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This essay studies the cultural consequences that the spread of paper money had in late nineteenth-century Brazil. First, I examine how these tensions are called into question through the analysis of a political scandal that took place in Rio de Janeiro, in 1900, concerning a two thousand reales banknote. Second, I offer a close reading of Machado de Assis' "Anedota pecuniária", a short-story included in Histórias sem data (1884). My goal is to interrogate the relation between paper money and the economy of credit work, and the narrative devices of literary fiction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In April, 2020, Dr. Geoff Cole published, "Why the 'Hoax' Paper of Baldwin (2018) Should Be Reinstated." We are the authors of the "Baldwin" paper published in Fat Studies. The paper satirized theoretical ideas within Fat Studies as part of a larger project to demonstrate the lack of rigor in certain theoretical approaches to cultural studies. In this response, we agree with Cole that our project should not be understood as hoaxes and that the retracted article should be reinstated, but defend our methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 2018, a peer-reviewed article was published under the name of Richard Baldwin in which the author presented a critique of fat exclusion and advocated "fat bodybuilding" as a sport. Some months later, it became apparent that the article was intended as a hoax written to raise awareness to, or "expose", a certain ideology promoted by some academics. As a result, the editors retracted the article. Using the principles of methodological behaviorism, and other hoax or hoax-like articles, I will argue that the thoughts and opinions held by any author are not important to the argument they present. I will also argue that this form of reflexive ethnography is too problematic to serve as a method of enquiry. I will therefore conclude that the Baldwin article should be reinstated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Food and digital culture are mutually implicated in contemporary processes of knowledge production and power contestation around the world. Our introduction and the papers in this special issue of the European Journal of Cultural Studies seek to draw out the distinctions, parallels and overlaps across food and the digital to offer critical insights into digital food culture's capacities, paradoxes and impacts on everyday life. We ask a series of questions fundamentally focused on issues of power that signal a critical concern for the (re)production and circulation of inequality within the food and digital nexus. For us and the authors here, Cultural Studies is particularly fertile ground from which to analyse digital food culture precisely because of the discipline's commitment to critiquing power and inequality and its subsequent capacity to illuminate everyday digital food politics and their social, cultural and ethical impacts. This article presents and highlights key questions—and introduces related concepts and theoretical debates—that drive this research agenda. In addition, we address the ways the issue's papers connect to digital food culture and power after COVID-19. We conclude with a summary of the articles in the issue and their contributions to digital food culture research and cultural studies more broadly. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper centers two complementary theoretical approaches to advance the debate about transgender women's inclusion in elite women's sports – namely, non-ideal theory and cultural studies. In doing so, the paper highlights divisions between ideal theory and non-ideal theory, normative internalism in sports and normative externalism in sports, and essentialist views of sports compared to non-essentialist views of sports. The paper's main agenda is to show the value of applying non-ideal theory, externalism, and non-essentialism to the discourse over transgender inclusion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Michael de Larrabeiti's controversial series of novels for youth (published in 1975, 1981, and 1986) about the Borribles, children who grow feral and live in anarchic communities in London, were influential for the urban fantasy genre. The novels describe a fictional fantasy subculture but nevertheless engage with issues of the rise of a law-and-order society in the U.K. in the 1970s and police harassment of black youth. Drawing from the work of the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, the paper argues that the trilogy represents an imaginary political solution, grounded in anticapitalist, antiauthority, and antiracist ethics, to the conjunctural crisis of the 1970s and the rise of Thatcherism. The paper reads the structure of feeling of Borrible culture and argues how its narrative functions through a series of displacements to engage with racist police tactics, anarchist squats, and anticapitalist and antiwork ethics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article invites submissions for the William M. Jones Award for the Best Graduate Student Paper in American Culture Studies, presented at the 2024 Annual Meeting of the Popular Culture Association/American Culture Association.

