Monographs and Editions 2021-2024

This book traces the socio–spatial transformation of Ahmedabad's worker neighbourhoods over the course of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries - during which the city witnessed dramatic and disturbing transformations. Taking the working-class neighbourhood as a scale of social practice, the question of urban change is examined along two axes of investigation: the transformation of local political configurations and forms of political mediation and the shifts in the social geography of the neighbourhood as reflected in the changing regimes of property.

The contributions of the issue examine the interplay between gender and emotion and trace the dynamics of rigidity, instability and fluidity within it. Fluidity, in these essays comes in several forms and registers: as ambivalence, circulation and divergence. Our essays explore the interface between the social and the individual as well as the points of tension or cohesion that appear in ways of feeling (out of) gender. In bringing fluidity to the centre of our analysis, this special issue advances an understanding of gender, emotions and their interactions as phenomena in motion and in the process of becoming, rather than fixed. With a geographical scope encompassing Zambia, Turkey, Soviet Russia and India, and drawing on archival histories, individual biographies, ethnographies and explorations of popular culture, we elaborate how gender categories are strengthened, disturbed or made ambivalent by emotions. more

This Element brings together the history of emotions and temporalities, offering a new perspective on both. Time was often imagined as a movement from the past to the future: the past is gone and the future not yet here. Only present-day subjects could establish relations to other times, recovering history as well as imagining and anticipating the future. In a movement paralleling the emphasis on the porous self, constituted by emotions situated not inside but between subjects, this Element argues for a porous present, which is open to the intervention of ghosts coming from the past and from the future. What needs investigating is the flow between times as much as the creation of boundaries between them, which first banishes the ghosts and then denies their existence. Emotions are the most important way through which subjects situate and understand themselves in time.

Ute Frevert’s groundbreaking publications represent a vital contribution to social and gender history. Early in her career, she mapped the history-making power of individual emotions and explored their historical roots. Her new book presents a carefully curated selection of key essays, unique case studies, and previously unpublished lectures from the last three decades that testifies to the power of emotions in history and the value of the history of emotions.

The book explores the ways in which children and adolescents learn not just how to express emotions that are thought to be pre-existing, but actually how to feel. The volume assumes that the embryonic ability to feel unfolds through a complex dialogue with the social and cultural environment and specifically through reading material. The fundamental formation takes place in childhood and youth. The multi-authored historical monograph uses children's literature and advice manuals to access the training practices and learning processes for a wide range of emotions in the modern age. The volume innovatively draws a framework for broad historical change during the course of the period. Emotional interaction between adult and child gave way to a focus on emotional interactions among children, while gender categories became less distinct. Children were increasingly taught to take responsibility for their own emotional development, to find "authenticity" for themselves.

Following Antonietta and Loris's first kiss in the shadows of the Italian Alps barely a year after the end of the Second World War, the couple was divided by a distance far greater than could ever have been imagined. With Antonietta's family moving to Montreal, migration entered the couple's intimate worlds, stretching the distance between them from the two hundred kilometres separating Ampezzo and Venice to the ocean between Montreal and Venice. Throughout their transatlantic separation, the young lovers fervidly wrote each other until they were reunited in Canada in 1949.

Love and its attendant emotions not only spur migration—they forge our response to the people who leave their homes in search of new lives. Emotional Landscapes looks at the power of love, and the words we use to express it, to explore the immigration experience. The authors focus on intimate emotional language and how languages of love shape the ways human beings migrate but also create meaning for migrants, their families, and their societies. Looking at sources ranging from letters of Portuguese immigrants in the 1880s to tweets passed among immigrant families in today's Italy, the essays explore the sentimental, sexual, and political meanings of love. The authors also look at how immigrants and those around them use love to justify separation and loss, and how love influences us to privilege certain immigrants—wives, children, lovers, refugees—over others. Affecting and perceptive, Emotional Landscapes moves from war and transnational families to gender and citizenship to explore the crossroads of migration and the history of emotion.

Sex education films attempted to shape people's attitudes and behavior throughout the 20th century. They circulated around Europe, traveled to the United States, and back. Their visual and epistemological frame of reference were the fields of medicine, education, and psychology, something that was reflected in audience research as well. Emotions were constantly evoked in the name of bodily health, but the emotional culture around them changed. In World War I, knowledge about syphilis was supposed to induce fear and thus discourage soldiers from unprotected sexual contact. In Weimar cinema, the population was mobilized against "false shame." At the battlefield cinemas under National Socialism, fear was replaced by feelings of unconditional trust. During the occupation, films demanded understanding, especially for the younger generation. This then had to be nurtured through "positive emotions" into a "socialist personality" in the GDR, or into self-management in West Germany. The fight against AIDS fueled the merging of emotions and forms of knowledge transmission. The history of sex education films therefore tells us not only about how a global media culture took shape, but also how it was controlled. Anja Laukötter's habilitation was awarded the Otto-Hintze-Prize by the Claudia-and-Michael-Borgolte-Foundation and has now been published as a book.