Dear list members,

With the usual apologies for cross-posting, we would like to make you aware of an edited volume that was published with Leuven UP last month and that might be interesting for colleagues working on urban culture topics, as well migrant and transcultural literature:

Exploring the Transnational Neighbourhood. Perspectives on Community-Building, Identity and Belonging, Edited by Stephan Ehrig, Britta C. Jung, and Gad Schaffer

The volume combines approaches from literary studies (incl. several German examples), geography, linguistics, theatre studies, ethnography, and sociology. The volume is Open Access and free to download from the publisher's website (see above). I have attached an abstract below.

We hope this may find some interested readers, and we would appreciate it if you could recommend it to your libraries.

With all best wishes and hopefully a recreational end of year break,

Britta, Gad, and Stephan

Practices of community-building in a globalised context

Urban neighbourhoods have come to occupy the public imagination as a litmus test of migration, with some areas hailed as multicultural success stories while others are framed as ghettos. In an attempt to break down this dichotomy, Exploring the Transnational Neighbourhood filters these debates through the lenses of geography, anthropology, and literary and cultural studies. By establishing the interdisciplinary concept of the 'transnational neighbourhood', it presents these localities – whether Clichy-sous-Bois, Belfast, El Segundo Barrio or Williamsburg – as densely packed contact zones where disparate cultures meet in often highly asymmetrical relations, producing a constantly shifting local and cultural knowledge about identity, belonging, and familiarity.

Exploring the Transnational Neighbourhood offers a pivotal response to one of the key questions of our time: How do people create a sense of community within an exceedingly globalised context? By focusing on the neighbourhood as a central space of transcultural everyday experience within three different levels of discourse (i.e., the virtual, the physical local, and the transnational-global), the multidisciplinary contributions explore bottom-up practices of community-building alongside cultural, social, economic, and historical barriers.

Contributors: Christina Horvath (University of Bath), Maria Roca Lizarazu (NUI Galway), Emilio Maceda Rodriguez (Universidad Autónoma de Tlaxcala), Naomi Wells (IMLR, University of London), Anne Fuchs (University College Dublin), Gad Schaffer (Tel-Hai Academic College), Daniela Bohórquez Sheinin (University of Michigan), Anna Marta Marini (Universidad de Alcalá), Godela Weiss-Sussex (IMLR, University of London), Britta C. Jung (Maynooth University), Emma Crowley (University of Bristol), Mary Mazzilli (University of Essex)

Dr Stephan Ehrig (he/him/his)

Lecturer in German

University of Glasgow / Oilthigh Glaschu
School of Modern Languages and Cultures / Sgoil nan Nua-Chànan is nan Cultar

Room 210b, Hetherington Building
Glasgow G12 8RS

@herrbinar

https://www.gla.ac.uk/schools/mlc/staff/stephanehrig/#

Secretary of the Association of German Studies in the UK and Ireland (AGS) 2022-25

My latest edited volume Exploring the Transnational Neighbourhood (2022) is now available as an Open Access Ebook with Leuven UP.