Far less explored than his dramatic output, Kotzebue's shorter prose offers surprising insights for cultural critics and media historiographers. Against the background of nineteenthcentury concerns with literary overproduction, the brief novella "Das Buch Papier" tests various economic and authorial anxieties involving the availability, circulation, and consumption of paper. In Kotzebue's tale, the discussion around the materiality of paper (beyond the book as a dominant cultural figure) becomes a stage for melodramatic narrative construction, raising new questions about the relationship between literary form and bureaucratic formats. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of the more striking, if under-appreciated, aspects of publishing in cultural studies' early days was its provisionality. It is worth remembering that the chief publishing organ of the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies was not called Cultural Studies, or something similarly definitive, but rather Working Papers in Cultural Studies. By today's standards it would likely be considered 'grey literature', because the work appearing there announced itself as, on some level, in process. This essay offers a detailed history of cultural studies' early publication practices, particularly those associated with the Centre. Its purpose is to provide insight into the modes of scholarly communication through which the nascent field established itself in the 1960s and '70s. Equally, its purpose is to use this history as a means for taking stock of the field's apparatus of scholarly communication today. Cultural studies, the authors argue, might do well to open a space once again for less finished scholarly products - work that is as much constitutive (i.e., about community building) as it is instrumental (i.e., about conveying new research). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper engages with the transculturalization of Cultural Studies by focusing on the theoretical and political implications of translating it. This is a question that has been discussed over the years, especially in the context of the global spread and the institutionalization (or lack thereof) of cultural studies in universities outside of Britain in the early 1990s. In this context cultural studies practitioners have questioned the very use of labels such as 'internationalization' or 'globalization', and expressed concerns about whether its expansion would happen at the expense of its distinctiveness. I pick up this discussion while re-framing it from a perspective which focuses on the politics of translation. I argue that translation is not a linear or automatic process (you bring something from A to B and it gets translated), but a collective work which is translingual, trans- and extradisciplinary. From this perspective, cultural studies has always been characterized by a strong commitment to translation. If labels such as 'British' or 'American' cultural studies obscure this commitment, this is because of a narrow understanding of translation as a cultural practice. In light of these considerations, I point to translation as a fundamental means to oppose cultural elitism, and the fragmentation of intellectual engagement produced by disciplinary, (inter)nationalizing and globalizing trends. Against this background, the paper stresses the potential of translation work with respect to re-thinking cultural studies' distinctiveness in the current conjuncture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines contemporary food culture in Ireland through the phenomenon of foodism and the habits and traits expressed through the subculture of foodies. Elements and actors of the Irish food scene are also considered. Qualitative research was applied to investigate the five research objectives posed. This featured six in-depth interviews with "key informants" from Ireland's tourism sector, educational sector, food sector, and a state food agency, conducted during 2020. The study draws insights from the fields of cultural studies and sociology. Thematic analysis was applied as part of the methodology process, from which five themes developed from the data findings. These are: (1) An evolving Irish food culture, (2) Two perceptions of Irish food, (3) A breakdown of hierarchies, (4) Influencing factors, (5) State body remits. The primary research reveals that industry experts and academics concur that Irish food and culture have "evolved" from a more traditional cuisine and culture and that these are dynamic entities. In addition, it establishes that there is a "hunger for food" amongst a small but growing cohort of Ireland's population, who wish to gain information via food media and to access food experiences such as culinary courses, gastro tours and food festival events. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a historical overview of conceptions about the Sun in Western astronomical and cosmological traditions before the advent of spectroscopy and astrophysics. Rather than studying general cultural ideas, we focus on the concepts developed by astronomers or by natural philosophers impacting astronomy. The ideas we investigate, from the works of Plato and Aristotle to William Herschel and his contemporaries, do not line up into a continuous and integrated narrative, since the nature of the Sun was not a genuine scientific topic before the nineteenth century. However, the question recurringly arose as embedded in cosmological and physical contexts. By outlining this heterogeneous story that spreads from transcendence to materiality, from metaphysics to physics, from divinity to solar inhabitants, we receive insight into some major themes and trends both in the general development of astronomical and cosmological thought and in the prehistory of modern solar science. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we demonstrate the ways in which the schooling of refugee youth in the United States reflects ongoing coloniality in education. Drawing on data collected in a case study, conducted between 2013 and 2016, as part of a larger ongoing ethnography of a Southwest United States District school's response to refugee students, we show how the enactment of policies, pedagogies, and practices within schools reinforce the government's control over refugee students and their families. In schools, the students are kept out of certain school spaces, marginalized in remedial courses, and denied academic opportunities and integrated support services. Using empirical data, we demonstrate how the restriction of the students' movement in and around schools is embedded within the larger limitations embedded in coloniality and assimilation. We situate our analysis within the tensions and interactions between coloniality, assimilation, and neoliberalism as articulated in studies within anthropology and sociology, migration studies, critical refugee studies, and cultural studies. We conclude with a call for the decolonization of education and offer a practical starting point in refugee education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this paper is to suggest that the concept of fugitive pedagogies of dread contributes to affective, ontological and political reorientations of dread in teaching and learning for/about the future. To do so, the paper puts in conversation the concepts of "fugitivity" (from Black liberatory practices), "anticipation" and "radical futurity" (from the field of Future Studies in education), and the notion of "dread" as a political affect/emotion (from the recent affective turn in the social sciences and humanities). It is argued that the concept of "fugitive pedagogies of dread" enables students and educators to contest monolithic understandings of "dreadful" visions of futures and reframe dread as a contingent and transformative possibility. The paper concludes by discussing the pedagogical and theoretical implications of this concept for scholars and educators in the fields of education, pedagogy and cultural studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents an analysis of the song "Pelas Tabelas", by Chico Buarque, and explores its main allusion: the Biblical figure of John the Baptist as a symbol of resistance to tyranny, violence, and irrationality. Buarque uses