March 13, 2025

Anxiety Culture

A Book Talk on Migration, Language, and Culture
Reid Hall | 4, rue de Chevreuse, 75006 Paris
Free and open to the public
Register here

The twenty-first century is characterized by uncertainty and pressing planetary challenges: from catastrophic climate change to the accelerating pace of technological change, societies around the world are gripped by anxiety about the future. In their new book, Anxiety Culture: The New Global State of Human Affairs (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2024), editors John Allegrante, Ulrich Hoinkes, Michael Schapira, and Karen Struve, and a distinguished group of contributing international scholars, examine the forces that increase anxiety as a cultural phenomenon that goes beyond the solely individual experiences of clinical anxiety to pervade global culture. The trenchant essays in this book examine our culture of anxiety across five sections: disciplinary perspectives on anxiety, climate change and the environment, population health and social well-being, migration, and technology. This event will feature a select panel of the book’s distinguished authors, whose chapters focus on migration, language, and culture, in conversation about how these elements are contributing to anxiety culture.

Programme

Welcoming Remarks and Introductions

Mae Ngai, Fellow at the Columbia Institute for Ideas and Imagination and Lung Family Professor of Asian American Studies

Overview of the Book, Anxiety Culture

John Allegrante, Teachers College, Columbia University

Panel

Ulrich Hoinkes, Kiel University

“Anxiety Culture as Social Reality and Object of Philosophical Consideration”

Monica van der Haagen-Wulff, University of Cologne

“Crisis, Affect, and Migration”

Bàrbara Roviró, University of Bremen

“Multilingual Anxiety in Migration Contexts”

Karen Struve, University of Bremen

“Narrative Anxiety”

Commentary

Emmanuel Kattan, Columbia Alliance and

Raphaël Liogier, UM6P (Morocco) and Sciences Po Aix (France)

Audience Q&A, Discussion, and Closing Remarks

Mae Ngai, Columbia University

Biographies

Mae Ngai is Lung Family Professor of Asian American Studies and professor of history at Columbia University. As a Fellow at the Columbia Institute for Ideas & Imagination, she is working on A Nation of Immigrants: A Short History of an Idea, a book based on the Lawrence Stone lectures she delivered at Princeton University. An intellectual and political history of the American liberal narrative of inclusion from the Cold War to 1980, it addresses major tropes such as “Nation of Immigrants,” “American Dream,” and “Land of Refuge,” showing how they are products of history and not timeless national ideals. Her major books include Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America (2004) and The Chinese Question: The Gold Rushes and Global Politics (2021). She has contributed commentary on immigration and Asian American issues to The New York Times, The Atlantic, and other publications.

John Allegrante is the inaugural Charles Irwin Lambert professor of health behavior and education at Teachers College, Columbia University, where he has been a member of the faculty since 1979 and has served as department chair, deputy provost, and associate vice president for international affairs. He has held appointments in sociomedical sciences at the Mailman School of Public Health and in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences at Columbia, and has been a visiting professor at several universities in Europe and Asia. An applied behavioral scientist, Professor Allegrante has published extensively on epistemological, theoretical, and methodological issues, as well as research-to-practice translation, in the science of health promotion and education. He is a co-founder of the Anxiety Culture research project and the principal co-editor of Anxiety Culture: The New Global State of Human Affairs (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2024).

Ulrich Hoinkes is a professor and chair of Romance studies and teacher education at the Christian Albrechts University of Kiel, Germany. Since his appointment at Kiel University and as the director of the Centre on Humanities in Education at Kiel University, he has focused on educational science and foreign language didactics. A Romance philologist and a linguist who specializes in semantics, history of linguistic thought, variety linguistics, language sociology, and minority languages, he is a co-founder of the Anxiety Culture research project, co-editor of Anxiety Culture: The New Global State of Human Affairs (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2024), and a contributing coauthor with Michael Schapira of the chapter, “Anxiety Culture as Social Reality and Object of Philosophical Consideration.” Professor Hoinkes has been a visiting professor at the Multilingualism Research Centre of the Katholieke Universiteit in Brussel and a visiting scholar at Teachers College, Columbia University.

