Unrivaled in scope and impact, the annual Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences is the convergence of approximately 70 scholarly associations, each holding their annual conference under one umbrella. Now in its 84th year, this flagship event is much more than Canada’s largest gathering of scholars. Congress brings together academics, researchers, policy-makers, and practitioners to share findings, refine ideas, and build partnerships that will help shape the Canada of tomorrow. For more information and the program please visit ideas-idees.ca
Berghahn is delighted to inform you that our titles will be present at Congress 2016, May 28 – June 3, 2016 in, Calgary, AB, via our colleagues at University of Ottawa Press. Please look for University of Ottawa Press stand and browse the latest selection of Berghahn Books and pick up some free journal samples. If you are unable to attend we would like to offer a special 25% discount. For the next 30 days please visit our website and use discount code CON16 at check out.
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Here is a preview of some of our titles on display in our core subjects of Anthropology, Cultural Studies, Film & Media Studies, Environmental Studies, Genocide Studies, Gender Studies, History, Medical Anthropology and Politics:
THE DEVIL’S RICHES
A Modern History of Greed
Jared Poley
Volume 11, Spektrum: Publications of the German Studies Association
A seeming constant in the history of capitalism, greed has nonetheless undergone considerable transformations over the last five hundred years. This multilayered account offers a fresh take on an old topic, arguing that greed was experienced as a moral phenomenon and deployed to make sense of an unjust world. Focusing specifically on the interrelated themes of religion, economics, and health—each of which sought to study and channel the power of financial desire—Jared Poley shows how evolving ideas about greed became formative elements of the modern experience.
Read Introduction
Forthcoming in Paperback
MATTERS OF TESTIMONY
Interpreting the Scrolls of Auschwitz
Nicholas Chare and Dominic Williams
In 1944, members of the Sonderkommando—the “special squads,” composed almost exclusively of Jewish prisoners, who ensured the smooth operation of the gas chambers and had firsthand knowledge of the extermination process—buried on the grounds of Auschwitz-Birkenau a series of remarkable eyewitness accounts of Nazi genocide. This careful and penetrating study examines anew these “Scrolls of Auschwitz,” which were gradually recovered, in damaged and fragmentary form, in the years following the camp’s liberation. It painstakingly reconstructs their historical context and textual content, revealing complex literary works that resist narrow moral judgment and engage difficult questions about the limits of testimony.
Check out Nicholas Chare and Dominic Williams’s piece on Slate’s The Vault and also Searching for Feelings: The Scrolls of Auschwitz and Son of Saul on the Berghahn Blog.
Read Introduction: Matters of Testimony
Paperback Original
GIRLHOOD AND THE POLITICS OF PLACE
Edited by Claudia Mitchell and Carrie Rentschler
Examining context-specific conditions in which girls live, learn, work, play, and organize deepens the understanding of place-making practices of girls and young women worldwide. Focusing on place across health, literary and historical studies, art history, communications, media studies, sociology, and education allows for investigations of how girlhood is positioned in relation to interdisciplinary and transnational research methodologies, media environments, geographic locations, history, and social spaces. This book offers a comprehensive reading on how girlhood scholars construct and deploy research frameworks that directly engage girls in the research process.
This title is available Open Access under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License and published in partnership with Knowledge Unlatched.
In Paperback
THE HISTORY OF THE STASI
East Germany’s Secret Police, 1945-1990
Jens Gieseke
Translated from the German by David Burnett
The East German Ministry for State Security stood for Stalinist oppression and all-encompassing surveillance. The “shield and sword of the party,” it secured the rule of the Communist Party for more than forty years, and by the 1980s it had become the largest secret-police apparatus in the world, per capita. Jens Gieseke tells the story of the Stasi, a feared secret-police force and a highly professional intelligence service. He inquires into the mechanisms of dictatorship and the day-to-day effects of surveillance and suspicion. Masterful and thorough at once, he takes the reader through this dark chapter of German postwar history, supplying key information on perpetrators, informers, and victims. In an assessment of post-communist memory politics, he critically discusses the consequences of opening the files and the outcomes of the Stasi debate in reunified Germany. A major guide for research on communist secret-police forces, this book is considered the standard reference work on the Stasi and has already been translated into a number of Eastern European languages.