poetry, irony, and references to Brazilian culture in order to create a story of love and alienation with pathetic intensity. The paper contextualizes the song in the context of Buarque's musical oeuvre and in that particular political moment in Brazilian history - the 1980s - in which a great movement for the reestablishment of democracy was on its way: the movement called Diretas Já. This analysis proposes a dialogue with the fields of cultural studies, theology, and literature. It shows that Buarque's song is imbued with the poetic, the prophetic, and the pathetic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper summarizes findings from the Austrian research team of the MascAge Project involving online focus groups with Austrian men aged 65 and over and a case study in literary and cultural studies in the form of an analysis of David Schalko's novel Bad Regina (2021). Both analyses suggest that negotiations of (declining) power are central to understanding cultural and social constructions of aging masculinities in Austria in the early 2020s. This paper provides an insight into an interdisciplinary endeavor on current dimensions of aging men in Austria that contributes to a better understanding of current debates in Austrian Studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This is an immanent discussion of the paper presented by Professor Jessica Gordon-Nembhard for the 2023 David Gordon Memorial Lecture given at the Allied Social Science Association annual meeting, Union of Radical Political Economy session. The discussion is organized around eight references (excluding Gordon-Nembhard) cited in the paper. These references represent specific theoretical perspectives and practical experiences in the fields of political economy, Black political economy, and Black feminist political economy, as well as psychology and cultural studies. The goal is to place this article and the work of Gordon-Nembhard within a variety of political economy and interdisciplinary traditions, and highlight its importance. JEL Classifications: B40, B55, P51 [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper addresses the developments witnessed by the concept of security in strategic studies, based on the insights of the Egyptian thinker Bahgat Korany, who formulated the concepts of high and low politics. The former is linked to traditional military and security domains, while the latter is associated with social, economic, and cultural spheres, which current historical contexts have highlighted the importance of, particularly for countries described as lagging behind. The study adopts the cultural security model through analyzing the contemporary Arab world's reality, demonstrating that cultural security plays a fundamental role in securing various other sectors, especially in preserving identity and cultural distinctiveness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The concept of liminality is fundamentally borrowed from anthropology to explore its application in literary and cultural studies, which remains largely understudied to this date. Liminality essentially signifies a state of in-betweenness characterised by significant factors, such as uncertainty, ambiguity, anxiety, loss of previous values, identity-crisis, isolation and dilemma. The present paper intends to investigate the tropes of liminality in the graphic novel as well as its application to understand the process of transformation of the protagonist as expressed through grids, gutters and panels by employing Victor Turner's 'Theory of Liminality'. Further, the later part is dedicated to explore the silhouettes of activism using Turner's concept of 'anti-structure', through the theme of vegetation visible throughout the novel. The present work not only attempts to trace the liminality of the protagonist in Gendry-Kim's Grass(2019) but also ventures into establishing the liminal status of the genre of graphic novel itself. The study, thus, presents us an opportunity to explore one of the aggressively silenced and traumatic histories of 'comfort women issue' through the lens of Gendry-Kim's recently published graphic novel Grass(2019). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The movie Try Harder! features a group of students at Lowell High School in San Francisco, California, as they navigate their elite public institution and apply to top-tier universities. A critical analysis of this film allows us to understand new trends and emerging discourses in urban cities, showing the way racialized groups are pit against each other to legitimize white supremacy. I employ the lenses of critical studies of race to examine the following questions: (1) how does the model minority myth shape urban contexts? and (2) how are racial, political, and academic discourses constructing notions of merit via the film Try Harder? Few studies examine the model minority myth in relation to urban contexts, despite its rising influence in political debates and education policy. This paper aims to fill this void by addressing the changing landscape of urban education and academic discourse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the introduction to her influential work on Asian American cultural studies and feminist materialist critique, Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics, Lisa Lowe shatters the contradictions manifested in Asian immigration, wherein Asians' entry into the United States marked them either as marginalized from "within" the national political sphere or as linguistically, culturally, and racially "outside" of the national polity For Asian immigrants, the debate of being simultaneously needed and excluded is no more evidenced historically than using Chinese labor during the California Gold Rush in the mid-nineteenth century. Their migratory relocation was hardly met with ease and public enthusiasm, however. Evoking anxiety in their Anglo counterparts, the Chinese were characterized as foreign noncitizens: barbaric, alien, and dangerous, the quintessential "yellow peril" threatening to displace white European immigrants such as the Irish. The irrational fear of the "Oriental" from the Far East led to a succession of immigration exclusion laws passed by Congress that denied the Chinese from entering the U.S. and their rights to naturalization in 1882. Passed by Congress and signed by President Chester A. Arthur, the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act suspended the entry of Chinese laborers into the U.S. based on their nationality for ten years. This paper argues that the possibility of agency for Chinese workers existed throughout the exclusionary period. Specifically, this site of agency resides with Chinese women and is expressed through a literary mode. For instance, Lin Yutang's Chinatown Family (1948) captures this moment of immigrant agency in the post-exclusion era. Lin, a pioneering Chinese writer and inventor who wrote texts such as My Country and My People (1935), The Importance of Living (1937), and Moment in Peking (1939), often utilized his narratives to bridge the clash between the East and West. Identifying what I see as the inadequacy of probing one of the earliest Chinese American texts from a rigid literary mode, I move to reconsider the novel as a legal counternarrative to the three exclusionary laws: the Page Law of 1875, the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, and the Cable Act of 1922. To direct my critical reorientation of Lin's novel away from, though not necessarily against, literary castings of this early immigrant tale, I take the narrative as a strategic literary re-imagination that structures itself around these three legislative pieces to critique restrictive practices enacted upon the Chinese. The novel showcases how Chinese immigrants maneuvered and manipulated the legal system in their favor during assimilation. In this context, critical reappraisal is needed in scrutinizing how the Exclusion Act generated a wave of domestic-based diasporic relocation of Chinese workers from California to New York. Due to acute anti-Chinese sentiments on the West Coast, resetting Chinese workers in the northeast in search of a new Gold Mountain led to a unique phenomenon. This dispersal elevated Chinese women as valuable social capitals who transformed metropoles like New York City and redefined their views as nationalist subjects of the "about-to-be" in industrial capitalist modernity. Through a legal framework, then, Lin's portrayal of the Fong clan suggests the emergence of a gendered Sino-immigrant agency, one that enabled the Chinese woman/mother to situate herself as the locus of the traditional patriarchal Chinese entrepreneurial family and the forefront of the northeast industrial capitalist scene. