Building on the new critical historiography about the evolution of the European state, the book analyses how administrators, scientists, popular publicists and other actors tried to redefine the realms of state action in the "Sattelzeit" (Koselleck). By focussing on the specific strategies of these actors and on the transnational circulation and dissemination of state related knowledge itself, the contributors of the book highlight the fluidity and the interconnections of the European debate in the crucial period of the development of the modern nation-state and its administration. They study the common European features of the evolution of a new type of statehood built upon multiple circulations and transfers that forged administrative practices in the different fields of state action. Analysing important fields of expertise ranging from agricultural knowledge, mining sciences to anthropological knowledge, which laid the basis for the new "scientific" foundations of administration, the book underlines the necessity of a re-evaluation of the classical approaches to the history of state in the 18th and 19th centuries.

This book investigates transnational processes through the analytic lens of cultural performance. Structured around key concepts of performance studies––commons, skills, and traces––this edited collection addresses the political, normative, and historical implications of cultural performances beyond the limits of the (US) nation-state. These three central aspects of performance function as entryways to inquiries into transnational processes and allow the authors to shift the discussion away from text-centered approaches to intercultural encounters and to bring into focus the dynamic field that opens up between producer, art work, context, setting, and audience in the moment of performance as well as in its afterlife. The chapters provide fresh, performance-based approaches to notions of transcultural mobility and circulation, transnational cultural experience and knowledge formation, transnational public spheres, and identities’ rootedness in both specific local places and diasporic worlds beyond the written word. This book will be of great interest to scholars and students of American studies, performance studies, and transnational studies

The university system, both in America and abroad, has always claimed a universal significance for its research and educational models. At the same time, many universities, particularly in Europe, have also claimed another role--as custodians of national culture. Transnational Intellectual Networks explores this apparent contradiction and its resulting intellectual tensions with illuminating essays that span the nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century nationalization movements in Europe through the postwar era.

Der Sammelband widmet sich der Analyse transnationaler Expertise - eines Themas, das in jüngerer Zeit beträchtliche Aufmerksamkeit in der Sozial- und Geschichtswissenschaft auf sich gezogen hat. Ihren Ausdruck fand die Forschung in der Entwicklung von Konzepten über transnationale Expertennetzwerke, Epistemische Gemeinschaften oder Gemeinschaften von Praktikern. Dennoch mangelt es bislang weiterhin an systematischem Wissen über die Funktionsweise transnationaler Expertengruppen und die Wechselbeziehungen, die es zwischen ihnen und Akteuren und Organisationen der transnationalen Politik gibt. Vor dem Hintergrund, dass transnationale Expertise bereits seit geraumer Zeit eine wichtige Rolle in der öffentlichen Politik spielt, nimmt dieser Band eine interdisziplinäre Perspektive ein und präsentiert Beiträge aus der Politikwissenschaft, der Soziologie und der Geschichtswissenschaft. Mit Beiträgen von Ingvild Bode, Christian Henrich-Franke, Robert Kaiser, Christian Lahusen, Alexander Reinfeld, Lukas Schemper, Andrea Schneiker und Carola Maria Westermeier.

Itineraries of Expertise contends that experts and expertise played fundamental roles in the Latin American Cold War. While traditional Cold War histories of the region have examined diplomatic, intelligence, and military operations and more recent studies have probed the cultural dimensions of the conflict, the experts who constitute the focus of this volume escaped these categories. Although they often portrayed themselves as removed from politics, their work contributed to the key geopolitical agendas of the day. The paths traveled by the experts in this volume not only traversed Latin America and connected Latin America to the Global North, they also stretch traditional chronologies of the Latin American Cold War to show how local experts in the early twentieth century laid the foundation for post–World War II development projects, and how Cold War knowledge of science, technology, and the environment continues to impact our world today. These essays unite environmental history and the history of science and technology to argue for the importance of expertise in the Latin American Cold War.

Based on a series of case studies of globally distributed media and their reception in different parts of the world, Imagining the Global reflects on what contemporary global culture can teach us about transnational cultural dynamics in the 21st century. A focused multisited cultural analysis that reflects on the symbiotic relationship between the local, the national, and the global, it also explores how individuals’ consumption of global media shapes their imagination of both faraway places and their own local lives. Chosen for their continuing influence, historical relationships, and different geopolitical positions, the case sites of France, Japan, and the United States provide opportunities to move beyond common dichotomies between East and West, or United States and “the rest.” From a theoretical point of view, Imagining the Global endeavors to answer the question of how one locale can help us understand another locale. Drawing from a wealth of primary sources—several years of fieldwork; extensive participant observation; more than 80 formal interviews with some 160 media consumers (and occasionally producers) in France, Japan, and the United States; and analyses of media in different languages—author Fabienne Darling-Wolf considers how global culture intersects with other significant identity factors, including gender, race, class, and geography. Imagining the Global investigates who gets to participate in and who gets excluded from global media representation, as well as how and why the distinction matters.

Communities across Borders examines the many ways in which national, ethnic or religious groups, professions, businesses and cultures are becoming increasingly tangled together. It show how this entanglement is the result of the vast flows of people, meanings, goods and money that now migrate between countries and world regions. Now the effectiveness and significance of electronic technologies for interpersonal communication (including cyber-communities and the interconnectedness of the global world economy) simultaneously empowers even the poorest people to forge effective cultures stretching national borders, and compels many to do so to escape injustice and deprivation.

Aspects of Transnational and Indigenous Cultures addresses the issues of place and mobility, aesthetics and politics, as well as identity and community, which have emerged in the framework of Global/Transnational American and Indigenous Studies. With its ten chapters – contributions from the U.S., Germany, Australia, Canada, Japan, Korea, and Taiwan – the volume conceptualizes a comparative/trans-national paradigm for crossing over national, regional and international boundaries and, in so doing, to imagine a shared world of poetics and aesthetics in contemporary transnational scholarship.

For anthropologists and social scientists working in North and South America, the past few decades have brought considerable change as issues such as repatriation, cultural jurisdiction, and revitalization movements have swept across the hemisphere. Today scholars are rethinking both how and why they study culture as they gain a new appreciation for the impact they have on the people they study. Key to this reassessment of the social sciences is a rethinking of the concept of borders: not only between cultures and nations but between disciplines such as archaeology and cultural anthropology, between past and present, and between anthropologists and indigenous peoples. "Border Crossings" is a collection of fourteen essays about the evolving focus and perspective of anthropologists and the anthropology of North and South America over the past two decades. For a growing number of researchers, the realities of working in the Americas have changed the distinctions between being a "Latin," "North," or "Native" Americanist as these researchers turn their interests and expertise simultaneously homeward and out across the globe.

Global Knowledge Cultures provides a collection of accessible essays by some of the world’s leading legal scholars, new media analysts, techno activists, library professionals, educators and philosophers. Issues canvassed by the authors include the ownership of knowledge, open content licensing, knowledge policy, the common-wealth of learning, transnational cultural governance, and information futures.