My dissertation examines literary mythologies of privacy in the authoritarian Russia of 1953–1985. This era was marked by an expansion of “non-state spheres,” or areas of life of which the Communist state increasingly released its control after Joseph Stalin’s death in 1953. Political elites, architects, and designers, as well as ordinary citizens co-constructed and explored the rising spheres through the languages of their respective fields—by producing regulations and laws, designing and erecting new types of buildings, developing new and modernizing already familiar everyday objects as well as devising new ways of integrating these objects into private and public spaces. Alongside these voices, transformations in the cultural sphere in general, and literature in particular, were most vocal. The late Soviet era witnessed the dissolution of the ossified ideology of socialist realism that focused on the glorification of the “new Soviet man” and had held culture in its tight grips since the 1930s. Starting from the 1950s, writers increasingly focused on portraying areas of life that lay beyond one’s public commitments and experimented with new meanings, codes, and forms to give shape to novel spheres of experience of the “late Soviet man” that can be subsumed under the concept of the “private sphere.” The analytical framework of my dissertation is built around the journey to understand the mechanisms and architecture that powered the imagination of models of distancing oneself from the state and the society at large—scenarios of privacy, as we may call them today. I examine Russian prose and drama of the 1950s–1980s as a laboratory for the ideas of privacy, which was increasingly sought in the society disillusioned by the Communist doctrine and thus progressively alienating from active participation in the public sphere. I analyze the meanings that writers incorporated into new and old forms of domesticity—private flats that became progressively widespread throughout the 1950s–1980s, rooms in communal apartments, individual houses—to determine the spectrum of concepts that nurtured the idea of privacy in the late Soviet literary imagination. I also examine representations of reciprocal paradigms of relations between subjects from which the state and society at large were increasingly excluded. In the examples that I analyze, forms of private withdrawals variate from establishing control over liminal spaces or escaping into the world of feelings and emotions and building a connection to a person or space (significant for the characters for private rather than public reasons) to experimenting with language and pursuing one’s idiolect despite the ubiquitous “officialese,” as well as living in temporalities asynchronous with the public time. Beyond revealing the visions of different, non-state existences in the late Soviet era, my text also advocates examining the role of official literature as a platform for subversion and change that was no less important in an authoritarian state than dissident literature. I see officially published texts as a cultural subaltern who defies the state of affairs and slowly but firmly turns the “state sphere” into a public one by pushing its own agenda through publications that test and gain ground for bolder visions of Soviet life that are not predicated on the commitment to the public sphere. With individual mechanisms of power assertion employed by the state or literature in the late Soviet era well-researched, the framework is still missing that would capture the shifts of borders between the private and public spheres under the influence of these actors. In devising such framework, I build upon sociological theories of disattendability and civil inattention that Erving Goffman conceived to describe conventions of individual behavior and social interaction in public. Extending these theories toward the studies of literary politics, I argue that by envisioning scenarios of a private retreat and bringing them into officially published editions, literature normalized privacy as a late Soviet imaginary and, therefore, continuously heightened its own disattendability, thereby expanding the borders of the private sphere. On the side of the state, the border was defined by the triggers of disturbance of civil inattention: privacy was conceded in return for disattendability. Under such conditions, literature became a bizarre “private kitchen” that performed private and public functions simultaneously—similar to the kitchens in newly-built individual apartments that were popular loci of socialization in the late Soviet era. It turned into a place where one can escape—it became one of the “niches of privacy” where it was possible to discuss and negotiate the world, in which the society lived or to which it should strive. At the same time, it assumed the role of a surrogate for the public sphere within the “state” sphere by pushing its own agenda through the publication of literary texts that sought to imagine a person rather than a cog in the Communist machine and thus transformed socialist realism into a literary current “with a human face.” In my research, privacy, literature, and politics are bound together to reveal a vibrant spectacle of the continuous interaction between the state, cultural elites, and the citizens, in which thresholds are erected and crossed incessantly. Fictional private sites were battlefields for the production and contestation of ideologies, and the exposure of these literary wars to the public eye played a fundamental role in shifting the borders between the private and the public spheres in an authoritarian late Soviet Russia. The patterns of relations between the state and culture that I uncover in my dissertation resonate in neo-authoritarian twenty-first-century Russia, making privacy an important lens for our insight into the role of culture in rising authoritarian and failing democratic systems across the globe.