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based upon a series of in-depth, semi-structured interviews with popular cancer influencers, this paper examines the practices by which intimacy is co-produced and managed in the online cancer community. Drawing theoretically from feminist theory, affect theory and cultural studies, the authors explore the complex boundary work that cancer survivors and caregivers engage in to establish, sustain, and protect themselves as an intimate public. The findings show that outsiders, difference, and the threat such things pose to community harmony are actively operationalized to sustain intimacy among cancer community insiders. In the discussion, the authors reflect on what these findings suggest about the politics, possibilities, and limits of platform-mediated forms of intimacy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Human culture is built upon nature to help humans adapt to their environment – first natural, but later natural-cultural. Cultural practices are aimed at aiding survival in changing environments, and in different settings they meet different environmental pressures, causing later changes in trajectories. According to cultural evolutionism, behaviours, ideas and artefacts are subject to inheritance, competition, accumulation of modifications, adaptation, geographical distribution, convergence and changes of function – these are mechanisms present also in biological evolution. In the following paper, we examine women's dance and physical exercise practices, which contain similar postures performed in comparable circumstances, as found in initiation ritual dances in chosen East African communities and in Slavic gymnastics for women in the Belarusian tradition. In times of globalization and the mixing of cultures, the position on knees and elbows is recontextualized in a visually attractive form of contemporary dances like Kangamoko and Baikoko, or more widely different variants of 'twerking' and reconstructed physical exercises. Approaching 'twerking' positions, especially on knees and elbows as a cross-genre performance, we find common roots in the communal support for women's good wife and mother status teachings in various cultures, showing the importance of women's circles, women's health and well-being for the community. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

At the end of his life, Stuart Hall called for the reengagement of Cultural Studies and Marxism. This paper contributes to this task. It analyses Stuart Hall's works on communication and the media. The goal of the paper is to read Stuart Hall in a manner that can inform the renewal of Marxist Humanism and the development of a Marxist-Humanist theory of communication. This involves reconstructing elements of Hall's approach, criticising certain aspects of his work, and through this engagement developing new theory elements. The article's analysis of Stuart Hall's theory of communication and the media is conducted in four steps. First, the paper reengages and re-evaluates what Hall called the two paradigms of Cultural Studies: Structuralism and "Culturalism"/Humanism. It discusses the role of human agency in society. Second, the paper engages with Hall's and Althusser's notions of articulation and sets the notion of articulation in relation to the concept of communication. Third, it discusses the relationship between communication and work in the context of Hall's works. Fourth, the article revisits and engages with Hall's encoding/decoding-model in the context of digitalisation. This paper grounds a dialectical concept of communication that is based on the dialectic of articulating and articulatedness, the dialectic of work and communication, as well as the dialectic of communication in the public sphere and society's power forcefields. It shows how a critical, dialectical theory of communication benefits from engagement with Stuart Hall's works. The present work argues with, for, against, and beyond Stuart Hall in order or productively draw on ideas that emerge from this engagement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article seeks to improve the understanding of applying case studies in qualitative research in construction culture. Being a soft and method-complex research strategy, the case study approach is challenging to implement in practice. This issue is exacerbated when the case study approach is incorporated with the inherited complexity of the construction culture. Thus, when studying construction culture through a case study approach, it is critical to establish concise guidelines that can be referred to and followed. The proposed methodology is described in detail, from conceptualizing the research problem to reporting the findings, and is illustrated with an example application to a building information modeling (BIM)-enabled construction organization. The ensuing discourse elucidates upon how the philosophical and methodological issues can be addressed by systematically designing the case study to secure optimal research outcomes. From the study, it was found that beyond the scope of typical case studies, a cultural case study must establish its cultural philosophical position, whether it sees culture as a variable or a root metaphor. Given the necessity of indirect questioning in culture research, the data collection protocols should be developed to allow for a more in-depth exploration of the core construction culture. Consequently, questions about difficult and critical situations are essential for eliciting appropriate responses from interviewees and making the process more effective. Furthermore, asking interviewees for examples to back up their answers adds justifications and credibility to their responses. The paper contributes to the existing body of knowledge by proposing a systematic approach to identify hidden cultural beliefs, and by demonstrating the process of developing coding levels using NVivo software. The proposed methodology can be applied to other cultural domains such as safety and lean and can help organizations to identify the underlying cultural beliefs that may impact their performance and develop targeted interventions. The guidelines help novice researchers identify critical steps in designing qualitative case studies in cultural research, and future research could deductively and quantitatively test the theories developed in this paper to confirm validity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

From his Problem of Genesis in Husserl's Philosophy (1953–4) to the address given on the fiftieth anniversary of Le monde diplomatique just before he died in 2004, Derrida made constant reference to the subject of Europe. A recent volume of essays, Europe after Derrida: Crisis and Potentiality, seeks to explore this work and the current paper gauges the extent to which it correctly accounts for it. It is suggested that many of the chapters are seriously flawed in failing to note how Derrida's interest in Europe follows that of a long line of philosophers from the phenomenological school, going back to Husserl and including Heidegger and Patočka. Consequently, many of the contributors resort to ideas of identity current in sociology and cultural studies and appear not to understand that central to Derrida's thought is a challenge to such notions. Unlike Gasché's Europe, or The Infinite Task, the only single-volume treatment of Derrida's work on Europe and a text mentioned by only two contributors, they overlook the way in which he proposes that Europe could be precisely a project of pioneering the rethinking of identity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article invites submission of articles by graduate students to be considered for the William M. Jones Award for Best Graduate Student Paper in American Culture Studies.

