Month: March 2021

Tensions between religion and secularism underlie many ongoing issues in today’s society. They divide not only the West and the East, or the global North and the global South, but also the urban and the rural, the young and the old. Yet the oppositions do not seem to be absolute: atheist churches have been established… Continue reading 32.1 | Religion and Secularism

The relation between fact and fiction has been a central topic for comparative literary studies ever since its inception. Because of the literary text’s ambiguous ontological status, authors are (nominally) at liberty to write anything without being held accountable for their artistic creation. As Jonathan Culler puts it, the literary text “does not presume a… Continue reading 31.2 | Fact and Fiction

Recent decades have seen the emergence of animal studies in a wide variety of disciplines that cut across the natural sciences, the social sciences, and the humanities. In accordance with Donna Haraway’s assertion that it “matters which worlds world worlds and which stories tell stories” (Cosmopolitan Animals, vii), scholars working in the field have taken… Continue reading 31.1 | Animal Studies

Since the late 1990s and early 2000s, the concept of precarity has emerged as a central point of reference in economic, philosophical, and sociological discourse, and has become a rallying cry for contemporary resistance movements. Precarity refers to the structural financial and existential insecurity brought about by the advent of neoliberalism, the dismantling of the… Continue reading 30.2 | Precarious work, precarious life