Stratified Belonging Layered Subjectivities

Recent studies show that immigration remains a top concern for Germans, with 46% expressing doubts that refugees can successfully integrate into German society. But what determines the successful integration of refugees? And what shapes their willingness to integrate into German society? Through qualitative interviews with both refugees and migrants, I investigate the relationship between their experience with discrimination and integration in Berlin. Importantly, I demonstrate how one’s appearance, ethnicity, religion, and so forth, can influence one’s experience with discrimination and integration trajectory; and through the multiple subjectivities I uncover, I show how complex the project of integration actually is. Additionally, by juxtaposing the experiences of post-2015 refugees with those of earlier Turkish and Arab immigrants, I highlight how the poor integration of earlier immigrants can adversely affect the integration of subsequent immigrants. Taken together, these insights challenge the image of Berlin as a cosmopolitan city. We extend our heartfelt thanks to the Vahabzadeh Foundation for financially supporting the publication of best works by young researchers of the Graduate Institute, giving a priority to those who have been awarded academic prizes for their master’s dissertations.

This insightful book explores the spread of network imagery in three areas of sociology – social capital, social support, and China – using as its protagonist a man active in all three: Nan Lin. Social Capital, Social Support and Stratification provides a unique combination of Nan Lin’s core contributions to the field presented alongside new and original analyses.

As the first volume of a two-volume set on new media users in China, this book approaches the subject from a macro level by regarding users as constructive nodes within networks, thereby giving insights into the interaction between users and new media and among individuals within the ambit of new media. The author revisits the roles of the typical new media user that has changed from that of a passive "audience member" to a basic unit of the network itself, acting as both a node in the communication network, social network, and service network and also a link between the three. In viewing users as nodes functioning in communication networks and social networks, this volume unravels the new landscapes of communication of the new media era and the consequent profound changes in social relationships, interpersonal connection modes and different methods of interaction. In terms of their role in service networks resting upon the network economy, new media users not only are consumers with personalized needs, but also serve as service guides, resource contributors, and even major productive forces. This title will be a must-read for scholars, students and media professionals interested in the topics of internet communication, new media usage, and media and society as a whole.

This collection offers a critical assessment of transcendentalism, the understanding of consciousness, absolutized as a system of a priori laws of the mind, that was advanced by Kant and Husserl. As these studies show, transcendentalism critically informed 20th Century phenomenological investigation into such issues as temporality, historicity, imagination, objectivity and subjectivity, freedom, ethical judgment, work, praxis. Advances in science have now provoked a questioning of the absolute prerogatives of consciousness. Transcendentalism is challenged by empirical reductionism. And recognition of the role the celestial sphere plays in life on planet earth suggests that a radical shift of philosophy's center of gravity be made away from absolute consciousness and toward the transcendental forces at play in the architectonics of the cosmos.

This book discusses approaches towards landscapes under pressure and transformation, and the importance of unprejudiced and experimental investigations to reveal its natural and cultural complexity. Layered Landscapes Lofoten, Understanding of Complexity, Otherness and Change aims to challenge internalized concepts about how landscapes are considered and investigated, to open for alternative research, and legitimize subjective, singular and experimental approaches as valid and appreciated as a foundation for an informed process. These approaches take into consideration both the landscape and the practices taking place in the landscape, that are consistently full of individual and collective stories and experiences—the complexity created in both time and space, which influences our societies not only as traces of historical events, but as present realities and even expectations and what is to become. Under the concepts of complexity, imbrication, vulnerability, fieldwork, flexibility and reorientation ideas are developed, all based in the contemporary and historic layers of the dramatic and contested landscapes of the Lofoten Islands in Northern Norway—where pressure from political decisions and structural changes, increasing tourism, a potential new oil industry and uncontrollable global forces’ impact on nature and societies and cause continuous transformation and alteration of landscapes and topography, surrounding the traditional and modern fishing communities.

The main theme of this book is collective subjectivity, analysed especially in connection with the work of Marx, Parsons, Giddens and Habermas, but also addressing the manifold tendencies of sociological theory, from its inception to the present. The book supports the idea that there is a conceptual shortcoming in the most relevant contemporary research programs in sociological theory, despite some recent efforts to re-develop concepts of collective actor, class or social movement. After the fragmentation of the sixties a number of synthetical approaches emerged. Some writers, such as Touraine, Laclau and Mouffe, Olson, Coleman, Hindess, Mouzelis and Eder have proposed some versions of concepts of collective subjectivity, focusing on collective actors, classes, genders, social movements, organisations and collective utilitarian action. But they do not, in terms of general conceptual construction, go further than Parsons and Marx: they often fail to match their original formulations. The concept of collective subjectivity is introduced to bring together these diverse approaches, which are synthesised and receive a more general definition. Moreover, this new concept is directly linked to those contemporary syntheses.

Spaces of Longing and Belonging contains theoretical and interpretative studies of spatiality centered on a variety of literary and cultural contexts. The essays provide a collection of innovative scholarship on central questions relating to literary spatiality in a context of increased global awareness.

Phenomenology and existentialism transformed understanding and experience of the Twentieth Century to their core. They had strikingly different inspirations and yet the two waves of thought became merged as both movements flourished. The present collection of research devoted to these movements and their unfolding interaction is now especially revealing. The studies in this first volume to be followed by two succeeding ones, range from the predecessors of existentialism – Kierkegaard/Jean Wahl, Nietzsche, to the work of its adherents – Shestov, Berdyaev, Unamuno, Blondel, Blumenberg, Heidegger and Mamardashvili, Dufrenne and Merleau-Ponty to existentialism’s congruence with Christianity or with atheism. Among the leading Husserlian insights are treated essence and experience, the place of questioning, ethics and intentionality, temporality and passivity and the life world. The following book will uncover the perennial concerns guiding the wondrous interplay of these two inspirational sources.