The historic Christian tradition of offering hospitality to strangers provides moral, theological and practical insights for contemporary responses to the needs of refugees, asylum seekers and immigrants. Ancient writers were explicit about the difficulties, blessings, and necessity of welcoming strangers. In this paper, specific components of the tradition, especially as they are evident in the writings of Chrysostom, Calvin and Wesley, are discussed. Suggestions are offered for points of intersection with contemporary concerns related to asylum and immigration.

Die Studien und Texte zur Sozialgeschichte der Literatur (STSL) veröffentlichen seit 1975 herausragende literatur-, geschichts- und kulturwissenschaftliche Arbeiten zu vornehmlich deutscher Literatur vom Mittelalter bis zur Gegenwart. Schwerpunkt der literaturgeschichtlichen und theoretischen Abhandlungen sowie der Quellen- und Materialienbände ist das Verhältnis von literarischem Text und gesellschaftlich-historischem Kontext. Als maßgebliche Publikationsreihe einer seit den 1960er Jahren einflussreichen Sozialgeschichte der Literatur prägt STSL zugleich die literaturwissenschaftliche Diskussion über mögliche Austauschbeziehungen zwischen Literatur-, Geschichts- und Sozialwissenschaften.

We’re solarpunks because the only other options are denial or despair.Utopian Studies, Futures, and Anticipatory Studies all focus, if in different ways, on the past, present, and futures. Utopian narratives anticipate, to cite Abensour, “what is different, the wish for the advent of a radical alterity here and now.”1 A tool that all disciplines use is storytelling—utopias as narratives by definition, Futures and Anticipatory Studies as critical and inquisitive tools. The Solarpunk Futures game taps into these disciplines by creatively exploring (...) still-possible or radically new worlds and societies.The Solarpunk Surf Club is an artists’ collective that has dedicated its work to the... (shrink)

Haraway's 'Cyborg Manifesto' is a key postmodern text and is widely taught in many disciplines as one of the first texts to embrace technology from a leftist and feminist perspective using the metaphor of the cyborg to champion a socialist, postmodern, and anti-identitarian politics. Until Haraway's work, few feminists had turned to theorising science and technology and thus her work quite literally changed the terms of the debate. This article continues to be seen as hugely influential in the field of (...) feminism, particularly postmodern, materialist, and scientific strands. It is also a precursor to cyberfeminism and posthumanism and perhaps anticipates the development of digital humanities. (shrink)

The objective of the present research was two-fold: to provide a new definition of ethical competence, and to clarify the influence of empathy, personal values, and the five-factor model of personality on ethical competence. The present research provides a comprehensive overview about recent approaches and empirically explores the interconnections of these constructs. 366 German undergraduate students were examined in a cross-sectional study that investigated the relationship of empathy, personal values, and the five-factor model of personality with moral judgment competence and (...) counterproductive work behavior as indicators of moral judgment and behavior. We found self-transcendence values to be related to both, high levels of empathy and ethical competence, in contrast to self-enhancement values. Multiple mediation analysis revealed unique effects of empathy on ethical competence through values as mediators. Affective empathy transmitted its effect on ethical competence through benevolence, conformity, tradition, power, and hedonism. Most importantly, perspective taking lost its predictive power when investigated alongside affective empathy dimensions. These results converge to an important role of affective empathy, in particular empathic concern, with regard to personal values and ethical competence. Furthermore, the five-factor model of personality explained variance in measures of ethical competence. Our research suggests that organizational decision makers should consider the role of empathy, personal values, and the five-factor model in their human resource management in order to select employees with high ethical competence. (shrink)

It is with great sadness that we have to share with you the news of the death of Jim Arnold, MBE. Many of us knew him as the efficient treasurer of the Utopian Studies Society, and we are very grateful for his services to the society.His most passionate work, however, as the "the greatest conservator in Europe" was dedicated to Robert Owen's New Lanark.1 For thirty-six years, Jim was the director of the New Lanark Conservation Trust. Both he and Lorna (...) Davidson, long-standing secretary to the Utopian Studies Society and the second director of the New Lanark Conversation Trust, were instrumental in elevating Owen's village to a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2001."The world is in his... (shrink)

In 2015, the filmmaker, artist, and writer Penny Woolcock created an imaginary city, Utopia, at the Roundhouse, London, in collaboration with Block9. It staged a blend of miscellaneous pop-up installations featuring Londoners who were each telling their individual stories about inequality, consumerism, gentrification, education, crime, and social media.1 The narrative soundscapes set within an extraordinary design brought to light the parallel lives yet opposite experiences of people in urban environments and, at the same time, revealed their hopes and dreams.Woolcock's current (...) exhibition at the Museum for Modern Art in Oxford, England, shows a part of this project. The video, Utopia, depicts eight people... (shrink)

ABSTRACT The golden age has not passed; it lies in the future. —Paul Signac.

