the New Work paradigm. Drawing on Self-Determination Theory and New Work concepts, we examine the motivations of workationers, and the adaptations hospitality providers have made to serve this emerging market. Through qualitative analysis of interviews with five hospitality industry experts and six workationers, we uncover key drivers behind the workation trend, including the desire for improved work-life integration, escapism, and the pursuit of novel experiences. Our findings reveal that successful workation offerings depend on providing environments that support autonomy, competence, and relatedness - the core tenets of self-determination theory. Destinations looking to capitalize on the workation trend could improve infrastructure and amenities, foster community integration, enhance work-life balance opportunities, and expand their long-term stay offerings. All in all, this study contributes to the growing body of literature on the intersection of work and tourism and offers insights into how destinations can leverage the workation trend to increase their competitiveness and resilience in a rapidly evolving tourism landscape. The analysis suggests that workations are more than a temporary trend. Instead, they represent a fundamental shift in how work, leisure, and travel are conceptualized and experienced in the era of New Work.

Despite widespread concern about levels of administrative burden within universities, understanding of the associated dimensions and drivers remains limited. Addressing the resulting lacuna, this paper presents a granular analysis of what academic staff within one national university system regard as the key dimensions and specific drivers of the administrative burdens they encounter at work. The data underlying our analyses are drawn from responses to an in-depth survey on administrative workloads from 350 academic staff working at 37 Australian universities. Our findings reveal that while generic administrative responsibilities add administrative burden, such burden is perhaps most acutely felt in the core academic work domains of teaching and research. In terms of perceptions of drivers, we find that two major strategies that universities have pursued to gain efficiencies—administrative centralization and administrative service automation—have resulted in what is widely experienced by academic staff as an intensification of their administrative burden.

Mauritius is widely praised for policies that have minimized tensions between ethno-religious groups. Other types of groups, however, are excluded from that sociopolitical ordering of society. In particular, LGBTQI+ Mauritians have long been stigmatized and criminalized by an anti-sodomy law, enacted by the British colonial administration. Despite a reputation for a strong commitment to human rights, the Mauritian government never repealed that law. Drawing in large part on interviews with LGBTQI+ activists in Mauritius, this article analyzes how and why they challenged that anti-sodomy law in court, what they achieved and what the implications are. It argues that the state’s and political parties’ emphasis on traditional cultures made it difficult to convince the government to act, leaving strategic litigation as the best option for getting LGBTQI+ rights recognized. Grounded primarily in constitutionally guaranteed rights and harnessing support from international nonstate actors, their court cases succeeded in carving out greater space for LGBTQI+ rights within the conservative multicultural framework, even though the verdict was rather limited in scope. Significant pressure will be needed to achieve more political and social change, potentially including more strategic litigation, which poses a significant challenge to LGBTQI+ activists.