Read Introduction: Ten Years and Ten Days
Paperback Original
THE MERKEL REPUBLIC
An Appraisal
Edited by Eric Langenbacher
“…the book is a must-read for those who seek to get behind the headlines about the chancellor.” · Foreign Affairs
Chancellor Angela Merkel has dominated German and European politics for almost a decade. Her stellar reputation, sound political and economic management, and popularity inside of Germany resulted in one of the most decisive electoral victories for her conservative parties in postwar Germany—the country can rightfully be deemed the Merkel Republic. Bringing together German politics experts from both sides of the Atlantic, this volume addresses the campaign, results, and consequences of the 2013 Bundestag election. Chapters delve into a diverse array of themes, including immigrant-origin and women candidates, the fate of the small parties, and the prospects for the SPD, the new coalition partner, as well as more general structural trends like the Europeanization and cosmopolitanization of German politics.
Read Introduction: Merkel’s Nachsommermӓrchen?
Pocket Size
THE EVENT OF CHARLIE HEBDO
Imaginaries of Freedom and Control
Edited by Alessandro Zagato
Afterword by Bruce Kapferer
Volume 15, Critical Interventions: A Forum for Social Analysis
The January 2015 shooting at the headquarters of satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo in Paris and the subsequent attacks that took place in the Île-de-France region were staggeringly violent events. They sparked an enormous discussion among citizens and intellectuals from around Europe and beyond. By analyzing the effects the attacks have had in various spheres of social life, including the political, ideology, collective imaginaries, the media, and education, this collection of essays aims to serve as a contribution as well as a critical response to that discussion. The volume observes that the events being attributed to Charlie Hebdo go beyond sensationalist reports of the mainstream media, transcend the spatial confines of nation states, and lend themselves to an ever-expanding number of mutating discursive formations.
Read Introduction: The Event of Charlie Hebdo – Imaginaries of Freedom and Control
In Paperback
NATIONALISM AND THE CINEMA IN FRANCE
Political Mythologies and Film Events, 1945-1995
Hugo Frey
It is often taken for granted that French cinema is intimately connected to the nation’s sense of identity and self-confidence. But what do we really know about that relationship? What are the nuances, insider codes, and hidden history of the alignment between cinema and nationalism? Hugo Frey suggests that the concepts of the ‘political myth’ and ‘the film event’ are the essential theoretical reference points for unlocking film history. Nationalism and the Cinema in France offers new arguments regarding those connections in the French case, examining national elitism, neo-colonialism, and other exclusionary discourses, as well as discussing for the first time the subculture of cinema around the extreme right Front National. Key works from directors such as Michel Audiard, Jean-Luc Godard, Jean-Pierre Melville, Marcel Pagnol, Jean Renoir, Jacques Tati, François Truffaut, and others provide a rich body of evidence.
Read Introduction: From International ‘High Art’ to the Parisian Political Melee
In Paperback
THE SOCIAL LIFE OF WATER
Edited by John Richard Wagner
Everywhere in the world communities and nations organize themselves in relation to water. We divert water from rivers, lakes, and aquifers to our homes, workplaces, irrigation canals, and hydro-generating stations. We use it for bathing, swimming, recreation, and it functions as a symbol of purity in ritual performances. In order to facilitate and manage our relationship with water, we develop institutions, technologies, and cultural practices entirely devoted to its appropriation and distribution, and through these institutions we construct relations of class, gender, ethnicity, and nationality. Relying on first-hand ethnographic research, the contributors to this volume examine the social life of water in diverse settings and explore the impacts of commodification, urbanization, and technology on the availability and quality of water supplies. Each case study speaks to a local set of issues, but the overall perspective is global, with representation from all continents.
New & Revised Paperback Edition
RUSSIAN POSTMODERNISM
New Perspectives on Post-Soviet Culture
Mikhail N. Epstein, Alexander A. Genis, and Slobodanka M. Vladiv-Glover
Translated by Slobodanka M. Vladiv-Glover
“The most comprehensive examination of Russian postmodern thought available in English.” · World Literature Today
Recent decades have been decisive for Russia not only politically but culturally as well. The end of the Cold War has enabled Russia to take part in the global rise and crystallization of postmodernism. This volume investigates the manifestations of this crucial trend in Russian fiction, poetry, art, and spirituality, demonstrating how Russian postmodernism is its own unique entity. It offers a point of departure and valuable guide to an area of contemporary literary-cultural studies insufficiently represented in English-language scholarship. This second edition includes additional essays on the topic and a new introduction examining the most recent developments.
