ABSTRACT
Referring to Lawrence Buell’s famous statement, it can be said that not only ecological, but most other global challenges and crises are linked to the crisis of imagination. Ideas and representations which are either deformed or entirely lacking, as well as anachronistic beliefs about social, cultural, political hierarchies and power relations play a crucial role in managing environmental or democratic crises. Thus, exercising and expanding the imagination in relation to global challenges and their roots, as well as possible ways of handling them, should be one of the goals of a Global Education.
Therefore, the chapter tries to demonstrate how imagining different scenarios of global issues, specifically migration, can be implemented in a foreign language university education using migration, inter- and transcultural literature. The chapter aims to:
explore the potential for integrating migration, inter- and transcultural literature into the processes of educating global citizens in foreign languages classes on the level of topics and theoretical concepts of foreign languages teaching and learning;
present how working with (selected) texts of migration, inter- and transcultural literature (mostly from German-speaking countries) can help implement learning about hyperobjects like migration, environmental decline or cultural hybridity in foreign language classroom practice, and therefore support understanding global topics in their complexity, enable critical reflection on them and expand imagination for sustainable and pluralistic societies.
