The Aesthetics of Collective Agency

Twenty-first-century Western culture is characterized by profound transformations in its forms of collective organization. While traditional institutions of Western liberal democracies still wield significant political power, new forms of collective agency – most visible in progressive social protest movements, but also in the global rise of populism – have increasingly put pressure on established systems of collective organization. The contributors to this volume explore the social, political, and aesthetic forms that collective agency takes in the twenty-first century across a variety of media, including social platforms such as TikTok, multiplayer video games, and contemporary lyric poetry.

Simone Knewitz is senior lecturer for North American studies at Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität Bonn, Germany. Her research focuses on poetry and poetics, cultural aesthetics and rhetoric, and the intersections of law, economics, and culture. Her current projects explore collective agency in twenty-first century North American poetry and protest movements, and the politics of whiteness in contemporary U.S. political discourses.

Stefanie Mueller (Dr.) is an adjunct professor at the Institute of English and American Studies, Goethe-Universität Frankfurt am Main, Germany. Her research areas include the environmental, legal, and economic humanities, with current research projects exploring citizenship in contemporary US lyric poetry and law as well as the representation of the scales of climate change in literature.