This paper explores the narrativization of sports icons within the context of nationalist discourse. The authors explore New Zealand media coverage surrounding the death of Colin Meads in August 2017. Meads, a former all Black rugby captain, coach and administrator, media pundit, and corporate spokesman, was a high-profile public icon. His death was met with saturation national media coverage. The authors' cultural studies informed analysis of Meads' narrativization is twofold. First, the authors contextualize the cultural scripts surrounding him prior to his death. Second, they critically read media narrativization following his death within the context of narratives of nation. They explore this mediation in the context of intersecting themes of rurality, Whiteness, masculinity, and rugby. Print media coverage widely articulated Meads to the nation as the archetypical "kiwi," liturgized his contribution to rugby during and after his playing career, and his "no-nonsense" character. In doing so, it reinforced a selective national narrative, premised on a combination of both remembering and forgetting. This narrative reaffirms White-settler, male heroism, and rugby as central to New Zealand nationhood and assuages contemporary national anxieties and the cultural hierarchies they entangle. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, a study is performed in order to achieve a process that successfully respects the colour integrity of photogrammetry models of cultural heritage pieces. As a crucial characteristic of cultural heritage documentation, the colour of the pieces—as a valuable source of information—needs to be properly handled and preserved, since digital tools may induce variations in its values, or lose them to a degree. Different conditions for image acquisition schemes, RGB value calculation, calibration and photogrammetry have been combined and the results measured, so the adequate procedure is found. Control over all colour transformations is enforced, with blending operations during the texture generation process being the only unpredictable step in the pipeline. It is demonstrated that an excellent degree of colour information preservation can be achieved when applying said control on the factors of acquisition and colour digitalization, inclusive deciding their parameters. This paper aims to serve as guidelines of a correct handling of colour information and workflow so cultural heritage documentation can be performed with the highest degree of colour fidelity, covering the gap of non-existing standard procedure or conditions to perform an optimum digital cultural heritage colour modelling. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Prof. Dr. Umay Türkeş Günay is a well-known folklorist in Turkey and abroad. While writing her doctoral thesis, she applied to Elazig tales the Propp method, which was developed by Russian scientist Vladimir Propp in his work "Morfogija Skazki", published in Leningrad in 1928, which marks the beginning of her scientific works. She is the first scientist to implement the Propp method, which is frequently used by folklorists today, in Türkiye. She started her career at Ankara University, Faculty of Language, History and Geogra- phy, and continued at Hacettepe University, thus creating the Hacettepe University school. She led the establishment of the chair of Turkish Folklore at the same university between 1985-1991. She received the title of "Associate Professor" with her research titled "Aşık Style Poetry Tradition and Dream Motif". She served as a member and consultant in commissions and committees related to culture, folklore and education activities of various institutions such as the Prime Ministry of the Republic of Türkiye, Ministry of Culture, Ministry of National Education, UNESCO and the State Planning Organization. In addition to her 5 books, Prof. Dr. Türkeş Günay has hundreds of publications including articles, papers, introductions-critiques, essays and translations. Prof. Dr. Umay Türkeş Günay, who continues her duty as the Dean of the Faculty of Education at Girne American University, sheds light on young researchers with her scientific articles and speeches. Scientists are people who produce, research, question, present their knowledge to the world of science and train young scientists. Prof. Dr. Umay Türkeş Günay, a scientist who has devoted her life to Turkish cultural studies, is principled, open to different suggestions and extremely objective as an administrator. She is uncompromising in scientific and business disciplines. She never conducts her relations with the people she works with on the subordinate-superior plane. By displaying her respectful style towards identities and personalities to both academic staff and students, she approaches young academics and students both like a mother and a teacher. In this study, information about Prof. Dr. Umay Türkeş Günay's life, her academic and administrative duties, the theses she supervised, and the books, articles and papers she wrote is given. In the study, the following books of Prof. Dr. Türkeş Günay, each a value in itself, were examined in detail: "Elazig Tales and Propp Method", "Aşık Style Poetry Tradition and Dream Motif in Turkey", "Risâlet-i Nushiyye and Yunus Emre", "History of Turks", and "Criticism of Turkish Culture". Based on the works of Turkish culture researcher Prof. Dr. Umay Türkeş Günay, attention was drawn to the messages she conveyed to the Turkish society and the importance of her books was examined. In the study, the views of Prof. Dr. Umay Türkeş Günay about science and the situation of the Turkish world in the historical course were pointed out and her suggestions and solutions were discussed. In addition, the articles written by Prof. Dr. Umay Türkeş Günay on the importance of critical perspective as regards the development and growth of societies are also included within the scope of the study. In addition, the bibliography of Prof. Dr. Umay Türkeş Günay's works is provided. Thus, an attempt has been made to draw a scientific portrait of Prof. Dr. Türkeş Günay based on the works. In the 80th year of her birth, the life path of the professor of the professors, Umay Mother of the Turks, is examined and her contribution to Turkish science is highlighted. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper assesses the significance for media and cultural studies of the collaborative interdisciplinary project initiated by John Hartley in the mid 2000s under the rubric of 'cultural science'. It suggests that, in the case at least of Hartley's own work, the project could be understood as an attempt to pivot cultural studies from an engagement with centre-periphery conceptual schemas associated with print and broadcast media to an idea of distributed systems. The way it does so is very revealing as to prospects of the concept of culture in the wake of half a century of neoliberal institutional reform. The paper finds the claim to scientificity confused and misleading, inhibiting engagement from what Hartley now calls 'old' cultural studies. However, the lines of argument can be pushed further than cultural science has itself been prepared to do, opening new possibilities for cultural studies and new possibilities for how we might imagine our collective future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this introduction to the Journal of Raman Spectroscopy special issue "Advanced Raman procedures applied to natural/cultural heritage and forensic questions: Mobile set‐up, data treatment and associated techniques," the aim is to assess the state of the art in the field and to highlight potential new perspectives. The novel approaches employed in the published papers are described and can be grouped as such: application of multivariate statistical analysis to Raman spectra, use of mobile instrumentations directly in situ for both cultural and forensic contexts, tackling with optics and spectral range issues, and coupling with mobile instrumentations based on different analytical techniques. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In his study Storycraft, the veteran American journalist Jack Hart asks the following questions about reportage, memoir and other forms of nonfiction writing that proceed from the first-person perspective of their author: 'Where's the storyteller standing? What can he see and hear? Whose story is it, anyway?' (Hart, 2021, Storycraft: The complete guide to writing narrative nonfiction (p. 39). University of Chicago Press). The questions are suggestive of the formal and creative decisions reportage practitioners must make, but also of their ethical obligations to fairly represent their human subjects, especially if they are vulnerable, underprivileged and/or marginalized. The hinting at viewpoint – 'whose story...' – might also make us think about how identity is constructed from the stories we tell about ourselves and about our interactions with the world. This paper addresses all these issues primarily, though not exclusively, through the prism of Coast of Teeth, a practice-based visual and textual reportage project we completed in late 2022. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Starting from a question about the "diasporic" position of certain authors of cultural criticism in Latin America, always halfway between academic affiliation and a kind of fractious position regarding their increasingly bureaucratized practices of knowledge administration, this paper proposes a reading of three representative texts by the Brazilian-Argentine critic Raul Antelo: Crítica acéfala, Archifilologías latinoamericanas. Lecturas tras el agotamiento and A ruinologia. These strange and problematic texts seem to be articulated from a position that not only (post)critically revises the foundations of more conventional criticism, but also moves toward the behavior of the most radical bids of artistic conceptualism; in other words, in them criticism becomes an act: intervention. And therein lies its forceful emergence in the framework of contemporary literary and cultural studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates feelings and emotions in intercultural development through an analysis of students' journals. It looks into the affective reactions to life in Spain and how these relate to the intercultural development of a cohort of 26 American students participating in a calendar year study abroad programme (SAP) in a Spanish university, a pertinent study given that Spain, which hosts 9,5% of total American students abroad, has become the third preferred destination of American university students (Institute of International Education, 2019). Although the literature on cultural dissonance highlights the prevalence of feelings of distress when sojourners are removed from their social support systems, findings divulge a myriad of feelings classified into 9 areas that show a balance between uncertainty and stress of study abroad (SA), and excitement and feelings of well-being. Departing from affective reactions, analysis has likewise been conducted on how students come to terms with a different reality. Data evince that understanding new meanings and symbols is done through a comparative/contrastive problematising orientation through which SA is presented as challenge rather than as threat. The paper concludes that SA and reflection upon it contribute to reassess and shift frames of reference, influencing intercultural development and personal growth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Reviews the history of praxis itself in the development of cultural studies. Proposals for conferences devoted to the development of practical skills and methods; Cultural studies as both interdisciplinary and anti-disciplinary.

