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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]

Are there certain shared feelings that orient contemporary feminists? And what does it mean to feel like a feminist now, at a time when digital networks and media culture significantly shape the conditions for what feminism 'is' (Banet-Weiser 2018)? This paper considers how digital culture, as a crucial but potentially disorienting site of feminist encounter and contestation, may reshape norms of feminist feeling, and what feminist feeling is used to do. Feminists have long understood feeling as an 'orienting device' (Ahmed 2006). in the question of how subjects come to know the world and situate themselves in it. Feminism itself has been associated with a 'willfulness' creating dissident subjectivities moving against the grain of prevailing patriarchal gender norms. Following Ahmed's queer phenomenology where feeling is theorized as an 'orientation' towards objects, this paper considers how the affective infrastructures and dynamics of digital culture orient and draw boundaries for feminists along particular lines. We explore self-identifying feminists' accounts of learning, interaction and deliberation as feminists within digital environments, suggesting that what it means to be feminist is significantly determined by what it means to feel feminist. While digital culture makes feminism more 'accessible' to many, we suggest that the commercialized architectures and rhythms of digital culture complicate and intensify the politics of emotion connected to differences and histories of power relations within feminism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The fire at Grenfell Tower, a block of public housing flats in The Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea, London, in June 2017 has come to epitomize the growing divide between Britain's rich and poor in the last decade. Yet, the proximity of Kensington Palace, home of many senior British royals, has been almost entirely ignored in scholarship and commentary on the Grenfell Tower atrocity. This is especially remarkable given the philanthropic 'work' the monarchy has undertaken since the fire's aftermath. This paper explores Together: Our Community Cookbook (The Hubb Community Kitchen. 2018. Together: Our community cookbook. London: Ebury Press), a cookbook released by Meghan Markle as part of her royal charitable 'duties', to raise money for The Hubb Community Kitchen – a group of women displaced in the fire, who prepared meals for survivors in the aftermath. The cookbook repeatedly emphasizes unity, collectivity and togetherness: the importance of a local community response to rehabilitate Grenfell survivors. By analysing the cultural politics of Together through radical contextualization, this paper argues that in releasing the cookbook, the British monarchy itself is incorporated into this narrative of community and recovery, which erases the classed and racialised inequalities between the monarchy and Grenfell survivors (and, indeed, those in similar socioeconomic positions). Fundamentally, the cookbook obscures the ongoing culpability of 'the elites' for the sociopolitical and socioeconomic inequalities experienced by citizens in Britain. Together evidences how inequalities in contemporary Britain are normalized and legitimized in the public imaginary through media representations, obscuring the structural inequalities that underpinned the conditions at Grenfell, and instead individualizing the survivors as 'responsiblised' neoliberal subjects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Kara Walker is best known for her depictions of sexualized violence and gendered racism during slavery in the form of black paper silhouettes. Scholars such as Salamishah Tillet argue that Walker's art, along with art by some of her post-civil rights contemporaries, offers 'aesthetic interventions' to problematic racial histories as part of a larger project of memory reclamation and justice. Walker's A Subtlety, Or the Marvelous Sugar Baby, an Homage to the unpaid and overworked Artisans who have refined our Sweet tastes from the cane fields to the Kitchens of the New World on the Occasion of the demolition of the Domino Sugar Refining Plant is another such interventionist project. Debuting in the Williamsburg neighbourhood of Brooklyn, New York in May of 2014, A Subtlety explores how a figure like mammy 'survives as a cultural force that influences and reflects a national conscience' (Wallace Sanders [2008]. Mammy: a century of race, gender, and southern memory. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 12). And yet, to say that the historical rootedness of the title, sugar sphinx sculpture, and molasses-covered walls and cherub-faced small figures throughout the installation were ambiguous to some spectators, is an understatement. Hundreds of photographs and videos were uploaded to social media sites with people making gestures towards the figure that some critics deemed highly inappropriate. This paper explores how A Subtlety both understands and undermines representations of Black women's bodies and how Black artists in the African diaspora contend with complex cultural signs of the past in the present. Utilizing studies of Black feminist theory and visual culture, I argue that Walker's A Subtlety – and her art more broadly – offers theoretical and geographic space to ponder where Black pleasure and collective memory can exist in systems of misogynoir, as well as in the Black nostalgic imagination. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues that the 2017–2019 comedy-drama Netflix series She's Gotta Have It attempts to rewrite the past represented within the 1986 feature-length film of the same name through its portrayal of Black women's sexuality. While lauded, the film was met with criticism of Spike Lee's portrayal of women in the film as ultimately misogynist and homophobic, evidenced by Lee's decision to show protagonist Nola Darling being punitively raped by one of her sexual partners as well as by the flat and stereotypical construction of the Black lesbian character, Opal Gilstrap. In contrast, the 2017 series introduces us to Nola Darling as a pansexual and polyamorous Black visual artist in a rapidly gentrifying Fort Greene, Brooklyn. This paper identifies sexual politics and self-representational strategies as two sites of nostalgic re-construction in which elements of the past are both reproduced and revised. For instance, Nola's self-identification as pansexual and her sustained relationship with a reimagined and more robustly characterized Opal illustrate that Nola's sexual desires are not bound by heteronormativity. At the same time, the series echoes the film in that the primary sexual and romantic conflicts revolve around the ways Nola's Black femininity is juxtaposed with the Black cis masculinity of her three primary suitors. The use of self-representational strategies, primarily Lee's signature 4th wall breaking, provides a sense of continuity through its nostalgic callback to Lee's earlier works, while also allowing Nola to articulate the 'new' identities of polyamory and pansexuality which depart from the language used in the '86 portrayal. Relatedly, Nola's work as a visual artist allows the show to prioritize Nola's perceptions of her lovers and herself. Overall, this paper mobilizes Black feminist, lesbian, and queer analyses in service of identifying and complicating Lee's efforts to recuperate misogynist and heteronormative gendered portrayals in a contemporary medium. [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]

