Featured Research Projects
Sergio Loza
Heritage Learning Teaching: Critical Language Awareness Perspective for Research and Pedagogy
Professor Loza’s co-edited volume, Heritage Learning, introduced the theory, research and classroom application of critical approaches to the teaching of minoritized heritage learners, foregrounding sociopolitical concerns in language education. Both Beaudrie and Loza open with a global analysis, and expert contributors connect a focus on speakers of Spanish as a heritage language in the United States to broad issues in heritage language education in other contexts.
Lesley Jo Weaver
Speaking of Race
How did race become such a flash point in modern society, and why does it remain contentious in our genomic age? In this first-of-its-kind trans-disciplinary podcast, biological anthropologist Jim Bindon joins with cultural anthropologist Lesley Jo Weaver and historian of science Erik L. Peterson to explore our species' centuries long debates over how to define biological and behavioral difference, and why it continues to matter today.
Rachel DiNitto
Fukushima Fiction
Professor DiNitto’s book Fukushima Fiction: The Literary landscape of Japan’s Triple Disaster introduces readers to the powerful literary works that have emerged out of Japan’s triple disaster. The book provides a broad and nuanced picture of the varied literary responses to this ongoing tragedy, focusing on “serious fiction” (junbungaku), the one area of Japanese cultural production that has consistently addressed the disaster and its aftermath. The book is a winner of the Choice Magazine Outstanding Academic Title 2020.
Neue Heimat(en): A Contentious Concept Reconsidered
Edited by Joscha Klueppel
This latest issue of the interdisciplinary German Studies journal Konturen (https://journals.oregondigital.org/konturen/index) presents work by young scholars and writers offering new perspectives on Heimat—a notion that continues to challenge and to polarize opinion. For some, including contributors to the collection Eure Heimat ist unser Albtraum (2019) and others, the term would best be abandoned in light of its loaded history. On the other side of the coin is the possible project of pluralizing and re-valuing the concept for the purposes of more open and inclusive society. Scholarly articles and review essays considering possible trajectories of such a reconsideration are complemented by powerful personal pieces written by three authors whose own biographies intersect with questions of cultural transfer that a reimagined conception of home and belonging does well to engage.
Contents:
- Jonas Teupert on Feridun Zaimoğlu’s transformative uses of linguistic provocation
- Tobias Lehmann on Heimat as utopia in Ernst Bloch
- Hevin Karakurt on “Deheimatization” in recent German novels by Kurdish authors
- Kyra Mevert travels to Istanbul but one would not call it going home
- Ali Can makes the case for a pluralistic Heimat defined by values rather than by roots
- Didem Uca reflects on what it means to unpack what we carry
- Nora Krug, Belonging (Scribner, 2018) reviewed by Ryan Scott Walke
- Dana Bönisch, Jil Runia and Hana Zehnschetzler (eds.), Heimat revisited (De Gruyter, 2020) and Svenja Kück, Heimat und Migration (Transcript, 2021) reviewed by Filip Kletnikov and Ronja Zimmermann