Friendship Without Borders

Across half a century, from the division of Germany through the end of the Cold War, a cohort of thirty women from the small German town of Schönebeck in what used to be the GDR circulated among themselves a remarkable collective archive of their lives: a Rundbrief, or bulletin, containing hundreds of letters and photographs. This book draws on that unprecedented resource, complemented by a set of interviews, to paint a rich portrait of “ordinary” life in postwar Germany. It shows how these women—whether reflecting on their experiences as Nazi-era schoolchildren or witnessing reunification—were united by their complex interactions with official power and their commitment to sustaining a shared German identity as they made the most of their everyday lives in both the GDR and the Federal Republic.

What exactly does it mean to be a close friend? With smart phones, social media and the Internet, the technical barriers to making new friends and keeping up with old ones have all but disappeared. What remains are more subtle borders resulting from cultural diversity, and these can be much more perplexing to navigate. These cultural differences in close friendships are the primary focus of Friends Beyond Borders.It turns out that we in the U.S. think quite differently about our friendships compared to people in many other cultures around the globe. Cross-cultural research shows that people from various cultures can have very different, even conflicting, ideas about what it means to be a good friend. One's friendly intentions can be seen as patently unfriendly by someone from another culture—they simply wouldn't fit with how others think about, feel about, and behave toward their close friends. In Friends Beyond Borders, Roger Baumgarte demystifies these differing approaches to friendship. He describes six distinct cultural styles of close friendship, each comparing what might be typical in the U.S. with what would be found in contrasting cultures. Although each culture might have a dominant style of friendship, he makes it clear that all six of these styles can be found within any given culture, especially one as diverse as the U.S. You will come away from this book thinking about your own friendships, whether or not they cross cultural borders, in new and creative ways. You might very well gain a renewed enthusiasm for your closest friends. Beyond cultural issues, there's also a chapter devoted to Facebook, taking primarily a social research perspective, attempting to explain and defend clearly and empirically what social media have to do with close friendships. The results of these studies surprised even the author. There's a chapter entitled “Friends make good medicine” which reviews the empirical research demonstrating the numerous benefits, including health benefits, of cultivating close and satisfying friendships. People who regularly make time for their friends tend to live much longer, have lower levels of stress, and are even less likely to catch a cold. These are but a sampling of those benefits.Friends Beyond Borders will inspire you to invest more in your close friendships, and help you to appreciate more fully these important people in your lives. Written with a touch of humor and genuine affection, Friends Beyond Borders offers both a researcher's perspective and numerous personal anecdotes about the roles that culture and gender play in our experience of close friendship.

Michaël Ferrier is a prize-winning novelist, essayist and academic whose cosmopolitan life – he grew up in Chad and France, has Mauritian roots and lives in Japan – has inspired him to write some fascinating novels that cross generic and geographical boundaries. This book is the first ever monograph dedicated to his works, which explore themes as various as an African childhood, notions of Frenchness, inter-identities, and post-Fukushima life in Japan. Hybridity is key to his themes, forms and genres, which include – as befits a twenty-first century author – a website, called ‘Tokyo-Time-Table’ and discussed in this study. Kawakami uses an eclectic range of frameworks to analyse Ferrier’s output, ranging from translingualism to Environmental Humanities and Ferrier’s own vision of his oeuvre, which he discloses for the first time in this book in the interview that he grants Kawakami. This interview, first published in this volume, is rich in insights into Ferrier’s views on dreams, Japan, the internet, and collaborating with other artists. This book is an indispensable guide to an author who is one of the rising stars of contemporary French and Francophone literature, and a unique voice that crosses all kinds of borders across the globe.

The cosmopolitan idea of justice is commonly accused of not taking seriously the special ties and commitments of nationality and patriotism. This is because the ideal of impartial egalitarianism, which is central to the cosmopolitan view, seems to be directly opposed to the moral partiality inherent to nationalism and patriotism. In this book, Kok-Chor Tan argues that cosmopolitan justice, properly understood, can accommodate and appreciate nationalist and patriotic commitments, setting limits for these commitments without denying their moral significance. This book offers a defense of cosmopolitan justice against the charge that it denies the values that ordinarily matter to people, and a defence of nationalism and patriotism against the charge that these morally partial ideals are fundamentally inconsistent with the obligations of global justice. Accessible and persuasive, this book will have broad appeal to political theorists and moral philosophers.

This book provides a ringing endorsement of international adoption based on comprehensive evidence from social and biological sciences paired with the author's first-hand experience visiting a Kazakhstani orphanage for nearly a year. A balanced account of the evidence supports international adoption as a viable means of promoting child welfare

Solidarity Beyond Borders is a collection on international ethics by a multidisciplinary team of scholars from four continents. The volume explores ethical and political dimensions of transnational solidarity in the emerging multipolar world. Analyzing global challenges of the world plagued by poverty, diseases, injustice, inequality and environmental degradation, the contributors - rooted in diverse cultures and ethical traditions - voice their support for 'solidarity beyond borders'. Bringing to light both universally shared ethical insights as well as the irreducible diversity of ethical perceptions of particular problems helps the reader to appreciate the chances and the challenges that the global community - more interconnected and yet more ideologically fragmented than ever before - faces in the coming decades. Solidarity Beyond Borders exemplifies an innovative approach to the key issues of global ethics which takes into account the processes of economic globalization, leading to an ever deeper interdependence of peoples and states, as well as the increasing cultural and ideological fragmentation which characterize the emerging multipolar world order.

Friendship studies can model behavior both intellectual and actual