We are all spectators of the times to varying extents. With the commencement of the twenty-first century, our spectator experience began to transform, becoming more scattered, divergent, and unsettled in response to technological advancement and the decline of consensus around social values, cultural meanings, and political agendas in the face of changes. In post-handover Hong Kong, a breach of meaning has been cumulatively caused by divided opinions on priorities (e.g. economic, democratic) and intensified by the contested narratives around history, identity, and reality. In the aftermath of the Anti-Extradition Law Amendment Bill (Anti-ELAB) Movement, a discursive construction of authority and legitimation has taken place in legislative affairs, a renewed school curriculum, and official speeches, among other organized patterns of action. Against this backdrop, this paper will focus on the spectatorship of trauma that has been generated by community screenings and documentary filmmaking. Two case studies will be presented in terms of their distance (distant vis-à-vis immersive) from the epicentre of these traumatic events. The first case study will explore the spectatorship of visual trauma, in which authoritarian experiences were transmitted through social movement-themed documentaries (e.g. Ukraine's Winter on Fire) and drama films (e.g. South Korea's 1987 and A Taxi Driver) that gained popularity and stirred up noise in Hong Kong in the lead-up to 2019. The second case study will explore traumatic responses through bodily reactions to pain and suffering as captured in post-2019 Hong Kong cinema. On the whole, the paper will demonstrate how viewing experiences embody shared and individualized responses (e.g. resistance, resilience, retreat) and how understanding spectatorship allows us to discern the social sentiments, cultural implications, and affects generated at a particular time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper undertakes a comparative analysis of the famous eighteenth-century chess-playing automaton known as Mechanical Turk and the Amazon microwork platform of the same name. The original Mechanical Turk was a life-sized automaton made in 1770 and publicly exhibited until the mid-1800s, and which played games of chess with the audience. Its movements were fully mechanical, but even more remarkably, it was promoted as the world's first 'thinking machine,' deciding each move of the chess pieces for itself. From the outset, it was widely assumed that the Mechanical Turk was a hoax, and that a human must be hidden inside the machine, directing the game. But it was a clever hoax whose trick was never discovered, and widely admired as such. Amazon's Mechanical Turk job platform functions in a similarly open way, this paper argues, as a sort of open technological hoax. Mechanical Turk provides a source of human cognitive labour that can be used to invisibly operate digital systems and programs that are widely assumed to be fully automated. Artificial intelligence is a twenty-first century thinking machine, it requires a human brain to make it work. Amazon's Mechanical Turk is a marketplace in which companies can hire piecemeal cognitive labour to patch gaps and train programs to keep those systems functioning. Providing what Jeff Bezos has called 'artificial artificial intelligence,' Amazon's Mechanical Turk, like Kempelen's automaton, both draws attention to and obfuscates the limits of automation and artificial intelligence. Taking the two iterations of the Mechanical Turk as rich cultural figures of automation for their respective periods, this paper will argue that the open secret of their artificial artificial intelligence is itself a form of misdirection that hides other, more successfully guarded secrets: the true extent of that labour, and the conditions in which it is performed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues that the proposal for a 'Hippocratic oath for data science' is a severely limited form of data ethics for automated culture. Drawing on the oath used within medical professionalism, proponents as diverse as Wired and the European Data Protection Supervisor have argued for a Hippocratic oath for data science as a way of introducing a soft regulatory environment. In this paper, we analyse the history of the Hippocratic oath and the professions of medicine and data science to suggest that this proposal offers an individualized solution to systemic problems and, as such, is unlikely to be effective. We further argue that the proposal of the Hippocratic oath ignores the degree to which the profession of the physician is different from the profession of the data scientist in ways that limit the transfer of an ethical framework between them. In particular, we note that automated data access leads to a lack of clear professional identity among those who act as data stewards which, unlike in a medical context, makes it unclear how breaches of an oath would be adequately sanctioned. We also argue that, unlike in a medical context, harms can be difficult to define and have historically been poorly acknowledged, making it difficult to meaningfully take an oath to 'do no harm'. We propose that in the context of data science, a Hippocratic oath would provide little substantial protection for users and largely penalize workers over companies while deferring responsibility away from those profiting from data extraction. The paper concludes by suggesting that the limits of the Hippocratic oath are significant to the point that other regulations should also be sought, although proposals for oaths have value as catalysts for cultural change within the technology industry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the force of automation and its contradictions and resistances within (and beyond) the financial sector, with a specific focus on computational practices of credit-scoring and lending. It examines the operations and promotional discourses of fintech start-ups LendUp.com and Elevate.com that offer small loans to the sub-prime consumers in exchange for access to their online social media and mobile data, and Zest AI and LenddoEFL that sell automated decision-making tools to verify identity and assess risk. Reviewing their disciplinary reputational demands and impacts on users and communities, especially women and people of colour, the paper argues that the automated reimagination of credit and creditability disavows the formative design of its AI and redefines moral imperatives about character to align with the interests of digital capitalism. The economic, social and cultural crises precipitated by the Covid-19 pandemic have only underscored the internal contradictions of these developments, and a variety of debt resistance initiatives have emerged, aligned with broader movements for social, economic, and climate justice around the globe. Cooperative lending circles such as the Mission Asset Fund, activist groups like #NotMyDebt, and Debt Collective, a radical debt abolition movement, are examples of collective attempts to rehumanize credit and debt and resist the appropriative practices of contemporary digital finance capitalism in general. Running the gamut from accommodationist to entirely radical, these experiments in mutual aid, debt refusal, and community-building provide us with roadmaps for challenging capitalism and re-thinking credit, debt, power, and personhood within and beyond the current crises. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper considers the riots and protests that irrupted around the world in the wake of the killing of George Floyd on 25 May 2020. It examines the politics of noise and listening in relation to the growing calls for abolition, asking how we can listen to, and for, an abolitionist imperative. The paper contextualizes the riot as a form of struggle that responds to the crises produced by capitalism in its circulatory phase, specifically the production of racialized surplus populations that are subjected to intensive forms of policing. The riot is figured as a politics of immanence that suggests what Ashon T. Crawley calls 'otherwise possibilities'. The paper tracks the historical conditions that give rise to riots and follows the noise in the street into platform media and back again in order to theorize the riot as a distinct form of struggle that is organized as well as contagious. Turning to the sonicity of the riot, the noise of this collective formation is figured in metaphysical terms as that which accounts for transformation and possibility – an originary turbulence with no single point of origin that foregrounds the relationality of the world. The paper then elaborates on listening as a crucial modality for generative collectivity and solidarity, developing an abolitionist conception of listening that attunes to relationality of noise and foregrounds anticipation and possibility. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, the authors explore female creativity and agency through the means of documentary filmmaking. Husband and Wife is an experimental documentary concerning one woman's journey from Poland to London, England to reclaim the body of her husband after his death. The authors/directors discuss the process of creating a space where the life of the characters and the life of the camera merge. This creative, feminist space is one of mutual influence between themselves, the protagonist and their documentary film. In their investigation of the protagonist's journey from her Polish hometown to the city of London, they all become affected by the process of filmmaking itself and by the widow's relentless resourcefulness in her mission to reclaim the body of her husband. To understand the widow's tenacious approach of dealing with UK institutions, as well as her mourning, the authors refer to the feminist theories of Luce Irigaray, and Judith Butler, who offer different conceptualisations of female identity and ethical agency. Drawing upon Irigaray, and Butler's analysis of Antigone (Sophocles, 441BC), the cinematic picture of the Polish widow's commitment to her husband's post-mortem civic dignity is compared to the commitment of Sophocles' heroine, who transgressed the patriarchal order attributed only to proper, male citizens. The authors of the paper discuss the definition of otherness, as a mode of creative and ultimate resistance that both Antigone and the Polish widow embody, as women acting in the patriarchal world. In their documentary, the authors-directors articulate Polish Antigone's act of resistance through the angle of female interiority, as defined by Lucy Bolton, which in cinema is more characteristic of male protagonists. In that way they reflect the incomprehensible agency of a woman that is gained through her gendered performance, her creativity and her everyday existence in the world of men. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many scholars, analysts and commentators have noted that the neoliberal conjuncture has seen the rise of a veritable explosion of discourses and theories of resilience. Some regard this discursive and narrative profusion as integral to the ongoing project of a neoliberal 'worlding' that seeks to reconfigure all aspects of human subjectivities and social relations. Meanwhile, the ongoing outpouring of neoliberal discourses and narratives of resilience is accompanied by the expansion of disasterscapes across the planet as we speed apparently toward what the Caribbean scholar Sylvia Wynter calls an 'unparalleled catastrophe for our species'. Some of these expanding disasterscapes are emerging across the terrain of a five-hundred-year history of genocidal and appropriative colonial practices. The people and communities inhabiting these disasterscapes have been struggling to develop counter-praxes of collective cultural resilience and survival in the face of the many catastrophes wrought over the centuries by coloniality. We turn to Wynter's concept of homo narrans to examine Indigenous praxes for the performative enactment of alternative genres of the human that contest the worlding of neoliberal discourses and apparatuses of resilience. Wynter's contributions to the de-universalization and thus relativization of Eurocentric 'Man' aim to make the present proliferation of the genres of humanity, our storytelling species, culturally intelligible in ways that might not only undercut the work done by neoliberal discourses of resilience toward the production of disastrous consequences in places like Guatemala and the obliteration of our capacities to imagine the world otherwise, but perhaps even ward off the potentially impending 'unparalleled catastrophe for our species'. This paper draws on our ongoing research in Guatemala, which involves Indigenous and poor ladino survivors of the 2018 eruption of the Fuego Volcano, as well as survivors of the 2005 landslide that followed Hurricane Stan. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Much has been and will continue to be made of 'official responses' to the COVID-19 pandemic, particularly around the varying success of prescribed isolation practices and how well (or not) people, taken in aggregate, complied with them. This paper examines a more spontaneous response to COVID-19 isolation: bread-porn. Taken literally, bread-porn is the competitive display of gratuitous pictures of home-baked bread across social media (particularly in the 'west'), shared by people isolated at home. On the surface, such pictures perfunctorily depict bread; yet, it is argued that these pictures are more nuanced than that, and that the bread itself is almost immaterial. 'COVID bread-porn' was a jockeying for social standing and represented one of many unique, if temporary, forms of do-it-yourself (DIY) cultural currency while people were less able to access other extant systems of representational social stratification. The paper discusses the value and significance of the suffix 'porn' with respect to struggles to understand the extremities of new systems of value, by linking how temporary COVID culture fit into the flow of the cultural changes that preceded it. The paper argues that the world faced the COVID pandemic at a tumultuous time marked by liminality between historically 'physical' and emerging 'cerebral' cultural practices in many societies (i.e. the move from manufacturing to 'knowledge' economies). Thus, it situates bread-porn as an attempt to 'win' at isolation by demonstrating prowess with available domestic resources, and highlights the productive tension of bread-porn that extends and potentially resists the social imperatives of pandemic self-management. