This is the first collection that highlights the strengths and contributions of the Humanities, in the European region. The volume stresses the positive and multidimensional impact of the Humanities on core areas of human experience, and their ability to formulate new frames to represent our collective and individual relation to the world. Further, it explores new ethical social imaginaries, gendered scenarios and spaces of decolonial transculturality. This collection also confronts the threats the Humanities face today and proposes ways to respond. These threats include public discourses that question the value of the Humanities; the chronic underfunding of teaching and research at our universities and institutions, and the more fundamental risks to intellectual freedom, democracy and critical discourse, diversity, and the radical imagination posed by political and market forces and organisations. Overall, this volume proposes innovative tools to increase our collective awareness of forms of injustice, exclusion and the suffering of both the human and the non-human inhabitants of this planet. It discusses the posthuman future of the Humanities and makes recommendations for the implementation of innovative approaches to the Humanities.

The study is devoted to intercultural communication between German and North American students. Conversations in German between English-speaking North American learners of German and German native speakers are analyzed on the basis of a framework model relating to the linguistic work involved in everyday encounters and the differences and commonalities such work displays. The conversations discussed involve narrative, discursive, and directive dimensions, and contain differing degrees of face threatening. The analysis covers all the elements typical of conversations.