Inclusive National Belonging: Intercultural Performances in the 'World-Open' Germany
General Material Designation
[Thesis]
First Statement of Responsibility
Burnside, Bruce Snedegar
Subsequent Statement of Responsibility
Ewing, Katherine
.PUBLICATION, DISTRIBUTION, ETC
Name of Publisher, Distributor, etc.
Columbia University
Date of Publication, Distribution, etc.
2020
GENERAL NOTES
Text of Note
270 p.
DISSERTATION (THESIS) NOTE
Dissertation or thesis details and type of degree
Ph.D.
Body granting the degree
Columbia University
Text preceding or following the note
2020
SUMMARY OR ABSTRACT
Text of Note
This dissertation explores what it means to belong in Berlin and Germany following a significant change in the citizenship laws in 2000, which legally reoriented the law away from a "German" legal identity rooted in blood-descent belonging to a more territorially-based conception. The primary goal is to understand attempts at performing inclusive belonging by the state and other actors, with mostly those of "foreign heritage" at the center, and these attempts' pitfalls, opportunities, challenges, and strange encounters. It presents qualitative case studies to draw attention to interculturality and its related concepts as they manifest in a variety of contexts. This study presents a performance analysis of a ceremony at a major national museum project and utilizes a discursive analysis of the national and international media surrounding a unique controversy about soccer and Islam. The study moves to a peripheral neighborhood in Berlin and a marginal subject, a migration background Gymnasium student, who featured prominently in an expose about failing schools, using interviews and a text analysis to present competing narratives. Finally it examines the intimate, local view of a self-described "intercultural" after-school center aimed at migration-background girls, drawing extensively on ethnographic interviews and media generated by the girls. These qualitative encounters help illuminate how an abstract and often vague set of concepts within the intercultural paradigm becomes tactile when encountering those for whom it was intended.