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Debt-migration is endemic in construction work in India, where exploitative social relations are an integral part of businesses' capital accumulation model that can entrap migrants in forced labour and perpetual indebtedness. Drawing on concepts of cultural capital, 'constrained agency', and qualitative interviews with migrants and their wives, this study examines the embodied and material practices that migrants in Telangana use to challenge power hierarchies and embark on different life trajectories. The paper draws out the gendered differences in cultural capital and agential strategies that migrants use to place themselves and their families on an upwardly mobile path. Although still in debt, many migrants had succeeded in buying land, investing in farming, marrying their daughters, releasing themselves from moneylenders, and educating their children privately. A few had transitioned to working and living more permanently in the city of Hyderabad. This research sheds new light on how constrained agency and the use of cultural capital intersects with gender, ethnicity, and caste. It also shows that while the situations of both those who continue to circulate and those who settle in the city remain precarious, small incremental changes can add up to a significant shift in social and economic circumstances. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the wider political economy surrounding the opening of Capitol Records' first Canadian record pressing plant in 1976. This celebrated facility encapsulates much of the optimism for Canadian music during this period. As a site of research it reveals a great deal of the complex relationship between a multinational corporation and an evolving national record industry. Further, this paper explores the materiality of popular music and places it within the context of national industrial and cultural policy. This material history brings forth a different account of the role of government policy in the development of this industry, with a greater emphasis on Canadian trade policy than on broadcast regulation. The plant began operation a few years after Canada's broadcasting regulator, the Canadian Radio-Television Commission, implemented Canadian Content regulations in 1971 for the programming of music created by Canadians on Canadian radio stations. 'Beyond the branch plant' draws from archival materials from the EMI Music Canada Archive, housed at the University of Calgary, to offer primary accounts of the development of this plant as well as the economic externalities beyond the music industry that were shaped by this new facility. The conclusions of this study call into question long standing positions regarding the place of national broadcasting content quotas and the growth of cultural industries. It highlights an industrial logic that was largely American in structure and one that indicates that the legacy of these content regulations is more complicated than it is often assumed to be. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Environmental problems, including climate change, exhaustion of natural resources, and persistent degradation of air quality, have escalated in the name of development despite the warnings of scientists and environmentalists. Written when the interconnectedness of the globe is evident in the Coronavirus pandemic and extensive carbon footprints, this paper examines the role of ecocriticism in illuminating the condition of a city such as Hong Kong, which is susceptible to contagion because its success is based on its interconnectedness with the world through the flow of people, resources, finance, and tourism. How does ecocritical discourse help us to see the ways Hong Kong's success has contributed to its vulnerability? What are the tropes that defined the development of Hong Kong in the colonial period and how have they been re-imagined in the post-handover period? Will Hong Kong's post-handover reappropriation of nature encourage other former colonies to adopt a green agenda and lead to the cross-fertilization of ecocritcal, historical, cultural and social discourses? This paper adopts an ecocritical perspective and revisits some of the central natural symbols that have shaped the grand narrative of Hong Kong. It reconsiders the natural tropes— the barren rock — that were used to reinforce colonial superiority, the ways that geography has determined the city's destiny, and the role of the official flower in the creation of the city's identity. Citing developments in the post-handover period (the Save Choi Yuen Village movement, the rise of organic communities, and the tactics of protestors in the summer of 2019), the paper reveals how natural tropes have been liberated from their traditional associations. Hong Kong shows not only the ways in which the human and non-human can work together interdependently but also the processes of identity formation in the period after decolonization and in an age of globalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the queer gaze within pop music videos. It contends that the contemporary US musician Hayley Kiyoko can be seen as a queer music video auteur who has transformed what the 'gaze' can mean in mainstream pop music through directing her own videos. The paper asserts that through her performance within and, arguably even more significantly, via her direction of videos, Kiyoko has produced a new and complex portrayal of how female sexual desire is represented even when, on the surface, it may not necessarily appear to disrupt normativity. Reaction videos made by Kiyoko's fans have also queered the gaze whereby the 'watcher' becomes the 'watched'. The paper concludes that online spaces and digital technologies are radically reshaping understandings of queer sexuality in music videos. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of the most globally serious in the recent decades is the reshaping, even reversing, of the basic directions of people's imagination of the future, which were mainly established within the intellectual frame of historic progress and strongly motivated by the real social struggles from the late nineteenth century to the 1980s, saying, which have seemingly proved the progress. The most important of the social functions of this reshaping/reversing is to make people including the youth more poor-spirited, nearsighted, self-centred and conservative. Is the judgment outlined above tenable? Is there something very different, which shows the bright side of today's public imagination of the future? How is the complexity and diversity of the imagination in the different areas as well as in the different cultural and social positions of a same society? And more important, how is the situation of the youth in thinking and imaging the future when it's still commonly today to think the youth as a symbol of the future? ... The questions are too big perhaps and the answers will certainly diverse, especially when looking into various social activities to trace the imagination. People always need positive imagination of the future when walking forward, and they are not only shaped by the current but also directed by the past, that's why it's worthy to develop the careful contrast of how people imagine the future today with how they did it before. Urged by what said above, seven authors, from Seoul, Tokyo, HK, Shanghai and Guangzhou, have worked with us to make a collection aiming at the imagination of future in East Asia. The collection composed by two parts: the first has five papers focusing on the current situations of the imagination of the future in different social contexts, and the other has two ones introducing very interesting historical cases of how the 'Chinese revolution' was seen from perspectives out