The Stacks (Library of Anglo-American Culture & History - FID AAC, Göttingen State and University Library)
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Never Change a Losing Horse?: On Adaptations in German Forecasting after the Great Financial Crisis
No full textUsing data from a recent survey among German professional macroeconomic forecasters, we analyze whether their (self-reported) behavior and attitude towards new methods has changed since the Great Recession. We find that several forecasters claim to use new methods and some known methods more frequently. By contrast, forecasters do not report to have changed their loss function after the Great Recession. Although linking forecasters´ attitudes towards a change in methods to socio-demographic variables (age, gender, nature of the institution) did not yield precise estimates, point estimates still suggest that the openness towards new methods is negatively related to medium-run forecasting success. Forecasters with good medium-term track record seem to be more reluctant to change technology whereas forecasters with a bad record seem to be more open for new methods.https://www.peterlang.com/view/title/7142
Sustainability as a Framework of Analysis and a Guide for Policy-Making: The Film Industry in Wellington, New Zealand
No full textCultural policy-makers worldwide have expressed the desire to promote local ‘sustainable’ cultural industries, including film industries. While well intended, this has been somehow problematic as what ‘sustainable’ entails has remained unclear. This paper suggests a definition of a sustainable film industry and develops a framework to study and leverage it by drawing on two approaches: the political economy of culture and geographical industrialisation. The framework is used to analyse the case of the film industry in Wellington, New Zealand, where a qualitative analysis of interviews, documents, and media reports informed the empirical study. The research identified localised ‘vertical’ blockages along the value chain relations and ‘horizontal’ blockages among the interdependencies of industry stakeholders. Those blockages undermine five key areas to enable sustainability: financial capacity, ability to maintain labour pools, to feed from creative sources, to develop infrastructure, and the opportunity to reach audiences. The Wellington case showed constraints in all five areas which also suggest potential paths for policy-making to overcome those challenges.https://www.peterlang.com/view/title/7023
Arbeite mit, plane mit, regiere mit!' – Doch bis wohin? Reflexionen zur Produktion deutscher Zeitgeschichte(n) und zum Quellenwert archivierter Überwachungsdokumente der DDR-Diktatur
No full textTaking the narrative character of historical research into consideration, I discuss a socio- and cultural-historical source value of the documents of the Ministry for State Security (MfS) of the former GDR against the background of the collectivist imperative of the so-called socialist personality. In doing so, I suggest reading the texts of the surveillance organs as communicative appropriation practices that can offer insight into interaction and confrontation processes.https://www.peterlang.com/view/title/6988
Indigenous Knowledges in North America
No full textThis essay takes as its assumptive backdrop the “Red/White/Black demographic triad” in the sense of Stam and Shohat that resulted from the European colonial conquest and settlement of, and the transatlantic enslavement of Africans in, the Americas. It homes in on the ambivalent functions and effects of different evocations of Indigeneity in early abolitionist discourse, considering this very discourse as a specific strand of settler colonial knowledge production during the era of the Enlightenment. While Euro-American abolitionists around 1800 centrally and critically focused on relations between the positions marked by “Black” and “White,” they also made recourse to the position of “Red.” Paradigmatic readings highlight that abolitionists mobilized Red as a trope in contradictory ways according to their argumentative needs, substantiating the hegemonic character of White self-referential knowledge practices in the early US republic and abetting the justification of settler colonialism.This publication is with permission of the rights owner freely accessible due to an Alliance licence and a national licence (funded by the DFG, German Research Foundation) respectively
Digital Pedagogy in American Studies
No full textThis article will focus on teaching with digital humanities (DH) methods and tools as they relate to their practicability in the context of the classroom. It will concentrate on the specific challenges that the teaching of computational methods pose to educators who are experts in their discipline but might feel that they lack the technical know-how to steer their students towards DH. In particular, the article will introduce a number of tools that allow school students and educators to access digital approaches and to start appreciating their relevance for research. These include online resources for literary analysis, simple programs that may be used for research into media, and archival projects that stem from the collaboration of students and staff and bring neglected histories to an outside audience. While these tools do not demand any practical programming knowledge, I will also present resources that teach widely used coding languages such as Python and R on a step-by-step basis. The third and final part of the article will introduce a number of methods and services that empower educators to create a digital classroom with quantitative approaches and distant learning as their primary characteristics. Teaching these methods might prove challenging at first.; yet the hands-on, collaborative, quality of DH also leads to classroom situations in which students and staff become co-learners, and therefore leads to a democratizing effect.http://www.asjournal.org/70-2020/the-digital-classroom-a-digital-humanities-primer-on-tools-methods-and-resources
