| Kommentar |
This Dutch-German Spring Academy promotes multi-national perspectives in interconnected classrooms. What does it mean to approach the burgeoning field of transnational American Studies in Euro-American contexts? We believe that we need to ground our work in a threefold manner: First regarding the premises, second, regarding the theoretical frameworks, and third regarding geographic dispositions and opportunities for research, case studies, and valorization.
We will focus on triangular perspectives on war, liberation, diversification and urbanization, memory, and memorial mania from World War II to today. How can students and scholars from the Netherlands, Germany, and US trace American legacies in a transnational and comparative fashion? Case studies can involve sites of memory related to World War II, the music of oppression and liberation, cultural politics such as the Fulbright program and Marshall Plan at work in Nijmegen and Essen, sports, tourism and leisure, as well as border studies and the effects of 9/11 and the democratization of the Middle East. A combination of classroom lectures and debates with excursions offers a promising experiment of grounding by comparing triangular approaches and results, for example via online learning platforms. In addition, students equipped with digital communication devices and powerful shareware tools are invited to combine theoretical analysis with the very means they use to retrieve information, namely documentary films, photo essays, or the programming of new smartphone apps to present their research and their own archives, be it oral history, visual archives created with smartphones or discovering archives in the digital and analogue realm. |
