About the Author

Wibke Schniedermann

E-Mail: Wibke.Schniedermann@gcsc.uni-giessen.de

Wibke Schniedermann is a Postdoctoral Researcher and Teaching Centre Coordinator at the International Graduate Centre for the Study of Culture (GCSC) at Justus Liebig University Giessen. Her current research investigates the representation of homelessness in American literature and culture. She completed her PhD on symbolic violence in Henry James’s novels with Frankfurt University. She is co-editor of Class Divisions in Serial Television (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017) and has published on homelessness in literature, film, and television, on Henry James, the American Western, and the contemporary American novel.

Contributions by Author: Wibke Schniedermann

12/11/2018 _Perspective

Interview With Franci Duran about her Video Art Installation 8401

8401 is a video installation that includes a video loop showing images of a building and the streets in front. Depending on the room in which the installation is being shown, there are one or more devices playing sound files. The image — or images — of the video shift slowly but constantly, and they look a bit like a collage made from the snippets of different pictures. […]

Editorial: On the Cultural Dimensions of Surveillance

Digitalization and de-materialization of surveillance technologies have facilitated changes in cultural agency that are at once fundamental and yet seem easy to ignore. Surveillance pervades every-day experiences down to the most quotidian and subconscious practices as well as the very materiality of the affected bodies. As a growing performative force, these practices and the responses they elicit work towards an essential cultural restructuring that results in a plurality of surveillance cultures. This shift calls for a radical reconceptualization of surveillance and its motivations. […]

Bypassing the Law in a Homeless Vehicle

Alan Bennett’s The Lady in the Van

Polish artist and social activist Krzysztof Wodiczko received much attention during the late 1980s and early 1990s for his “Homeless Vehicle Project.” [1] The Homeless Vehicles were carefully engineered and constantly improved devices designed to make life for urban street dwellers easier and to afford them a form of protected visibility in the streets of the modern metropolis. Protection and visibility are also two major functions fulfilled by the ‘homeless vehicle’ in Alan Bennett’s The Lady in the Van, published as a book in 1989, adapted to the stage in 1999 by the author, and brought to the screen by Nicholas Hytner in 2015. [2] […]

The Trouble With Emergence

I have grown suspicious of the word emergence and the concepts it designates. More often than not, the term seems to serve as a deus ex machina whenever other models or theories cannot account for a certain new aspect or object. Emergence is then used as though it were based on a concept or a theory, when all the term does is label something as complex, unpredictable, and only comprehensible after the fact. It is my contention that, particularly in the study of culture, we need to carefully scrutinize the ways in which we use […]