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Variously translated as “estrangement,” “enstrangement” or “defamiliarization,” Viktor Shklovsky's concept of ostranenie is more relevant than ever. This collection offers new insights into the theories and practices of ostranenie across various languages and cultures, with a particular focus on the 20th and 21st centuries. Our current era is marked by a dramatic redefinition of the normal and the strange, the familiar and the weird. The rise of far-right populism has increasingly normalized xenophobic and nativist stances previously confined to the fringes of the political spectrum. Additionally, the climate crisis has led to the ongoing renegotiation of the concepts of normalcy and emergency amid widespread efforts to adapt to the “new (ab)normal.” Exploring defamiliarization provides a unique perspective to comprehend and question these processes and their profound cultural implications. Focusing on ostranenie also offers valuable insights into how aesthetic forms serve a political function. Defamiliarization can take on various forms, including retro-futuristic dystopias, stylized films, and darkly humorous cartoons and memes. It can be an effective tool for political activation that relies on formal innovation rather than superficial emotional engagement. This collection brings together the work of a group of scholars examining defamiliarization across different media. It explores questions such as: How can we differentiate between various forms of defamiliarization and analyze their effects on the reader/viewer? How is defamiliarization connected to the weird, the eerie, or the uncanny? As a result, the collection offers an updated theoretical framework for understanding the wide range of emergent artistic and literary practices of e(n)strangement in the current era and their significant political affordances. Chapter 6 is available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.com

This book considers Karl Marx's ideas in relation to the social and political context in which he lived and wrote. It emphasizes both the continuity of his commitment to the cause of full human emancipation, and the role of his critique of political economy in conceiving history to be the history of class struggles. The book follows his developing ideas from before he encountered political economy, through the politics of 1848 and the Bonapartist “farce,”, the maturation of the critique of political economy in the Grundrisse and Capital, and his engagement with the politics of the First International and the legacy of the Paris Commune. Notwithstanding errors in historical judgment largely reflecting the influence of dominant liberal historiography, Marx laid the foundations for a new social theory premised upon the historical consequences of alienation and the potential for human freedom.

​Dieses Buch hat die Beobachtung zum Ausgangspunkt, dass politische Ideen seit jeher das politische Denken und die politische Praxis bestimmen. Sie sind mit dem Politischen verwoben, sei es offensichtlich, implizit oder kaschiert. Doch wie steht es um das Verhältnis politischer Ideen und politischer Bildung? Als Unterrichtsgegenstände stehen sie in den schulischen Curricula. In den einschlägigen Nachschlagewerken der politischen Bildung finden politische Ideen allenfalls indirekt Beachtung. In den Beiträgen des Sammelbandes wird das Verhältnis politischer Ideen und politischer Bildung in seinen unterschiedlichen Dimensionen reflektiert.

Some analysts have called distrust the biggest governmental crisis of our time. It is unquestionably a huge problem, undermining confidence in our elected institutions, shrinking social capital, slowing innovation, and raising existential questions for democratic government itself. What's behind the rising distrust in democracies around the world and can we do anything about it? In this lively and thought-provoking essay, Donald F. Kettl, a leading scholar of public policy and management, investigates the deep historical roots of distrust in government, exploring its effects on the social contract between citizens and their elected representatives. Most importantly, the book examines the strategies that present-day governments can follow to earn back our trust, so that the officials we elect can govern more effectively on our behalf.

Why do people adopt attitudes of political alienation--attitudes of estrangement from, or lack of identification with, the political system? Why do some politically alienated people react to their alienation by engaging in revolutionary behavior, while others similarly alienated--become reformers or ritualists, and still others simply drop out of political activity?In Political Alienation and Political Behavior, David C. Schwartz attempts to answer these questions, challenging accepted theories of social status and economic difficulties and developing a completely new, three variable psychological theories to explain alienation. Based on observations of threat from value conflict, perceived personal inefficacy, and perceived systemic inefficacy, the theory includes a process model for predicting political behavior.The book is organized into a definition and discussion of the concept of political alienation, including reviews and critiques of relevant scholarly and popular literature; a theoretical explanation of the causes and consequences of alienation; presentation of data; research reports testing the author's explanation of political alienation; tests of a process model explaining the consequences of alienation; and a summary of the major findings of the research, indicating some of the directions that future research might profitably take.Fascinating reading for social scientists, this well-written book will be important to teachers and students concerned with U.S. politics and more generally with the relationship of economic, social, and psychological forces manifested in political behavior.

That the publics of Western democracies are becoming increasingly disenchanted with their political institutions is part of the conventional wisdom in Political Science. This trend is often equated with the expectation that all forms of political attachment and participation show similar patterns of decline. Based on empirical underpinnings derived from a range of original and sophisticated comparative analyses from Europe and beyond, this collection shows that no such universal pattern of decline exists. Nor should it be expected, given the diversity of reasons that citizens have to place or withdraw trust, and to engage in conventional political participation or in protest.Contributers are: Christoph Arndt, Wiebke Breustedt, Christina Eder, Manfred te Grotenhuis, Alexia Katsanidou, Rik Linssen, Michael P. McDonald, Ingvill C. Mochmann, Kenneth Newton, Maria Oskarson, Suzanne L. Parker, Glenn R. Parker, Markus Quandt, Peer Scheepers, Hans Schmeets, Thoralf Stark, and Terri L. Towner.

Now more than ever, questions of citizenship, migration, and political action dominate public debate. In this powerful and polemical book, Gregory Feldman argues that We Are All Migrants. By challenging the division between those considered'citizens'and'migrants,'Feldman shows that both subjects confront disempowerment, uncertainty, and atomization inseparable from the rise of mass society, the isolation of the laboring individual, and the global proliferation of rationalized practices of security and production. Yet, this very atomization—the ubiquitous condition of migrant-hood—pushes the individual to ask an existential and profoundly political question:'do I matter in this world?'Feldman argues that for particular individuals to answer this question affirmatively, they must be empowered to jointly constitute the places they inhabit with others. Feldman ultimately argues that to overcome the condition of migrant-hood, people must be empowered to constitute their own sovereign spaces from their particular standpoints. Rather than base these spaces on categorical types of people, these spaces emerge only as particular people present themselves to each other while questioning how they should inhabit it.

Discusses the impact of globalisation on security in the West and in particular the way it has changed the nature of NATO as well as its security agenda.