In Paperback
ENVIRONMENT AND CITIZENSHIP IN LATIN AMERICA
Natures, Subjects and Struggles
Edited by Alex Latta and Hannah Wittman
Published in Association with the Centre for Latin American Research and Documentation (CEDLA), Amsterdam
Volume 101, CEDLA Latin America Studies
Scholarship related to environmental questions in Latin America has only recently begun to coalesce around citizenship as both an empirical site of inquiry and an analytical frame of reference. This has led to a series of new insights and perspectives, but few efforts have been made to bring these various approaches into a sustained conversation across different social, temporal and geographic contexts. This volume is the result of a collaborative endeavour to advance debates on environmental citizenship, while simultaneously and systematically addressing broader theoretical and methodological questions related to the particularities of studying environment and citizenship in Latin America. Providing a window onto leading scholarship in the field, the book also sets an ambitious agenda to spark further research.
In Paperback
PREGNANCY IN PRACTICE
Expectation and Experience in the Contemporary US
Sallie Han
Volume 25, Fertility, Reproduction and Sexuality
Babies are not simply born—they are made through cultural and social practices. Based on rich empirical work, this book examines the everyday experiences that mark pregnancy in the US today, such as reading pregnancy advice books, showing ultrasound “baby pictures” to friends and co-workers, and decorating the nursery in anticipation of the new arrival. These ordinary practices of pregnancy, the author argues, are significant and revealing creative activities that produce babies. They are the activities through which babies are made important and meaningful in the lives of the women and men awaiting the child’s birth. This book brings into focus a topic that has been overlooked in the scholarship on reproduction and will be of interest to professionals and expectant parents alike.
Read Chapter 1. Introduction: Ordinary Pregnancy
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Berghahn Journals:
Boyhood Studies
An Interdisciplinary Journal
Boyhood Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal is a peer-reviewed journal providing a forum for the discussion of boyhood, young masculinities, and boys’ lives by exploring the full scale of intricacies, challenges, and legacies that inform male and masculine developments. Boyhood Studies is committed to a critical and international scope and solicits both articles and special issue proposals from a variety of research fields including, but not limited to, the social and psychological sciences, historical and cultural studies, philosophy, and social, legal, and health studies.
One of the core missions of the journal is to initiate conversation across disciplines, research angles, and intellectual viewpoints. Both theoretical and empirical contributions fit the journal’s scope with critical literature reviews and review essays also welcomed. Possible topics include boyish and tomboyish genders; boys and schooling; boys and (post)feminisms; the folklore, mythology, and poetics of “male development”; son-parent and male student-teacher relations; young masculinities in the digital and postdigital ages; young sexualities; as well as representations of boyhoods across temporalities, geographies, and cultures.
WINNER OF THE 2009 AAP/PSP PROSE AWARD FOR BEST NEW JOURNAL IN THE SOCIAL SCIENCES & HUMANITIES!
Girlhood Studies
An Interdisciplinary Journal
Visit the new Girlhood Studies website here!
Girlhood Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal is a peer-reviewed journal providing a forum for the critical discussion of girlhood from a variety of disciplinary perspectives, and for the dissemination of current research and reflections on girls’ lives to a broad, cross-disciplinary audience of scholars, researchers, practitioners in the fields of education, social service and health care and policy makers. International and interdisciplinary in scope, it is committed to feminist, anti-discrimination, anti-oppression approaches and solicits manuscripts from a variety of disciplines.
Conflict and Society
Advances in Research
Publishing peer-reviewed articles by international scholars, Conflict and Society expands the field of conflict studies by using ethnographic inquiry to establish new fields of research and interdisciplinary collaboration. An opening special section presents general articles devoted to a topic or region followed by a section featuring conceptual debates on key problems in the study of organized violence. Review articles and topical overviews offer navigational assistance across the vast and varied terrain of conflict research, and comprehensive reviews of new books round out each volume. With special attention paid to ongoing debates on the politics and ethics of conflict studies research, including military-academic cooperation, Conflict and Society will be an essential forum for scholars, researchers, and policy makers in the fields of anthropology, sociology, political science, and development studies.
An Interdisciplinary Journal of Experience, Perception, and Display
Screen Bodies is a peer-reviewed journal focusing on the intersection of Screen Studies and Body Studies across disciplines, institutions, and media. It is a forum promoting research on various aspects of embodiment on and in front of screens through articles, reviews, and interviews. The journal considers moving and still images, whether from the entertainment industry, information technologies, or news and media outlets, including cinema, television, the internet, and gallery spaces. It investigates the private experiences of portable and personal devices and the institutional ones of medical and surveillance imaging. Screen Bodies addresses the portrayal, function, and reception of bodies on and in front of screens from the perspectives of gender and sexuality, feminism and masculinity, trans* studies, queer theory, critical race theory, cyborg studies, and dis/ability studies.