of the mainland China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Mobilities has become a keyword in the agendas of policy makers and the decisions of individuals, including young people. Hong Kong as a city long defined as a hub of cross-border flows has in recent years promoted the Working Holiday scheme, a new international policy and programme that directly encourages cross-border flows among the younger generations. Through the programme, young people aged between 18 and 30 can live and work in Hong Kong's Partner Economies for a relatively long period of time (usually up to 12 months). By obtaining information through in-depth interviews with 50 Hong Kong citizens who spent their working holidays in Australia and analysing various texts on the Working Holiday scheme, including the travel records and published works by working holiday makers, official documents, news reports, and documentaries, this paper discusses how young people interpret the practice of working holidays as a romanticized culture of being mobile. Exploring how the working holiday makers' experiences of mobility compel them to balance highly precarious labour conditions with aspirations to search for a meaningful life, this paper shows that the liminal time of working holidays shapes youth subjectivity by creating a kind of 'emerging adulthood' in which the young people might have a chance to explore alternative value systems but also be subject to the necessity to the final return to home and working life as a result of the temporariness of the scheme. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Virtual Reality (VR) film has been described as an empathy machine. Filmmakers and producers have claimed that VR film's immersive qualities can amplify empathy for victims of humanitarian crises and move the viewer to support humanitarian aid organizations. This paper questions these transformative assumptions about VR film. We call attention to how humanitarian VR films are techniques that promote emotional styles like empathy through the script of suffering and hope. Through analysis of humanitarian VR films, the use of character, narrative, and formal VR film devices, we show how empathy is created. Thereby, we focus specifically on the simulation of particular locales, intimate encounters with the suffering Other, and gratification of viewer needs. The paper concludes that humanitarian VR films simulate an engagement with global problems when, in fact, they are catering to the emotional needs of people engaging with those problems. The global citizen as a feeling self becomes caught in interpersonal affective textures, which obscure geopolitical causes of humanitarian crises. Hence, the paper questions empathy as a universal way to better the world and diverges from the celebration of humanitarian VR film as a universal empathy machine. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Television networks, in partnership and collaboration with streaming platforms, are now increasingly using nostalgia themed programming to captivate diverse audiences. To meet the growing calls for diverse representation, many of these shows retell the history and events of Black America during the Reagan period, drawing on post-soul aesthetics and culture. Further, streaming services have made a conscious effort to acquire rights to older Black sitcoms, enabling Black audiences to relive the memories attached to post-soul media. Using textual analysis of FX dramas Snowfall and Pose, this paper analyses how television programmes invoke post-soul aesthetics to produce a distinct and consumable form of Black nostalgia. This results in a competing nostalgia where viewers are unable to disassociate the feel-good moments of a past era from the racial trauma, oppression and discrimination that shaped this same period. While discourse around Blackness and nostalgia should fervently occupy space outisde of topics related to structural racism and economic marignalization, this essay argues that television networks and streaming platforms are choosing to produce Black nostalgic programmes that highlight this tension. Therefore, this has led to a resurgence of post-soul-themed programming. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Contrary to most postcolonial approaches that focus on modernity/coloniality, this article argues for the relevance of heterarchical theories of power. In his lectures at Collège de France, Foucault shifts from a microphysical and corpopolitical analytic of power towards a biopolitical analytic of power. This shift in Foucault's focus is analyzed through Quijano and Wallerstein's theorization of the modern/colonial world system. In doing so, this paper details the ways in which corpopolitics, biopolitics, and geopolitics operate on the micro-, meso- and macro-levels of power, respectively. Further decolonial research should give deeper consideration to heterarchical theories of power, particularly as they relate to multiple temporalities within the modern/colonial world system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The village of Miska is one of the 530 Palestinian localities destroyed during the Palestinian Nakba (Arabic for great calamity, catastrophe, or devastation). Although the ruins of these places are part of the Israeli landscape, and most Israeli Jews have some knowledge about the Nakba, they do not understand its meaning. In this paper, I deploy Hannah Arendt's distinction between knowing and understanding to answer the question of how the Nakba can at once be known but not understood by Israeli Jews. Drawing on the tours conducted by the activist organization Zochrot (Hebrew for 'we remember') to the ruins of Miska, I argue that the embodied and symbolic practices conducted during the tours to Miska can work to challenge the gap between knowing and understanding by creating a different perspective on the Nakba. From this perspective, the Nakba is not only understood as the memory of the 'other'—that is, the Palestinian memory of the place—but is understood as a complex memory that embodies a dialectical relationship between Jewish and Palestinian remembrances: a potentially common memory of the place and the basis for the imagining of a common future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyzes the formation of coal energy infrastructure in Pakistan's Thar Desert as part of the China–Pakistan Economic Corridor. This infrastructure comprises an open pit coal mine and thermal power plant that traverses indigenous lifeworlds. My analysis takes up the subterranean matter of Thar's Desert – the coal, the sand, the water – and its related social and ecological contexts. I show that decades of technological processes of tests, drilling, chemical analyses, surveys, simulations, and maps of coal, water, and sand have yielded 'coal data' that mediates Thar's ancient lifeworlds in a singular relation to its coal deposit. Coal data, the mediated representations of subterranean coal, forms the very basis upon which coal extraction is performed and global energy infrastructures are advanced. The Sindh Engro Coal Mining Company (SECMC), a joint venture of Pakistani and Chinese actors financed by Chinese state-capital, repeatedly presents Thar's land as coal data. Through the kinds of cultural authority granted to data as representations of technological objectivity, the SECMC is able to claim coal infrastructure as the foundation for a national energy future of Pakistan. Despite the SECMC's efforts to overlay the land with mediated coal data, Thar's indigenous villagers have enacted a historic protest and long march, including hunger strikes with unprecedented participation by women, and filed a case in the High Court in order to protest the poisoning of their agricultural farmlands and the eventual displacement from their homes. Through these mediated constructions of Thar's land as coal data, and the indigenous movements against coal mining, the ground of the Thar Desert is being reconfigured and reproduced as – what I call – a coal ground. