As Featured Scholar, Daniel Stein will be participating in the Maurice Halbwachs Summer School in Göttingen. On September 3, he will be giving a presentation on the current City Mysteries-Project.

For more informationen: http://www.maurice-halbwachs-summer-institute.uni-goettingen.de/

30.08. - 03.09.2016 − Lichtenberg-Kolleg, Göttingen

Criminality, it seems, has become a global preoccupation in the early twenty-first century, a preoccupation strikingly disproportionate, in most places and for most people, to the threat posed by lawlessness – among other risks – to the conduct of everyday life. Law-making, law-breaking, and law-enforcement are ever more critical registers in which societies construct, contest, and confront truths about themselves. As a result of a tectonic shift in the relations among capital, the state, and governance, the meanings attached to crime, and the nature of policing, have undergone significant change. There has also been a muddying of the lines between legality and illegality, corruption and conventional business, and crime-and-policing, which exist nowadays in ever greater, hyphenated complicity. This is captured in a political economy of representation that focuses increasingly on a new noir in literature and cinema. ‘Crime Dis/order, and Narration,’ in short, will offer a novel excursion into the Contemporary Order of Things.

At his year’s Maurice Halbwachs Summer Institute anthropologists and social theorists, John L. Comaroff and t Jean Comaroff (both Harvard University) will draw from their forthcoming study Thinking through Crime, and Policing to analyze the interplay of knowledge, sovereignty and citizenship, of civility, class and race, and of the law and social order in the contemporary world, taking as their primary examples South Africa and the USA. American Studies and media scholar Daniel Stein (University of Siegen) will complement and historically deepen their late modern assessment with his work on 19th century American crime fiction and its agency in a rapidly modernizing and territorially expanding society.