Futures Worth Preserving

Cultures as well as individuals continually balance the demands of nostalgia and sustainability as they construct historical narratives of futures worth preserving. The aim of this volume is to explore those narratives and the underlying assumptions which inform them. Drawing on a range of disciplines from the humanities and social sciences, the chapters investigate cultural assumptions about which aspects of the past deserve to be remembered and which aspects of the present should be sustained for the future. In the process, they reveal how contemporary definitions of sustainability are informed by a nostalgic yearning for the past, and how nostalgia is motivated by a reciprocal longing to sustain the past for the future.

Andressa Schröder is a PhD researcher in Cultural Sustainability. Her research interests include environmental aesthetics, arts-based research, sustainability ethics, alternative and psychedelic art and culture. Nico Völker is a PhD researcher in American Studies. His thesis is a cultural narratology of the process of gentrification in 21st-century Brooklyn. Robert A. Winkler is a postdoc at the Paris-Lodron-Universität Salzburg in Austria. He received his Ph.D. from the International Graduate Centre for the Study of Culture (GCSC) at Justus-Liebig-Universität Gießen in 2019 with a dissertation on race and gender in hardcore punk. Tom Clucas completed his DPhil at Oxford and was a Deputy Professor of English and American Literature and Culture at Justus Liebig University Giessen. He now works at a leading law firm in London.