Over the years, the humanities community has increasingly requested the creation of artificial intelligence frameworks to help the study of cultural heritage. Document Layout segmentation, which aims at identifying the different structural components of a document page, is a particularly interesting task connected to this trend, specifically when it comes to handwritten texts. While there are many effective approaches to this problem, they all rely on large amounts of data for the training of the underlying models, which is rarely possible in a real-world scenario, as the process of producing the ground truth segmentation task with the required precision to the pixel level is a very time-consuming task and often requires a certain degree of domain knowledge regarding the documents at hand. For this reason, in this paper, we propose an effective few-shot learning framework for document layout segmentation relying on two novel components, namely a dynamic instance generation and a segmentation refinement module. This approach is able of achieving performances comparable to the current state of the art on the popular Diva-HisDB dataset, while relying on just a fraction of the available data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on my teaching experience of nearly 20 years in the Department of Chinese Literature in mainland China, this paper discusses the functions of literary criticism, and how they differ between university education and secondary education. This paper has two main purposes: (1) by examining how Chinese literary criticism evolved since the 1980s, this article shows the important role it played in shaping the ways people think. (2) Through the observation of the new generation of young readers, this paper points out the inflexibility of the existing academic criticism. From my teaching experience, I have observed that the flourishing Chinese network literature represents, since the beginning of the new century, a whole new literary field and traditional literary criticism is facing new challenges. However, with the top-down reform of literature education, literary criticism is more related to the exam system than to the literary creation itself. This means that literary criticism still assumes a very important educational function, but is no longer adapted to the new commercial literary production. This new trend has forced academic criticism to make corresponding adjustments. This paper sees the possibility of establishing a new critical unified field. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper aims to understand how everyday life is affected by new technological conditions through an inquiry into glitch, a concept that signifies moments of faulty interference in the regular operation of a technology and that is often labeled a ghost in the machine. By drawing on two concepts from cultural studies – spectrality and post-digital culture – it demonstrates how the imperfection-oriented aesthetic of glitch is today complicated by the technological tendency to bypass human awareness. By developing this argument through a reading of German electronic music group Oval's influential glitch-based record 94diskont (1995), the paper shows how glitch's signification of mediation, fragility and technological complexity has been modulated in recent years. This analysis is augmented through a consideration of Mark B.N. Hansen's concept of 'twenty-first-century media', which takes as highly significant the tendency of contemporary media to operate beyond the thresholds of human cognition and perception. The paper suggests that, as a result of these new medial forms, the subversive potential of glitch-based artworks is impacted severely, but also that glitch's status of ghost in the machine offers valuable resources for thinking through the media experiences afforded by 21st-century media. This paper thereby points to new potential modes of critique, and expands existing cultural debates about aesthetics, technology, and the constitution of everyday life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cultural Studies' 'institutional presence' in higher education is well documented; however, less well understood are nuances between different institutional 'types' and the way that Cultural Studies is variously taught and practiced in these settings. This paper will explore the authors' experiences of teaching with Cultural Studies in Australian regional universities and the opportunities that Cultural Studies presents in these 'peripheral' locations. Arguing that predominant accounts of Cultural Studies' practice derive from institutional settings where a recognised disciplinary presence is evident, this paper will chart what it means to enact Cultural Studies in locations where the disciplinary presence is not so visible. We suggest that enactments of Cultural Studies in these settings demonstrate innovative activations of practice that afford generative possibility for the discipline. The ways that Cultural Studies comes to be done in these contexts provide useful prompts for considering the possibilities that Cultural Studies provokes pedagogically, as a contextually contingent intellectual project. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper I study a set of late-colonial kantha quilts as sites of recuperation. In the first section I situate kantha and its shifting meanings within the wider field of cultural productions in nineteenth-century bengal. I argue that through kantha embroideries upper caste women participated in Hindu cultural nationalism while recuperating a sense of self. I briefly follow speculative trajectories of kantha's surfaces and contents to further look for the social world of collected kantha makers. I continue to examine kanthas made by elite women as objects of recuperation inflected by women's authorial voices and everyday gendered negotiations, and as sites of inscribing the self in relation to the sacred. I end the paper with the contention that while some women embroidered im/possible worlds to recuperate from effects of colonialism and patriarchy, others sought comfort in translating emergent ideological underpinnings of the elite class onto the kantha surfaces. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the rise of modern social sciences that deal with sports phenomena. It begins with the first formula that paved the way for sports science to become an independent scientific field. This is found in European intellectual discourse in the first half of the twentieth century, which linked sport to what was then known as the "crisis of European values." It then deals with the endeavours of the social sciences to make sport a research and knowledge topic, which was devoted to and institutionalised in the 1960s. It investigates the first theoretical paradigms in the field, the first designed by Norbert Elias, and deals with the position of sport in the development of modern European societies. The other, designed by Pierre Bourdieu, is based on viewing sport as an independent social field. Finally, the paper looks at the interest in cultural studies in sports in the late seventies of the twentieth century, which saw it as a field revealing the distinctions on which Western societies are built. