2008-2012 Research Themes
CGES has four international, interdisciplinary research projects including teaching and outreach elements for 2008 through 2012:
After the Violence: The Work of Memory in German Culture and Society (Leader: Marc Silberman, Department of German, UW-Madison)
Contemporary art and literature, the design of monuments and museum exhibitions, commemorative event culture and the visual media contribute to what some have called a memory obsession that saturates the public sphere. This project establishes a network within and outside the University to investigate the relationship between memory and culture, contributing to the increasing complexity of our understanding of memory.
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Education After Violence (Curriculim and Instruction 675, Section 6)
Course: Spring 2009
Instructor: Simone Schweber
In this communally designed seminar, we have chosen to address what education means, what it can achieve and what it looks like, in the wake of violence, at the individual, familial, societal, trans-national and generational levels. Beginning at the level of family violence, we are asking what trauma-specialists can teach classroom educators. Moving then to look at the impact of 'natural disasters' yoked to racist policies, we will examine the after-effects of Hurricane Katrina both for students and education systems. We will be comparing the educational impact of Katrina to the impact of the attacks on 9/11. We then move to look at nationalist violence, focusing on the impacts of the Holocaust, the Rwandan genocide and the former Yugoslavia. Here we will look especially at what it means to educate about violence, how such violence is depicted curricularly, and who learns what. Through this comparative approach, we hope to accomplish a variety of objectives simultaneously--mainly, though, to focus on what we can learn from violence in its wake.
Historicizing the GDR
Seminar: Fall 2008
Instructor: Marc Silberman
As the GDR recedes into an ever more abstract, Cold War past, there is a tendency to regard it from the perspective of its collapse in November 1989, blocking an understanding of the hopes and anxieties that accompanied its forty-year history. Although this seminar cannot provide a comprehensive overview of East Germany’s historical development, it will focus on the complex relationship between culture and power in East Germany, a key concern of modern societies. Many scholars have relegated state socialism to a pre-modern phase of social development that prevented the domain of culture from ever achieving autonomy vis-à-vis the state’s political dictates. Indeed, the state attributed a special value to culture, and artists and intellectuals enjoyed many privileges because the socialist party recognized their powerful contribution to changing the consciousness of the masses. Yet despite, or precisely because of the party’s attempts to control artistic production and reception in its own interests, the disparity between socialist vision and reality constantly generated contradictions and fantasies that permeated the literature, theater, and films produced in the GDR. We will examine a limited corpus of such works with a view toward their validity as a source for learning about East German reality, asking whether such works were a stabilizing element or a force of critical intervention.
Memory Discourses and Postwar German Cinema
Seminar: Spring 2008
Instructor: Marc Silberman
This graduate seminar will investigate critical theories and cinematic practices of how experience becomes memory. During the past fifteen years new forms of memory work have entered the public sphere: in literature, theater, monuments, museums, photography, and perhaps most strikingly in the visual media of film, television, and comics. Accompanying these cultural practices, new discourses have emerged that increasingly dominate the field of cultural studies: reflections on how memory shapes mentalities, identities, symbols, texts, and media. While this social and critical memory boom has evolved with strong transnational and interdisciplinary dimensions, the seminar’s focus will be primarily on Germany, which offers a case study not only of extreme “experience” (devastating war, Holocaust, economic collapse, political division) but also arguably of a protracted and rich trajectory of “coming to terms with the past” (Vergangenheitsbewältigung), with instructive blindspots, repressions, repetitions, and illusions. The first goal of the seminar will be to review the some of the major sources of current memory discourses such as “mémoire collective” (Maurice Halbwachs).
Positioning ‘Modern’ Germany in the World: Nationalism and Cosmopolitanism Colonialism, Migration (Leader: B. Venkat Mani, Department of German, UW-Madison)
Contemporary scholarship on modern Germany reveals an unprecedented attention to nationalism and cosmopolitanism, migration and colonialism. This project investigates these lines of inquiry and “positions” Germany – as a geopolitical unit and as a cultural-linguistic space – within and beyond the boundaries of Europe.
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Transnational Perspectives on German Studies
Seminar: Fall 2009
Instructor: B. Venkat Mani
This course seeks to evaluate the term “transnational” and its efficacy as a qualifier for a discipline such as German Studies, institutionally categorized as a “national language and literature” department. Through discussions on literary, historical, linguistic/pedagogical, philosophical, political, and sociological texts, the course aims to explore multi- and interdisciplinary perspectives on German Studies in the 20th and 21st centuries. Along with spotlighting key texts that form and inform German self-imagination and German imagination of the non-German/non-European ‘Other,’ the course collates and examines reactions to German nationalism and cosmopolitanism, migration, colonialism and modernity from outside the geo-cultural boundaries of Europe. In addition, this course discusses contemporary scholarship on the German-speaking world that focuses on nationalism and cosmopolitanism, migration, and colonialism. The course analyzes the modes in which the above-mentioned political and ideational phenomena have shaped and informed ‘modern’ Germany, and the actual processes by which migrant, colonial, and cosmopolitan subjects have challenged, innovated, and revised the very definitions of the German nation and modernity. The course situates the discipline of German Studies in the larger investigation of the Humanities through filters of globalization and postcolonialism, in order to surmise new directions for the field.
Transforming European Governance (Leader: Jonathan Zeitlin, Sociology, Public Affairs, Political Science, Department of History, UW-Madison)
The projects for this theme will explore the developing forms of European governance underpinning the EU’s capabilities of generating a dense and expanding web of internal rules and policies, and of projecting them outwards as a regional and global actor, examining key dimensions of the union’s internal and external decision-making processes and policies, including the relationship between them.
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Regional Integration and International Governance: The European Union in Comparative Perspective
Seminar: Spring 2009
Instructor: Jonathan Zeitlin
Regional integration is one of the most controversial and widely debated phenomena in international governance and political economy, with the rise of the European Union and the development of other regional organizations and trading blocs such as NAFTA, Mercosur, ASEAN, and the African Union. What are the drivers of regional integration and how extensive are regionalization trends within the global economy? Do regional trade agreements threaten the multilateral trading system, or do they facilitate international economic and regulatory cooperation? Should regional organizations such as the EU or ASEAN be understood as shelters against globalization, challenges to US international hegemony, or building blocks of global governance? How do patterns of integration vary across different world regions, and what accounts for such variations? Are other regions likely to follow the European model, or are looser and more open forms of integration more probable and sustainable elsewhere? This course approaches such questions through a comparative analysis of the European Union, the most highly institutionalized regional organization in the world today.
Work, Family and Education in Europe: Challenges of Globalization and Gender (Leader: Myra Marx Ferree, Department of Sociology and Women’s Studies. UW-Madison)
Advanced capitalist societies such as the US and Germany are all undergoing transformation in the direction of more flexible labor forces, family forms, educational systems and gender relations. By looking closely at transformations happening in Europe and extending outward to other parts of the world, we intend develop theoretically advanced and methodologically sound analyses of intersectional social change, and substantively will consider the role of gender as it crosses these areas
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Globalizing Higher Education and Research for the 'Knowledge Economy'
Seminar: Fall 2009
Instructor: Kris Olds
Geo 675/901 Course Website
