Futures Worth Preserving : Cultural Constructions of Nostalgia and Sustainability

How can the paradoxical conceptual overlap of nostalgia and sustainability in cultural constructions of the present be used in order to make previously unexplored territory within the study of culture accessible? This collection of essays and artistic contributions aims at answering this and other questions. It problematizes the relationship between past-oriented practices of sustaining and future-oriented forms of remembering. The present becomes the moment in which both notions overlap: Cultures have to position themselves, both in relation to what they have once been and to what they aspire to become.

Tom Clucas is a postdoctoral researcher in English literature and culture at Justus Liebig University Giessen working on character and economy in nineteenth-century British community novels.

Andressa Schroder is a PhD researcher in cultural sustainability. Her research interests include aesthetics, arts-based research, environmental humanities, and sustainability.

Nico Volker is a PhD researcher in American studies. His thesis examines the process of gentrification in twenty-first-century Brooklyn from an interdisciplinary perspective.

Robert A. Winkler is a PhD researcher in American studies and his thesis sheds light on race and whiteness in the U.S. hardcore punk subculture of the 1980s.