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent discussions of gay male bottom identity have been cautious about positioning bottoms in relation to a gendered identity, and thereby colluding with stereotypes about gay bottoms being effeminate and effeminate gays being bottoms. In wider LGBTQ media in Europe and North America there is an effort to destigmatize effeminate gay men in a dating culture that privileges "masc4masc." While this is welcome, it obscures the existence of effeminate gay bottom fantasies that are gender stratified and which insist on a connection between sex role preference, sex object choice, and gender presentation. This paper analyses sexual fantasy narratives on the social media platform, Tumblr, and interrogates a deep structure of gender-stratified male androphilia that finds thematic similarities in non-Western settings, where "egalitarian" or Western "gay" expressions of male same-sex unions compete with traditional "heterogender" forms. It concludes by reaffirming the need to consider gender positionality among gay bottoms' narratives in Western contexts, and for further research on Western gay men to recognize the heterogeneity of gay identities and experiences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study takes a cultural anthropological approach to address the use of music taste as an instrument of self-presentation on online dating platforms by examining the partnership between Spotify and Tinder, which not only allows Tinder users to pick an anthem from Spotify's catalog, but also displays a list of "top artists" based on data aggregated through their activity on Spotify. Using Cheney-Lippold's formulation of the "measurable type" and Bucher's notion of "conscious clicking" as foundational frameworks, this paper offers the term "conscious listening" to explore the ways that users play with their music taste-based identities on Tinder. In order to better theorize this phenomenon, a wide array of thinkers ranging from communications, sociology, and data/platform studies are coalesced along with the results of in-depth interviews with 10 Tinder users to analyze the recent convergence of music streaming and social dating platforms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I rethink thuggery, an overt form of dissent, as a spatial structural frame. Through a close reading of everyday forms of thuggery in Nigeria, exemplified in literary, musical, and photographic forms, I argue that not only is thuggery ubiquitous in the African postcolony but also that it is the means by which the citizenry assert their citizenship, structure their space, and perform democracy. I use the phrase "proximate thuggery" in two ways: first, to broaden the commonplace definition of thuggery as violent antisocial behavior which does not hold up in many postcolonial states where there seems no line separating the violent from the non-violent, where the insidiously violent masquerades as non-violent; and second, to signal the quotidian nature of dissent and therefore refocus attention on those manifestations of thuggery even in corridors of power. If the purpose of critical cultural studies is to understand a problem from its roots in order to suggest useful solutions, it seems fitting to pay attention to everyday, non-spectacular forms of dissent—for, among other reasons, attention to overt forms of dissent isolates them as anomalies and leads to inadequate solutions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper proposes a novel framework called 'cultural affordances' to examine the dynamic interplay among technology, users and culture, as multilevel and multidirectional interactive networks. The framework includes three dimensions. 1) Cultural affordances of technology describe what technology can offer users and culture in terms of behavioural or cultural changes. 2) Cultural affordances of users describe what users can offer other users, technology and culture in terms of behavioural, technological or cultural changes. 3) Affordances of the cultural describe what culture can offer users and technology in terms of the design and use of technology as well as related changes. To establish the need for a culturally oriented extension to affordance theory, we first revisit Gibson's original definition of affordances of the environment and discuss its significance and limitations, including the need to understand the interplay between technology and users in the digital era. We contend that culture, as an assemblage of all relations and practices, should be included as an indispensable part of affordance theory, and we provide a detailed explanation of the novel, three-dimensional framework of cultural affordances. We then apply the framework to three prior empirical studies and one ongoing study to demonstrate how the framework can be used as an analytic tool to deepen our understanding of the multilevel and multidirectional interplay among technology, users and culture, and we identify related changes, focusing on WeChat. We also discuss how the framework can provide directions for designing new technologies to improve collaborations among users, between users and designers, and between an online platform and the offline world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Culture is about the mode of life and activity, way of thinking, and artifacts, which are associated with particular communities and the language which serves as a vehicle for meanings. This paper is aimed at describing cultural challenges and their translation procedures from English into Arabic; it also investigates choices of translation procedures that can be used to overcome cultural aspects problems. This study limits itself to cultural factors. It follows Newmark’s approach (1988) on culture translation. The corpus of this study is a play entitled A Dance of The Forests written by Wole Soyinka. The study is a qualitative study and cultural occurrences are analyzed and their translations are rated by raters who are native speakers of Arabic. The research reveals that translating a literary work like a play requires the use of strategies and procedures like domestication and oblique translation procedures, which are found to be vital in translating drama text from English into Arabic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Play is a place of diverse meaning-making for young children and often central to family life. This paper reports on a family study in which the authors analyse Author One's family photos of young children's play across four generations. The photo analysis shows continuity and transformations in the types of play activities the young children engaged with across the generations. A facet of this study is gaining insights into how these familial photos operate in the cultural sphere of family, community and broader socio-political contexts with the analysis set against the seven rhetorics of play espoused by play historian Sutton-Smith. The study explores how young children's play lasts and transitions across four generations in line with early childhood education ideologies of the times. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article reviews the exhibition "Miguéis in New York" at the John Hay Library, Brown University in Rhode Island, which features the testimonial of the author's life of literary and cultural studies of José Rodrigues Miguéis in 2015.

In today's diversified development of contemporary culture, how Chinese traditional culture and contemporary graphic design can be perfectly integrated into contemporary design and how to reflect their unique cultural symbols in contemporary design is a major issue that designers and researchers must face. This paper takes Chinese cultural symbols as the research object and adopts a multivariate statistical model based on a random matrix. By means of factor analysis and cluster analysis, the number of dimensions of multivariate data is minimized while ensuring minimal information loss to improve the efficiency of the analysis. This paper takes Chinese cultural symbols as the core and adopts a multivariate statistical method based on the random matrix for factor analysis and cluster analysis, in an attempt to establish a complete and scientific evaluation index system, which provides a reliable tool for the study of Chinese cultural symbols. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]