Current Trends, Causes, and Social-Ecological Impacts
No full textBushfires are common events in Australia reaching their peak each summer season. However, the last bushfire season from July 2019 until March 2020 was unprecedented. An estimated area between 240,000 up to 400,000 km² burned, with the southeast coast being particularly affected. The images of burnt flora and fauna and the fires that raged for months went around the world. It became clear how vulnerable both Australia’s communities and ecosystems are to this natural hazard, which is becoming more frequent and intense. Australia’s southeast is increasingly vulnerable against the often sudden event of bushfires. This article discusses the current trends, causes for this extreme fire season, the socio-economic and ecological impacts, and the resulting adaptation processes
Art against the Odds: The Struggles, Survival and Success of New Zealand Local Cinema
No full textNew Zealand is well-known as being able to produce some of the most successful high-budget Hollywood ‘blockbuster’ productions, such as "The Lord of the Rings" or "The Hobbit," despite its comparatively small population and remote location. However, little is known about its own bottom-tier films, their funding problems and sustainability challenges. Bottom-tier films, those productions that are made with small-budgets and the domestic audience foremost in mind – which are also known as ‘local cinema‘ – generally face significant economic challenges when confronted with a small domestic media market. This paper provides a critical analysis to fill this knowledge gap by applying a political economy
of communication perspective and drawing on findings derived from review of academic literature and secondary data, policy analysis, archival research and expert interviews with key personnel in industry and state agencies. Precisely, it builds on Dunleavy & Joyce (2011), Lealand (2013) and Ferrer-Roca (2015). In the first part, the paper will provide a value chain analysis – development, budget and institutional objectives, production, domestic distribution (including piracy) and international distribution – of three New Zealand bottom-tier productions that have achieved unusual success, in critical and/or commercial terms. These three case studies are used to examine the distinguishing factors of bottom-tier films will be Sione’s Wedding (2006), Boy (2010) and The Orator (2011). The second part will offer a comparative analysis of the three bottom-tier case studies previously presented. The value chain structure will allow to provide a thorough examination of the current problems concerning the funding and sustainability of New Zealand local cinema, as well as how digitalization and globalization (i.e., piracy) is directly affecting the financial sustainability of
bottom-tier productions. Based on the New Zealand case, the paper concludes with a set of recommendations regarding policy and institutional arrangement from an analytical approach of critical political economy, which might be useful for other small countries with lack of economies of scale aiming at strengthening their local cinema.https://www.peterlang.com/view/title/7023
‘Racism’ Down Under: The Prehistory of a Concept in Australia
No full textThe conceptual history of ‘racism’ is hitherto underdeveloped. One of its assertions is that the term ‘racism’ originated from a German-centric critique of völkisch and fascist ideology. A closer look at the early international usage of the categories ‘racialism’ and ‘racism’ shows that the circumstances were much more complex. Australia lends itself for validation of this complexity. It once shared a colonial border with Germany, had a substantial number of German immigrants, and, during both world wars, was amongst the opponents of Germany. Even so, the reference to Germany is only one of many elements of the early concept of ‘racism’
Reading Autobiographical Comics: A Framework for Educational Settings
No full textThis book updates reader-response criticism as the foundation of aesthetic reading in the classroom by bringing it in line with cognitive theories in literary studies and linguistics. With the help of Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner‘s conceptual integration theory, which shares a surprising number of correspondences with Wolfgang Iser‘s The Act of Reading, it is possible to flesh out the latter‘s model of narrative meaning-making. In turn, this allows for a consistent reader-response approach to the medium of comics and auto/biography as one of its dominant genres. The fragmentation of comics narratives, but also of human lives and identities, requires such a theory that can explain how different perspectives and experiences can be blended into an experiential whole.https://www.peterlang.com/view/title/6861