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper traces the infrastructural politics of automated music mastering to reveal how contemporary iterations of artificial intelligence (AI) shape cultural production. The paper examines the emergence of LANDR, an online platform that offers automated music mastering, built on top of supervised machine learning branded as artificial intelligence. Increasingly, machine learning will become an integral part of signal processing for sounds and images, shaping the way media cultures sound, look, and feel. While LANDR is a product of the so-called 'big bang' in machine learning, it could not exist without specific conditions: specific kinds of commensurable data, as well as specific aesthetic and industrial conditions. Mastering, in turn, has become an indispensable but understudied part of music circulation as an infrastructural practice. Here we analyze the intersecting histories of machine learning and mastering, as well as LANDR's failure at automating other domains of audio engineering. By doing so, we critique the discourse of AI's inevitability and show the ways in which machine learning must frame or reframe cultural and aesthetic practices in order to automate them, in service of digital distribution, recognition, and recommendation infrastructures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the past decade, commercial social media platforms have scaled up, in terms of the number of users, and scaled out, in terms of integration into public life, taking on infrastructural significance. This paper adapts sociologist Norbert Elias's conceptualization of the civilizing process to examine the role of social media in society, arguing that social media platforms establish socially sanctioned categories of people and modes of conduct. Taking Facebook as an exemplar, the paper analyzes the pedagogical, punitive, and incentivizing practices through which platforms produce social norms and societal ideals. From the company's ambition to become the social infrastructure of the globe and its expansionist history, to policy documents and moderation practices, to formatted interactions and incentive structures, Facebook universalizes appropriate conduct and emotional expression in accordance with the interests of brands and advertisers. With its integration of information technology and automated decision making, Facebook takes over tasks traditionally associated with institutions like the home, the school, and the workplace and acts as a civilizing infrastructure in a double sense: first, infrastructure itself is civilized by the ability to sense and judge people and actions, and second, infrastructure becomes a civilizing force in the world on the basis of these abilities. Finally, the article concludes with a discussion of the implications of civilizing infrastructure for our understanding of civility, Facebook, and infrastructural politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

From the construction of ports to the dredging of access corridors for ships and the production of asphalt and concrete, sand is an inextricable part of urban environments. Focusing on the molecular transformations of sand–from silt to concrete to rubble–the first half of this paper studies the geosocial history of Dubai over the course of the twentieth century, including the dredging of Dubai Creek, the making of Jebel Ali Port, and the construction of the World Islands. I draw on reports, archival records, and newspapers, as well as existing scholarship, to demonstrate the infrastructural exuberance of Dubai, its tendency to marshal vast amounts of sand in the construction of increasingly outrageous infrastructures. In the second half of the paper, I follow some of the threads that emerge from this site in a more theoretical and comparative register. I draw comparisons between Dubai and similar world–cities in the global South, to understand and critique how this infrastructural exuberance exists alongside increasing concerns over 'sand scarcity'. Drawing on the work of Georges Bataille (1991. The accursed share: volume 1: consumption, tr. by Hurley, R. New York: Zone Books), Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari (1983. Anti–oedipus: capitalism and schizophrenia, tr. by Hurley, R. New York, NY: Penguin Classics; 1987. A thousand plateaus: capitalism and schizophrenia, tr. by Massumi, B. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press), and McKenzie Wark (2015. Molecular red: theory for the anthropocene. New York: Verso), I develop a framework of antiproductive ecologies that treats incommensurable forms of surplus and waste (such as sand and rubble) as constitutive of world–cities. Developing Deleuze and Guattari's concept of 'antiproduction' from an environmental perspective, I argue that in their exuberance and thirst for construction, world–cities like Dubai attempt to organize and render productive the very planetary distribution of sand and silt. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many scholars argue for an epistemological shift from romanticizing marginalized politics and praxis to understanding them within a spectrum of resisting and reproducing normative and dominant power structures. Scholarship on drag demonstrates that drag as a performative practice that seeks to challenge gender and sexual normativities is often not beyond the logics of hegemony and normativity. Drawing on these critiques, this paper contends that drag as an art form can reproduce the racial and colonial logics of the settler state. The paper traces the workings of settler colonialism that shape drag creativity through the TV show RuPaul's Drag Race. To do so, I theorize how Raja, the winner of season 3, performed, imitated, and appropriated indigeneity. I argue that Raja's act as the 'Native,' after Lumbee drag queen Stacy Layne Matthews's elimination from the show, demonstrates how queer people of colour can become complicit in settler colonial processes. The paper is a call to rethink drag creativity beyond assumed transgressive aesthetics, and to critically engage with racial and settler colonial formations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using Frank Kermode’s (1967. The sense of an ending: studies in the theory of fiction with a new epilogue. Oxford: OUP) formulation of ‘the End’ as its conceptual marker, this paper takes aim at pronouncements of cultural studies’ demise. In recent years, it has become fashionable to declare cultural studies as in decline, if not irretrievably lost. In drawing on this conceptualization of ‘the End’ to define the current status of cultural studies, attention will be given to how narratives of demise and decline claim a position of speaking-for the discipline whilst reifying selective moments of cultural studies’ past as markers of a ‘high point’, a halcyon moment from which the current malaise is contrasted. Arguing that this is a troubling dynamic, this paper works through the formulations that