In der vorliegenden Dissertation wird untersucht, wie Studierende bei der Prüfungsvorbereitung auf die vorhandenen E-Learning Angebote zurückgreifen wie Dozierende E-Learning Angebote in der Lehre einsetzen und wie die Potenziale von E-Learning-Angeboten an den Universitäten besser ausgeschöpft werden und die Studierenden bei der Prüfungsvorbereitung zu unterstützen. Als Studiendesign wurde eine Kombination von quantitativen und qualitativen Methoden gewählt. An den verschiedenen Fakultäten der Universität Passau wurde zu Beginn eine quantitative Befragung unter Studierenden zu deren Nutzung von Lehrmaterialien und Medienangeboten durchgeführt. Danach folgten qualitative Lehrenden- und Experteninterviews zum Medieneinsatz in der Lehre. Zum Abschluss wurden in einer zweiten quantitativen Befragung Studierender die Zusammenhänge von Lernmotivation, Lernstrategien und Prüfungsangst genauer untersucht. In den Ergebnissen zeigte sich, dass die Studierenden die E-Learning-Angebote nur dann annehmen, wenn sie daraus einen unmittelbaren Nutzen ziehen. Den Lehrenden stehen die entsprechenden Ressourcen zum Einsatz digitaler Medien häufig nicht zur Verfügung. Kurz zusammengefasst bedeutet E-Learning an Universitäten vor allem Folgendes: Hochladen und Verwalten von Lernmaterialien auf Lernplattformen, zusätzlich die Bereitstellung von Videoaufzeichnungen bei Veranstaltungen mit hoher Teilnehmerzahl. Vereinzelt werden noch elektronische Klausuren oder Live Votings angeboten. Des Weiteren konnte nachgewiesen werden, dass die weiblichen Studierenden, unabhängig vom Fachsemester, über eine höhere Lernmotivation als die männlichen Studierenden verfügen. Wenn Studierende sich mehr Lernstrategien zu eigen machen, ist sowohl deren Prüfungsangst als auch die Anzahl der Arbeitsstörungen geringer. Künftig sollten die digitalen Medien verstärkt dazu eingesetzt werden, die Studierenden zur aktiven Mitarbeit anzuregen. Die Lehrenden sollten Zugriff auf spezielle technische Ausrüstungen sowie auf didaktische Qualifizierung und Beratung haben, damit sie auch anspruchsvolle Medienangebote wie Webbasiertes Lernen oder Apps umsetzen können.

Religion can unite and divide, it can lead to a strengthening or a weakening of identity and legitimacy. Religion can stoke conflicts but it can also pacify them – within societies and in international politics. Religion endures and it can exist independently of states, it can constitute them, and it can provide new forms of states, societies, and empires. Arguably, religion shapes or even constitutes the international society of states, an aspect so far neglected in the field of International Relations. The dissertation provides a new definition of religion for International Relations and the English School in particular. Based upon this understanding of religion, the five publications presented in the dissertation provide new analytical and theoretical concepts and approaches to fill the research gap. Religion is integrated into the theoretical framework of the English School in the form of a “prime institution” and with the help of the “quilt model”. While the former expands the theoretical framework, the latter adds an analytical layer. Based upon this definition religion is also introduced as a concept (“hybrid actorness”) in Foreign Policy Analysis, opening it up to become less state-centrist and more transnational-oriented, thereby boosting its relevance considering the evolving international (global) society. In another step, the Securitization framework of analysis is expanded to include (freedom) of religion. By revisiting the publications, the dissertation is able to identify next steps in terms of avenues of research. Finally, the dissertation reveals areas of study which contribute to increasing the pertinence of IR, particularly of the English School.

Kann die Gesellschaft die hermeneutische Ungerechtigkeit gegenüber Menschen mit Lernbehinderungen abmildern? Wie stellen sich die europäischen Theater dieser Herausforderung? Wie können Künstler mit Lernbehinderungen "eine Stimme haben"? Der vorliegende Band sucht in theoretischen Ansätzen und in Interviews mit Regisseuren nach Antworten auf diese Fragen.

Data-driven decision-making and data-intensive research are becoming prevalent in many sectors of modern society, i.e. healthcare, politics, business, and entertainment. During the COVID-19 pandemic, huge amounts of educational data and new types of evidence were generated through various online platforms, digital tools, and communication applications. Meanwhile, it is acknowledged that educa-tion lacks computational infrastructure and human capacity to fully exploit the potential of big data. This paper explores the use of Learning Analytics (LA) in higher education for measurement purposes. Four main LA functions in the assessment are outlined: (a) monitoring and analysis, (b) automated feedback, (c) prediction, prevention, and intervention, and (d) new forms of assessment. The paper con-cludes by discussing the challenges of adopting and upscaling LA as well as the implications for instructors in higher education.