Industrial films are a valuable resource for research in the field of cultural studies as they are both mediator and part of industrial culture. In the Saarland, as well as in the Greater Region as a whole, many industrial films were created throughout the last century. The industries treated include but are not limited to glass and porcelain manufacturing, brewing and viticulture as well as the iron, steel and coal industry. Looking at borders, this talk will focus on the heavy industries, in which geographical border crossings are rendered obligatory by ore and coal basins extending over national borders. However, geographical borders are only one of many types of borders which play an important role in the context of the heavy industry and are represented in respective industrial films. This variety of different borders shall be illustrated by examples taken from industrial films produced between the 1930s and the 2010s.
Isis Luxenburger is a doctoral researcher in the International Research Training Group “Diversity. Mediating Difference in Transcultural Spaces” at Saarland University, the University of Trier and the University of Montreal. Her research interests include the cultural studies of (industrial) films and, in general, investigating research subjects rooted in other disciplines—especially Film Studies, Game Studies and Translation Studies—from a Cultural Studies perspective. She is currently working on her interdisciplinary dissertation project on the mediation of industrial culture in films on the heavy industry in the Canadian province of Quebec and the Greater Region Saar-Lor-Lux.
The conference will be moderated by Dr. Massimiliano Livi1 and introduced by Prof. Dr. Christoph Brüll.
Wednesday, 14 July 2021 at 16.30 CET
Online - Webex
The conference will be held in English.
To receive the link to the conference, please register at lorine.hosch@ext.uni.lu.
The FLUXUS project is supported by the Greater Region.
- 1. Dr Massimiliano Livi studied English, German and History in Perugia, then earned his doctorate in Sociology of Politics (Münster) in 2005 and in History (Florence) in 2009. From 2009 to 2016, he was project leader in the Cluster of Excellence "Religion and Politics" at the WWU Münster and lecturer in Western European History at the same university. Since October 2016, he has been a private lecturer in Trier. From 2017 to 2018, he led a project on migration and labour integration at the Institute of Contemporary History Gelsenkirchen. In 2019, he was UniGR-CBS Chair in Border Studies at the Universities of Trier and Metz. Since 2016, Livi has been working intensively on the topic of post-traditional forms of communalisation and new forms of identity formation in Western European society and has been publishing the blog <Tribes.hypotheses.org> since 2017 to disseminate and establish historical trend research. Livi is the author of numerous publications on the topic of "migration" as well as "religion and politics" and the Italian political and social system.