Tag: Reunification

Free Download Tatiana Astafeva, "Ostalgie in German Cinema After Reunification"
English | ISBN: 3031750055 | 2024 | 227 pages | EPUB, PDF | 5 MB + 5 MB
This book provides a thorough overview of the ostalgie films about the German Democratic Republic (GDR) produced since the 1990s. Far from being a homogenous phenomenon that romanticizes the totalitarian state, the ostalgie genre is multifaceted, reflexive, and at times subversive. Thus, Astafeva argues, the core of "ostalgie" is an experience of distance that is ‘prefocused’ by various aesthetic strategies. This genre-based definition makes it possible to conceptualize the phenomenon of ostalgie film in its heterogeneity and to reveal the mechanisms that lay in the essence of ostalgic experience. The cognitivist-phenomenological approach is underpinned by historiographic and genre theory and close analysis of film examples―from the most popular ostalgie films such as Goodbye, Lenin! (Wolfgang Becker, 2003) to lesser-known film productions and recent series such as Kleo (2022-2024)―that allow exploration of various functions of the ostalgic experience. Ostalgie films can foster uncritical reactionary and conservative views of history and expose the experience of distance by orienting aesthetics toward kitsch and retro. They can also encourage reflexive and meta-reflexive understandings of history so that the GDR past is critically discussed and reworked. Furthermore, ostalgie films can in some cases activate historical consciousness, facilitate the production of historical knowledge, and generate ethical thinking and empathy.

Free Download Accomplishing Permanency: Reunification Pathways and Outcomes for Foster Children By Elizabeth Fernandez (auth.)
2013 | 154 Pages | ISBN: 9400750919 | PDF | 2 MB
Reunification is a primary goal of foster care systems and the most common permanency planning decision. It is defined as the return of children placed in protective care to the home of their birth family and used to describe the act of restoring a child in out-of-home care back to the biological family. Yet reunification decision-making and the process of reintegrating children into birth families remains under researched. This Brief takes a look at family reunification knowledge and research in Australia where there is evidence that most children placed in protective care are eventually reunited with their birth parents. It explores how a knowledge of reunification decision making and outcomes can contribute to strengthening practice and informing policy formulation and program planning in Child Welfare.​

Free Download Catherine Lee, "Fictive Kinship: Family Reunification and the Meaning of Race and Nation in American Immigration"
English | ISBN: 0871544946 | 2013 | 200 pages | PDF | 1515 KB
Today, roughly 70 percent of all visas for legal immigration are reserved for family members of permanent residents or American citizens. Family reunification―policies that seek to preserve family unity during or following migration―is a central pillar of current immigration law, but it has existed in some form in American statutes since at least the mid-nineteenth century. In Fictive Kinship, sociologist Catherine Lee delves into the fascinating history of family reunification to examine how and why our conceptions of family have shaped immigration, the meaning of race, and the way we see ourselves as a country. Drawing from a rich set of archival sources, Fictive Kinship shows that even the most draconian anti-immigrant laws, such as the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, contained provisions for family unity, albeit for a limited class of immigrants. Arguments for uniting families separated by World War II and the Korean War also shaped immigration debates and the policies that led to the landmark 1965 Immigration Act. Lee argues that debating the contours of family offers a ready set of symbols and meanings to frame national identity and to define who counts as "one of us." Talk about family, however, does not inevitably lead to more liberal immigration policies. Welfare reform in the 1990s, for example, placed limits on benefits for immigrant families, and recent debates over the children of undocumented immigrants fanned petitions to rescind birthright citizenship. Fictive Kinship shows that the centrality of family unity in the immigration discourse often limits the discussion about the goals, functions and roles of immigration and prevents a broader definition of American identity. Too often, studies of immigration policy focus on individuals or particular ethnic or racial groups. With its original and wide-ranging inquiry, Fictive Kinship shifts the analysis in immigration studies toward the family, a largely unrecognized but critical component in the regulation of immigrants’ experience in America.