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This paper builds on assemblage theory to propose a new theoretical understanding of modernity. While the conceptual framing is meant for modernity at large, this paper locates its conceptual discussion in the context of tourism in Macao and illustrates how plasmatic thinking, the new conceptual framework proposed, advances analysis of aspiration, exploitation and freedom of its tour guides. Plasmatic thinking helps examinations of tourism labour to engage with the fragile and fluid nature of the sociomaterial environments. Instead of structures, networks or fluidities, plasmatic thinking sees the world as composed of 'plasmas' – 'charged' sociomaterial clustering of objects, humans and the processes between them. Plasmas are a form of charged matter falling outside solid, liquid and gaseous states and metaphorises the fragility and impermanence of sociomaterial situations for plasmas disintegrates when discharged. The attention to charges and fragility of plasmas helps describes both pandemic levels shocks and everyday disruptions. Through a plasmatic analysis of the falling apart and coming together of such plasmas and how they bring about significant consequences to Macao's tourism, I showcase plasmatic thinking as a theoretical approach which vividly uncovers the fragility and fluidity of modernity and the workings of power in our sociomaterial worlds. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Early Soviet society featured clear nutrition guidelines and a robust plan for streamlined logistics in food processing, distribution, and consumption, all of which was aimed at building a stronger state through a virtuous transformation of calories into labor power. Such rhetoric appeared even in children's illustrated books, such as Vladimir Maiakovskii and Nikolai Kupreianov's Story of Petia, Fat Boy, and of Sima, Who is Skinny (1926). This paper shows how in the 1920s authors such as Viktor Shklovskii and Iurii Olesha turned that rhetoric on its head and pushed back against the early Soviet obsession with planning and mastering nature and the human body by employing metaphors of food, digestion, and agriculture. In Shklovskii's memoirs A Sentimental Journey (1923) and Knight's Move (1923) and Olesha's novel Envy (1927), the October Revolution itself emerges as a metabolic process on a vast scale: prerevolutionary aesthetic threads, motifs, and concepts are broken down and processed, reassembled, and repurposed into a seemingly new society and worldview, in which the individual original components are still recognizable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Lifestyles signify who people are and who people want to be. They contain one's value orientation toward the world. The speeding urbanization over the globe has made the urban lifestyle mainstream, and so does it in China. The overwhelming range of options in cities represents a consumerist society, but meanwhile, there is an emergent underground alternative, especially from the younger generations who are pursuing a "more meaningful life." This paper does an ethnographic study on young Chinese urbanites' engagement in a village as an essential example of this trend. It argues that young people's choice for rural life is a reaction and a resistance to the social forces of consumerism and urbanization. By reflecting on the reimagination of modernity and life politics in the changing process, the research implies that accompanied by opportunities for social change, young people's promotion of rural lifestyles could be linked to the government's development agenda, and this might potentially cause new forms of inequalities in rural development. By drawing on practical experience, the paper brings narratives about young Chinese urbanites' life choices in rural places into the discussion of modernity and life politics, hopefully exemplifying a broader sociological contribution around the topic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Academic research is the site where the production and dissemination of knowledge are embedded in Eurocentric epistemologies which are posited as universal and non‐Eurocentric knowledges are devalued, dismissed, and ignored. Objectives: The goal was to explore the tensions that emerged between the Global North team and the Global South team, from the Global North's perspective. Methods: This paper a collaborative autoethnography to trace how the logics' of coloniality of power structured a transnational research project focused on exploring Indigenous Women's experience of marginalization. The autoethnography involved engaging in critical reflexive auto‐interviews between the team members in the Global North, analyzing field notes and personal written reflections. Results: Autoethnography revealed how colonial conditioning respectively shaped both—the Global North and the Global South teams' expectations of one another, and as such, how they each operationalized decoloniality in the research process. Conclusion: The Global North team focused on epistemically disengaging from coloniality but became overly concerned on meeting the expectations of the funder's temporally oriented productivity demands and ended up rearticulating coloniality's logics. The Global South was concerned with remedying the material dimensions of coloniality in their local community but became overly focused on adopting neoliberal logic models to efficiently satisfy the North's productivity expectations. Meaning, they, too, rearticulated coloniality's logics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Today, we are held to live in the Anthropocene, bringing to an end modern binary imaginaries, such as the separation between Human and Nature, and with them Western assumptions of progress, linear causality and human exceptionalism. Much Western critical theory, from new or vital materialism to post‐ and more‐than‐human thinking, unsurprisingly reflects this internal crisis of faith in Eurocentric or Enlightenment reasoning. At the same time, a radically different critique of modernity has gained prominence in recent years, emerging from critical Black studies, which places the Caribbean at the centre of the development of a new and distinct mode of critical thought. In attempting to grasp the ways in which Caribbean thought and practice have been seen to enable a distinctive alternative non‐Eurocentric imaginary, this paper heuristically sets out a paradigmatic framing of 'abyssal geography'. We emphasize two key points. The first is that abyssal thought is not grounded in abstract and timeless philosophical assumptions but figuratively draws upon aspects of Caribbean practices of resistance and survival, for example, from the Middle Passage, Plantation, carnival, creolization, dance forms and speculative fiction. The second is that abyssal work engages the legacies of modernity and coloniality by explicitly seeking to question the lure of ontology: seeking to disrupt, suspend and to problematize the modern project of the human and the world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Tragic characters fight battles they cannot possibly win. That is what makes heroes out of them. However classical and modern tragedies display ontological differences whose fault line is to be found in the philosophical shift from the rationalist principle of sufficient reason to that of insufficient reason. Hence, life ceases to be a necessity imposed by the wrath of the gods and becomes the ordinary outcome of man's failure. Given that, this paper will consider the nature of the shift and its conceptual impact on the Greek term hamartia. Modernity comes with a redefinition of Weltanschauung: it does not have the cosmic range of the classics, and thus it is less about fate than it is about guilt. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we elaborate on the Fifth Dimension, an extraordinary, largely overlooked architectural example of 1960s psychedelia that was installed in a small Scottish resort town. Made up of 17 domed chambers, each designed to stimulate psychedelic sensory experiences for its intrepid visitors, the Fifth Dimension was the creation of London‐based environmental artist Keith Albarn using his experimental "Ekistikit" modular building system. We argue that the qualities and impacts of this highly inventive, utopian "fun palace" interrogate stereotypical depictions of countercultural, psychedelic creativities. We discuss how they also intersect with current geographical scholarship concerned with sensation, play, and the built environment. Two key elements of the Fifth Dimension are examined. First, building on critical geographies of architecture, we focus on Albarn's innovative system to exemplify how pioneers of environmental design used advanced modular technologies to radically re‐configure the possibilities of dwelling and working in flexible building structures. Second, drawing on aesthetic theories of the sensory, we demonstrate how the structure was designed to stimulate transformative psychedelic sensibilities as a novel form of disruptive politics to induce critical dispositions towards the built environment. Our argument is underpinned by the call for a recuperation of sensational and affective experience in the design and inhabitation of built environments. We contend that this bears particular significance for an emergent geography of play and enchantment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]