WueGlobal

Contributions

WueGlobal supported collaboration, program, and curriculum development for:

Environmental Humanities (EH) at Julius-Maximilians-Universität Würzburg as a network for EH work across disciplines and institutional boundaries.

German-French Studies: Language, Culture Digital Competence (Romance Studies JMU Würzburg – German Studies Université de Caen Normandy) as a binational Bachelor of Arts program with a focus on intercultural exchange and digital competencies.

JMU Cultural Studies as a teaching, research, and collaboration initiative dedicated to examining culture in terms of material, symbolic, and aesthetic practices as well as media technologies. A key question posed by cultural studies is how such practices and technologies express, constitute, negotiate and/or transform power relations. From its beginnings and consequently supported by WueGlobal, JMU Cultural Studies has explored these issues in dialogue with international partners and perspectives.

Irish Studies Würzburg (ISWÜ) as a JMU-based cooperative with a robust exchange network under the umbrella of the European Federation of Associations and Centres of Irish Studies (EFACIS).

Transatlantic Cultures & Histories as a framework for cooperation between Flagler College and JMU Würzburg with a particular focus on the productive intersections between the cultural landscapes created by regional and global histories, the multidisciplinary perspectives of transnational English and American Studies, and the wide-ranging liberal arts and education perspectives represented at Flagler College. The online Monuments & Memory project and exhibition space aims to not merely document ongoing seminar collaborations on issues of cultural memory and history, but also to facilitate dialogue with the wider public and provide resources for further education.

Writing to Collaborate: Our Approach to Transnational Collaboration and Forward-Facing Public Humanities

“Writing to Learn” and “Writing Across the Curriculum” (WAC) models have been central to the work of the Schreibzentrum | Writing Center from its beginnings. These models emphasize writing as a means of learning applicable to all disciplines: from the traditionally writing-focused humanities to the social and natural sciences. Equally important in these models, writing is understood as a process of active engagement with materials, ideas, and, hardly least, other writers and readers.

The WueGlobal projects built on these foundations. Convinced that writing is a key skill in the digital age, writing was installed as a key focus and central activity within the collaborations. In our Writing to Collaborate model, writing not only serves learning and allows for active engagement, but creates frameworks of intensified collaboration across national and digital boundaries.

Collaboration becomes an expanded dialogue in the Monuments & Memory project and exhibition space. The online forum “faces forward” in addressing itself not simply to an academic or university audience, but to a wider public. A further aim of such a Public Humanities approach is to demonstrate how humanities inquiry engages with and offers insight into key questions of our times. Accordingly, the space showcases collaborative student projects and writing in a range of media: from textual and visual essays to compact podcasts and videocasts. The contributions highlight further resources for learning, but are also themselves Open Education Resources (OER).

The Writing to Collaborate approach and Public Humanties commitments of WueGlobal continue in two open-access and internationally orientated publication series with Würzburg University Press (WUP):

Challenges of Modernity – A Platform for Innovative Engaged Scholarship in the Humanities, series editors Catrin Gersdorf and MaryAnn Snyder-Körber

The first installment in the series edited by Lena Pfeifer, Molina Klinger, and Hannah Nelson-Teutsch explores Climate, Change, Global Perspectives (2022) with creative, academic, and dialogical contributions drawn from the international and multilingual online WueGlobal Summer Symposium in 2021.

JMU Cultural Studies – Dedicated to Reinvestigating the Cultural Studies Tradition and Retooling its Approaches for the Contemporary World, series editors Zeno Ackermann and MaryAnn Snyder-Körber

The series launched with a transnational collection bringing together the work of young scholars based in Germany, India, and the United States under the editorship of Tobias Jetter. Global Cultural Studies? Engaged Scholarship between National and Transnational Frames (2023) thereby transported the lively debates of the Cultural Studies Colloquium (CSC) and WueGlobal cooperations with Indian partners onto the print / digital page.

We look forward to sharing our insights from the WueGlobal projects as well as ongoing developments in writing-focused higher education pedagogies, international academic collaboration, and forward-facing scholarship. We welcome inquiries and other opportunities to enter into dialogue.

Prof. Dr. MaryAnn Snyder-Körber (Professor of American Cultural Studies) & Dr. Petra Zaus (Director Schreibzentrum | Writing Center der JMU)