Monica van der Haagen-Wulff is a social and literary theorist with interests in communication and media. She is currently a lecturer at the Department of Education and Social Science in the Faculty of Humanities and Social Science at the University of Cologne. Her interests include cultural and postcolonial studies, migration, intersectionality, post- and decolonial feminist theories, globalization, global cities, affect theory, embodiment, fictocritical writing, and critical heritage/memory studies. Dr. Haagen-Wulff’s main research focus is on how practice and theory can be merged to create new knowledges and in so doing decenter Eurocentric knowledge constructions. She has published numerous papers in international academic journals and is most recently coauthor with Paul Mecheril of “Crisis, Affect, and Migration: The Production of Legitimacy within Political Orders” in Anxiety Culture: The New Global State of Human Affairs (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2024).

Bàrbara Roviró is a lecturer in the Department of Languages and Literatures at the University of Bremen and works as a teacher trainer in the field of Romance languages. She is also an academic consultant and author for the leading German textbook publisher in the field of foreign languages for schools. Her research focuses on development and innovation in foreign language teaching in schools as well as on academic research in everyday teaching in order to professionalize pre-service teachers and on sociolinguistic issues in the multilingual society with an emphasis on minority languages and especially in educational institutions. Most recently, she is coauthor with Eva Daussà of the chapter, “Multilingual Anxiety in Migration Contexts,” published in Anxiety Culture: The New Global State of Human Affairs (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2024).

Karen Struve is professor of Franco-Romance and literary studies at Bremen University, Germany. Professor Struve’s research and scholarship focuses on Francophone Literature and French theory, including postcolonial, transcultural and poststructuralist literary and cultural theory in epistemology and in the cultural theories of anxiety. She is both a co-editor of Anxiety Culture: The New Global State of Human Affairs (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2024) and coauthor of “Narrative Anxiety: An Examination of Fractured Memory Through the Lens of Contemporary Francophone Literature.” Professor Struve is the director of the Campus Nord for Francophone und French Studies (CaNoFF), has been a Mare Balticum Fellow at the University of Rostock and was awarded the Germaine de Staël Prize from the Association of French Studies in 2008 and the Elise Richter Prize from the Association of Romance Studies Scholars in 2019.

Emmanuel Kattan, director of the Alliance Program at Columbia University, is a Canadian philosopher and the author of four novels in French and an essay on the politics of memory. He previously served as the Public Affairs Attaché at the Délégation générale du Québec in London and subsequently served as Advisor to the Secretary-General of the Commonwealth in London. Prior to coming to Columbia, Dr. Kattan was the director of the British Council’s New York office where he was in charge of partnerships. He is most recently the author with Karen Struve of “Narrative Anxiety: An Examination of Fractured Memory Through the Lens of Contemporary Francophone Literature” that appears in Anxiety Culture: The New Global State of Human Affairs (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2024). Dr. Kattan was named a Knight in the French National Order of Merit in 2024.

Raphaël Liogier, a philosopher and sociologist, is a professor at the UM6P in Morocco, where he is scientific director of the Institute for Advanced Studies and head of the Chair of Transitions, and at Sciences Po Aix in France. He has been a visiting scholar at numerous universities, including the University of Varanasi (India) and Louvain la Neuve (Belgium). He has published extensively on the changes in human identities and beliefs linked to globalization, the internet, AI and transhumanism. His chapter, “Anxiety Culture as Fuel for Industrialism,” was published in Anxiety Culture: The New Global State of Human Affairs (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2024). His latest book, Khaos: La promesse trahie de la modernité, argues that our collective anxiety stems from the repression of the real, positive meaning of modernity in the form of materialism and nihilism.

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