Cultural artefacts and the ‘migration crisis’: Disruptive materialities in works by Navid Kermani and Maxi Obexer

Amplified worldwide fragility and growing mobility have contributed to increased forced migration towards Europe. However, Europe’s present focus on border protection has furthered the ‘migrant crisis’ which is very much a crisis of response. News about the ‘migrant crisis’ continues to dominate political discourse in Europe and elsewhere. The discussions typically focus on Europe’s supposed solutions in the form of increased border security, new political agreements, and various forms of humanitarian aid. This article reviews four literary texts about Europe’s responses to forced migration and proposes that the literary treatment of various cultural artefacts employed in these texts critiques Europe’s current restrictionism. Two speeches by Navid Kermani, ‘Towards Europe’ and ‘On the sixty-fifth Anniversary of the Promulgation of the German Constitution’ and two novels by Maxi Obexer, Wenn gefährliche Hunde lachen (‘When dangerous dogs laugh’) and Europas längster Sommer (‘Europe’s longest summer’) make reference to several phenomenal objects and also to gestures. In and of themselves, these cultural artefacts such as beds, blankets, buses, lipsticks, T-shirts, shoes, and even the gestures of kneeling and bowing, may not possess anything disruptive. However, there is an unruly quality about them that puts a spotlight on the precarity of survival migrants who cannot access the European asylum process.

Everyday Thoughts in Time: Experience Sampling Studies of Mental Time Travel

Time is among the most important yet mysterious aspects of experience. We investigated everyday mental time travel, especially into the future. Two community samples, contacted at random points for three (Study 1; 6,686 reports) and 14 days (Study 2; 2,361 reports), reported on their most recent thought. Both studies found that thoughts about the present were frequent, thoughts about the future also were common, whereas thoughts about the past were rare. Thoughts about the present were on average highly happy and pleasant but low in meaningfulness. Pragmatic prospection (thoughts preparing for action) was evident in thoughts about planning and goals. Thoughts with no time aspect were lower in sociality and experiential richness. Thoughts about the past were relatively unpleasant and involuntary. Subjective experiences of thinking about past and future often were similar — while both differed from present focus, consistent with views that memory and prospection use similar mental structures.

Everyday Thoughts in Time: Experience Sampling Studies of Mental Time Travel

Time is among the most important yet mysterious aspects of experience. We investigated everyday mental time travel, especially into the future. Two community samples, contacted at random points for 3 (Study 1; 6,686 reports) and 14 days (Study 2; 2,361 reports), reported on their most recent thought. Both studies found that thoughts about the present were frequent, thoughts about the future also were common, whereas thoughts about the past were rare. Thoughts about the present were on average highly happy and pleasant but low in meaningfulness. Pragmatic prospection (thoughts preparing for action) was evident in thoughts about planning and goals. Thoughts with no time aspect were lower in sociality and experiential richness. Thoughts about the past were relatively unpleasant and involuntary. Subjective experiences of thinking about past and future often were similar—while both differed from present focus, consistent with views that memory and prospection use similar mental structures.

Measuring states

This chapter extends the theory developed in the previous chapter in which an expression like “much” (implicitly as part of “more”, explicitly as part of phrases like “too much” when combined with nouns and verbs) uniformly introduces measure functions into the compositional semantics of comparatives. The present focus is on adjectival comparatives, which are typically analyzed as involving lexical specification of measures by the adjectival target. Exploring both novel and familiar data, drawn from the morphosyntactic and semantic literatures, this chapter suggests that the balance of evidence diagnoses the relevance of order-theoretic properties at the lexical level rather than the presence of lexically-specified measures. The positive proposal offered is that adjectives express properties of states, and the distinction between gradable and non-gradable is on a par with that between mass and count nouns: the former introduce non-trivial ordering relations while the latter do not.

Introduction: (How) Do We Share the Sacred?

Multi-religious cohabitation bears immense social and political implications, since the question of how multi-religiosity should be organized has become a hotly debated topic all over Europe. Although religious diversity has turned into an everyday experience in many parts of the world today, a perception that understands conflict between religions as inevitable still holds sway and has maybe even grown stronger, especially after violent events such as the terror attacks of 9/11 and the recent upsurge of political populism in Europe and the Americas. A historically informed perspective that illustrates the widespread dissemination of religious mixture and the commonness of religious interaction throughout the centuries, however, may help us to see current debates in a different light. The present focus edition is dedicated to this purpose.

The role of temporal focus and self-congruence on consumer preference and willingness to pay

Purpose The study aims to investigate the psychological mechanism that motivates consumers to pay more for a preferred brand that reflects their actual or ideal self-concept, by examining the shift in attention between consumer’s present, future, and past moments. Design/methodology/approach First, in a survey setting, the study identifies the relationship between temporal focus and self-congruence. Subsequently, we conduct three experiments to capture the effects of temporal focus on brand preference and willingness to pay (WTP). In these experiments, we manipulate consumers’ self-congruence and temporal focus. Findings The findings show that consumers with a present focus (distant future and distant past foci) tend to evaluate a brand more preferably when the brand serves to reflect their actual (ideal) selves. However, in the absence of present focus consumers’ WTP is more for a brand that reflects their ideal selves. Research limitations/implications The study does not have an actual measure on consumers’ WTP; instead we use single-item measure. Practical implications This study sheds new light on branding strategy. The results suggest that authentic and aspirational branding strategies are relevant to publicly consumed products. Brand managers could incorporate consumers’ temporal focus into branding strategy that could significantly influence consumer preference and WTP for their brands. Originality/value This study expands our understanding of brand usage imagery congruity by showing that temporal focus is an important determinant of self-congruence. In this regard, this study empirically investigates the relationship of temporal focus, self-congruence, brand preference, and WTP. It further reveals that mere brand preference does not necessarily lead consumers to pay more for symbolic brands.