A wide array of species throughout the animal kingdom has shown the ability to distinguish between quantities. Aside from being important for optimal foraging decisions, this ability seems to also be of great relevance in group-living animals as it allows them to inform their decisions regarding engagement in between-group conflicts based on the size of competing groups. However, it is often unclear whether these animals rely on numerical information alone to make these decisions or whether they employ other cues that (...) may covary with the differences in quantity. In this study we used a touch screen paradigm to investigate the quantity discrimination abilities of two closely related group-living species, wolves and dogs, using a simultaneous visual presentation paradigm. Both species were able to successfully distinguish between stimuli of different quantities up to 32 items and ratios up to 0.80, and their results were in accordance with Weber's law (which predicts worse performances at higher ratios). However, our controls showed that both wolves and dogs may have used continuous, non-numerical cues, such as size and shape of the stimuli, in conjunction with the numerical information to solve this task. In line with this possibility, dogs' performance greatly exceeded that which they had shown in other numerical competence paradigms. We discuss the implications these results may have on these species' underlying biases and numerical capabilities, as well as how our paradigm may have affected the animals' ability to solve the task. (shrink)

Pohl (Chinese studies, Trier U., Germany) and Muller (philosophy, Trier U.) present 16 contributions penned by U.S., German, Taiwanese, and Chinese scholars that explore the ethical viewpoints of their respective philosophical traditions. The collection is meant to be cross-cultural at the same time as it attends to the political/ideological rifts of the Western and Chinese regions. After exploring theoretical issues of understanding ethics in a global context, the contributors explore ethical and political values for Chinese and Western societies respectively. (...) Final papers offer a more explicitly comparative approach, looking at such ideas as morality and the family, medical ethics, and jurisprudential attitudes towards human rights. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR. (shrink)

During the 1970s, both the Crimean Tatars and Meskhetian Turks in Soviet Central Asia compared their plight to that of the Palestinians. The Stalin regime deported both the Crimean Tatars and Meskhetian Turks from their homelands to dispersed settlements in Central Asia. The similarities between the Soviet policies of expelling and permanently excluding the Crimean Tatars and Meskhetian Turks from their homelands and similar Israeli policies towards the Palestinians are not entirely coincidental. The Zionists based their mass expulsion of Palestinians (...) in 1948 and subsequent prohibition on allowing them to return to their homes in part on the Soviet model. The similarities between the two instances of ethnic cleansing are due in large part to this conscious emulation of Stalin's methods by the Zionists. (shrink)

The paper deals with the Lower East Side as a site of memory in children's literature in the United States. Contemporary children's books depict the Lower East Side in migration narratives about Eastern European Jews who came to America around the turn of the last century. They do so both verbally and visually by incorporating an often reproduced photograph that has come to symbolize the imaginary place. The Lower East Side is a Jewish site of immigrant poverty, crowded tenement houses, (...) and sweat shops. In the examples given, it is used to dismantle the image of the Goldeneh Medina. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Millennium Jahrgang: 9 Heft: 1 Seiten: 299-342.

The current epoch is often described by cultural theorists as facing an ontological turn with regard to the question of nature. In the Anthropocene, ‘Mother Nature’ makes space for ‘Gaia’, a nature that is inseparably related to culture. In turn, Gaia has vehemently been criticized as a harmonious figure of whole-ism. Utilizing a psychoanalytic framework, this paper traces the shift from Nature to Gaia through Jacques Lacan's ‘formulas of sexuation’. From a Lacanian standpoint, sexual difference paves the way towards two (...) different ways of relating nature and culture. Addressing the case of ruination, the author engages with the two underlying ontologies taking place in debates on nature: the narrative of Mother Nature based on a ‘masculine’ ontology, and the notion of Gaia as following a ‘feminine’ ontology. The paper concludes by outlining a feminine reading of the Anthropocene that captures nature and culture as ruined and immanently out of joint. (shrink)

Semantische Fragen erwecken seit Jahrzehnten das besondere Interesse verschiedenster Wissenschaften. In den Studien des vorliegenden Bandes werden aus der Sicht der germanistischen Linguistik Antwortangebote versucht, insbesondere zu theoretischen Positionen innerhalb verschiedenster Semantikauffassungen, zur Strukturiertheit der Semantik im Morphem, im Wort, im Syntagma, zu semantischen Relationen im Sprachsystem und im Sprachgebrauch. Ausgehend von übereinstimmenden, jedoch im Detail nicht immer identischen Auffassungen zum Phänomen Sprache, widerspiegeln die Aufsätze den Stand und die Ergebnisse von Forschungen zur deutschen Gegenwartssprache, die in den von den (...) Herausgebern geleiteten Wissenschaftlerkollektiven entstanden. (shrink)

This paper deals with Swinburne’s project of developing a theodicy. We criticise this project from both an external and an internal perspective. Regarding the first strategy, the target of our critique is Swinburne’s construal of God’s attributes—especially omniscience—and the related issue of incorrigible foreknowledge. We argue that Swinburne has to clarify and improve his position to deal with the fideist or the atheist. Regarding the second strategy, we focus on Swinburne’s notion of God’s right. In this context, the parent-child-analogy strikes (...) us as particularly problematic. Hence, we argue that Swinburne should either rethink it or drop it altogether. (shrink)

Art is always political! Only dance is not!Dance has been somewhat ignored in utopian studies as a potential transformatory and political artistic expression, though performance and drama have attracted critical attention. The exhibition Das Echo der Utopien at the Dance Archive in Cologne uses its own archival materials to prove that dance can be political by looking at archival visual material from the sixteenth century to the German dance theater of the 1990s. The underlying assumption of the exhibition is that (...) dance as a physical, bodily form of individual and social expression has been and will be monitored and censored. “Social choreography,” in the words of Hewitt, highlights the interconnection between... (shrink)