Language – Culture – Identity

Abstract: This thematic focus intends to deal with issues underpinned by social sciences and cultural studies, which grapple with the social negotiation of borders and differences in everyday life, in the field of aesthetics and in migrational contexts. The subjects of research are cultural phenomena, which focus on interstices and spawn new identities as well as cultural and linguistic forms of practice as hybridizations. The research issues concern themselves with strategies and practices of multilingualism and interculturality as well as with processings and representations in the media and aesthetic forms of expression. The research generates knowledge on bordering processes and issues of social cohesion in the Greater Region and other border regions.

The thematic focus “Language – Culture – Identity” intends to deal with issues underpinned by social and cultural sciences, which grapple with the social negotiation of borders and differences in everyday life, in the field of aesthetics and in migrational contexts. Such issues relate to theories on borders, hybridity and heterotopias with the aim of analyzing cultural phenomena from a synchronic and diachronic perspective, addressing transnational and regional topics, dealing with inter- and transcultural phenomena as well as construing cultural identities and linguistic practices in interstices.

This thematic focus generates knowledge on mechanisms of bordering processes and on logic of the social cohesion within the Greater Region. This knowledge provides insights on new identities, forms of consciousness and experiences, which may be considered as hybridizations. Territories in which such hybridizations emerge may be described as heterotopia, i.e. as places where diverging systems of ordering and reference co-exist, which in turn spawn different cultural and linguistic forms of practice, which do not or only partially adhere to subordinate rules.

Against this backdrop, the main focus contributes towards the profiling of the as yet under-determined term of the borderland society. Corresponding research issues concern themselves with strategies and practices or multilingualism and interculturality as well as with processings and representations in the media and aesthetic forms of expression. This includes the following issues, for example:

• What effect do political demarcations and shiftings of boundaries have on regional and subordinate systems of ordering?
• To what extend do cultural systems of meaning, aesthetic patterns as well as poetical and political systems of regulation change due to migration?
• When border regions serve as places for the negotiation of identities – in particular of a national, regional, ethnic and gender nature – how have these developed and how are they changing?
• Which creative cross-border strategies are offered in the field of border literature?

The work of the thematic focus thus relates to real and fictitious, geographical and social borderland regions, ranging from historical boundary demarcations up to and including physical and social barriers. The intention is to equally consider spatial and social dimensions as well as linking them with each other. The topics and issues covered by the thematic focus allow and promote different disciplinary approaches and follow on in many ways from the other UniGR-CBS thematic focuses.