Can culture be translated? It is not often that we are confronted with a question that becomes all the more difficult, the easier it is to answer: no.

Beim Versuch, aktuelle Entwicklungen der Migration anschaulich und die darauf reagierende Politik plausibel zu machen, spielen Karten und Diagramme eine entscheidende Rolle. In der Forschung, in politischen Aushandlungssprozessen und in der medialen Berichterstattung dienen sie der Repräsentation angeblich objektiver Verhältnisse. Im Rahmen des Projektes MigMap wurden gängige Kartierungsverfahren kritisch reflektiert und ein eigenes Mapping des aktuellen Europäischen Migrationsregimes entwickelt.

Contrary to widespread condemnation in the German mainstream press, the term precariat does not designate a dissociated lower class (“abgehängte Unterschicht”), but rather a striving for new forms of organizing in dispersion. Precariat is neither a state that empirically describes a class, nor a function of the teleology of a class in itself. Instead it is a becoming, a struggle, a question.

Critical Whiteness Studies are a flourishing project – both within the academy and beyond. Drawing on current publications in this field in German, and focusing on the notions of whiteness and of white privilege which are employed here, Ina points to some of the particular strenghts, as well as to current limits of the whiteness debate.

Ein zentrales Thema der Kritischen Weißseinsforschung ist die Problematisierung von Privilegien. Doch in ihrer auf Normen fokussierten Analyse inthronisiert sie nicht selten erneut ein weißes Subjekt zur eigenen Immunisierung.

There is a recurring debate within and outside Babels, the international network that provides volunteer interpretation in the Social Forums: is Babels a service provider whose major concern should be quality in interpretation or a political actor that helps mobilize people through its choices and practices? The answer is relevant to the nature of the Social Forums.

There is a linguistic code peculiar to the housing estates of the French banlieue. Within this code, which defies the long-established authority of the written language, oral exercises displaying a high degree of verbal artistry are stimulating the rediscovery of oral culture. People engage in “digs”, “verbal jousting” and “slamming”, word games that trace elegant and rugged metaphorical arabesques whose fury is akin to the fury expressed in graffiti, rap or even riots. With uncompromising frankness and biting wit, language works on the misunderstandings that arise from ordinary encounters and life in the suburban housing estates.