selected crisis narrative present to outline how these narratives gain dimension. The argument then moves to problematize the positioning of selective originary points within cultural studies’ past to propose that a far more speculative appraisal of these halcyon moments might be drawn upon. Such ‘speculative recognition’ of the past does not seek to dismiss cultural studies’ histories, nor position these within simplistic generational divisions, but does seek to question the significance selective originary moments hold in defining prescriptions for the discipline’s future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the 'anti-lockdown' protests in the US beginning in April 2020 through the concepts of necropolitics (Mbembe) and microfascism (Deleuze and Guattari). The paper argues that these protests are examples of what it coins, necropopulism. What if the libertarian, hyper-individualistic, and reactionary populism we witness in these and other manifestations (e.g. mass shooters, alt-right street fights) are both fixated on their identity as a 'people,' yet simultaneously indifferent to their own persistence? Examining the anti-lockdown and anti-masking protests and their precursors, the paper argues that microfascism is infused with homi-suicidal aesthetics. The essay seeks to refine our analysis when it comes to the cultural (necro)politics of this 'downsurgency,' in which decline accelerates rapidly and might even be detached, ultimately, from its own demise. This analysis matters if we are to antagonize this necrotic force, not simply through a battle of ideas but by preventing a fascist social body from being fully activated and mobilized. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper provides ethnographic sketches of the struggles of bordered lives – mainland spouses and their families, PRC students and overseas Taiwan – during the pandemic time when their rights to enter or return to overseas Taiwanese was denied as part of the preventive measures against COVID-19. By conducting interviews with mainland spouses from a distance and looking at the discussion of a Facebook group called 'Overseas Taiwanese COVID-19 Self-Help Group' as an archival site, we seek to understand and analyse the reasons why their right to enter or return was silenced, discredited, denied and attacked, and used these ethnographic sketches as the basis for explaining the emergence of democratic censorship, a paradox that sadly is part of the living reality in Taiwan. Furthermore, inspired by Michel Foucault's discussion of raison d'etat as the rationale for the state's, rather than people's, survival, we situate democratic censorship in the context of tense China–Taiwan relations and call for the 'de-Cold Warring' (Chen 2010) of consciousness as the key to save democracy from the spectre of autocracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Japan, young people are becoming increasingly apathetic about politics, while at the same time they are experiencing a rightward leaning and a growing sympathy for totalitarianism and authoritarianism. To understand this contradiction, we need to look at the digital communication environment in which they engage in political discourse. One of the most representative opinion leaders in this regard is Hiroyuki Nishimura. In recent years, Hiroyuki has become widely known as the 'King of Refutation' and is immensely popular among the young generation. He is very active in political and social issues, arguing in a logical and neutral manner. However, despite his enlightened mode of argumentation, his arguments have been perceived as accommodative to totalitarian and authoritarian perceptions. This paper argues that at the heart of this mode of refutation is a process of 'decontextualisation' and 'recontextualisation' which has resulted in reducing the complexity of the issue, making it comprehensible to the majority while oppressing minorities. And this mode of refutation and the processes of 'decontextualisation' and 'recontextualisation' are at the centre of the various digital communication platforms that he operates and that have become hubs of political communication around the world: 2channel, 4chan, Nico Nico Douga and YouTube clips. In this sense, the totalitarianism and rightward leaning of the young generation is not due to a specific ideology but is strongly conditioned by the communication environment. 'Communication totalitarianism' can be used to describe the totalitarianism and right-wing tendencies taking place in Japan. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses royal pardons and other patronal graces in Morocco as forms of gifting that borrow their logic from Islamic teachings, and protocols binding ar-rā'I (ruler) and ar-ri'āya (subjects). The moment they begin to engage mixed feelings and analyses from politicians, activists, academics, and the general public they give rise to stormy debates, with as of yet unsettled disputes in the thick of social and political tensions in Morocco (from the post-2011 uprisings to the recent al-hirak of El Huceima, to other instances of social unrest (boycotts of consumables, struggles over human rights infringements)). As we posit the debate on rentier economy and politics in the hub of existing theoretical insights on gift-giving, we launch the particularities, subtleties, and dualities of the gift in general as both desirable and undesirable, pure and impure, honouring and humiliating, and the royal gift in particular as a neopatrimonialist act that hinges on referentiality and preferentiality. We draw on examples of potential royal grace receivers (classic criminals, political activists, Rif hirakists, amateur gift hunters, and professional smayria (professional hunters of the royal gift)) as touchstones for rethinking how patronal gifts are sent (as envois), received and lost midway. In the end, we conclude that gifting, far from being about sharing what one has, is about fighting with what one has. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Seduction of the Innocent, by Fredric Wertham, contended that comic books could harm youth; it is popularly understood as the impetus for the creation of the Comics Code Authority that limited what could appear in comics. Wertham subsequently became a 'bogey man' within the comics community, leveraged to do various kinds of political work. In this paper, we examine social media posts from reactionary fan movement Comicsgate to explore how Wertham is rhetorically deployed and (mis)remembered, arguing these reactionaries have more in common with the bogey man of comics culture than they realize: Both engage in moral panics about comics and queerness. Contemporary fans' aggressive attempts to distance themselves from Wertham and to paint their ideological opponents as his contemporary analogues represent an attempt to disguise their reactionary impulse by painting themselves as victims of censorious power at the same time as they leverage toxic masculinity to attack legitimately vulnerable people. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using the concept of problematization, this paper reveals the rationale for governing consumers in the practice of Swedish financial literacy education. Before the 1980s, the problematization of consumers was characterized by teaching economic thrift to 'at-risk groups'. Through observations of and interviews with teachers and organizers, as well as analyzes of policy texts, this study shows that contemporary financial education instead describes a whole population of consumers lacking 'financial self-confidence'. This study also shows how social, political, and economic developments prompted the problematization of the previously unnoticed issue of Swedish citizens' 'financial literacy'. Neo-liberal ideas and reforms, financialization, and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development's promotion of financial literacy are all strong factors in the current problematization of Swedish consumers and the ongoing practice of financial education. Financial education attempts to foster economically rational, responsible, self-reliant financial citizens; in other words, it seeks to make people more like the 'virtual consumer' of neo- classic economic theory. The ideal consumer of contemporary financial education is expected to turn to financial markets to ensure his or her economic welfare. Doing so is assumed to lead consumers to contribute to efficient and stable global and national financial markets. However, consistent with the local problematization of Swedish consumers as having diverse problems and needs in relation to finance, such education is adjusted to fit different categories of consumers. While some are said to require financial 'inspiration' to become active and engaged financial consumers, the traditional morality of thrift still characterizes financial education tailored for consumers deemed to be at risk of over-indebtedness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A common interest amongst Chinese hip hop scholars concerns the construction of a local youth identity via the negotiation between the logics of hip hop culture, the practices of the local underground hip hop community, and the cultural governance of the state. Building on previous studies about these multi-faceted negotiations before 2017, or before The Rap of China phenomenon, this paper explores the politics and aesthetics of featuring in post-2017 Chinese hip hop. Rather than dwelling upon the authenticity of hip hop, this paper is more interested in Chinese hip hop's variations of authenticity through the practice of competitive collaborations between local and non-local artists. I seek to demonstrate a spectrum of 'realness' in the post-2017 era with three case studies: Vava, Kris Wu, and Higher Brothers. While these rappers negotiate with the values of hip hop and state expectations differently, they are all nonetheless 'keepin it real'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing from D.A. Miller's work on The novel and the police (1988) in Victorian fiction, this paper looks at narrative strategies through which the same-sex underworld is portrayed, policed and contained in contemporary Vietnamese fiction. The pioneering works of the prolific policeman-author Bùi Anh Tấn have spearheaded a strong connection between sex and crime in his representations of homosexuality. These potentially subversive representations take place within a liminal underworld, often depicted as an alternative space constitutive of personal identity characterized by same-sex desire outside of recognition by legal authorities or public morality. A critical exploration of the police presence and function within the narrative can uncover the underlying techniques and technologies of surveillance and discipline whereby depictions of the same-sex underworld are policed by and therefore complicit in an operational regime of pervasive hetero-normativity. By examining the thematics of criminality, sexual/social outcast, self-renunciation/acceptance, and cultural ambiguity in the sizable LGBT-themed oeuvre of Bùi Anh Tấn over the past two decades, this paper explores how this body of works partakes in the construction and containment of a transgressive yet marginalized homosexual underworld. Marked by the police presence and subjected to the policing function of the texts, this same-sex underworld is transformed into an object of increasing attention and fascination for an ever so curious yet still ambivalent Vietnamese society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses how the capital town of Eritrea, Asmara, is depicted alternately as Italian, Eritrean and Ethiopian thus showing the competing claims of 'ownership' that traverses its colonial and postcolonial histories and a multifaceted identity. It focuses specifically on how the Italian architecture of Asmara is depicted both as a sign of modernization and oppression. Literary and oral- sources are analysed to illustrate Asmara as a site of cultural encounter and a historical palimpsest such as the poems Asmara (1958, included in the collection Esat Wey Abeba) by Tsegaye Gebremedihin, and And Nebis (1992, included in the collection Efta 60 Tirekawoch) by Haile Melekot Mewael. The novels Oromay (1984) by Bealu Girma, Ye Burqa Zimita (1992) by Tesfaye Gebreab. These contemporary literary and oral reminiscences of Asmara show how Asmara's architectural legacies are remembered to express memories of ambivalence between beauty and inhibition; being modern and segregated. Whereby, Asmara gets represented as a model town for other African cities, and a city of colonial decay and segregation, in these contradictory accounts of memories of Asmara, a de-colonial method of engagement seems to emerge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Digital media are frequently described as producing a 'real-time', 'live', 'alwayson' temporality. While seemingly referring to similar processes and experiences, these descriptions indicate a temporality that is diverse, multiple and changing. This paper proposes that it is necessary to develop theoretical approaches to this temporality, and that it is productive to understand this temporality in terms of the present; a temporality that is both 'now' and on-going. It sets out one framework for theorizing the present and conceptualizing the temporal qualities of digital media, drawing on Raymond Williams' influential work on structures of feeling and the (pre-)emergent qualities of media culture. It focuses on Williams' definition of a structure of feeling as attending to the 'active', 'flexible' 'temporal present', and the importance he places on preemergence in grasping this present. Discussing various examples including social media platforms, devices, streaming services and apps, I suggest that pre-emergence is an especially prevalent quality of today's media culture. I develop Williams' notion of structures of feeling to offer the concept of infrastructures of feeling. This concept helps to account for the amplified significance of pre-emergence, its affective quality and how digital media work across each other in complex architectures of texts, textures, platforms and devices. To flesh out this concept, I analyze the present temporalities that are produced by and productive of the social networking site Twitter and the streaming service Netflix. I argue that these media produce the present differently; creating a real-time, live, connected present in the case of the former, and a suspended or expanded present in the latter. These distinctions are significant; however, in both, pre-emergence is central. The paper therefore concludes by inquiring into whether pre-emergence may define today's structure of feeling and, if so, what this implies for a politics of the present. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on two years of ethnographic fieldwork traveling with three ‘artesanos’ (mask-makers) from rural Michoacan and ‘studying up’ as they circulated through fairs and folk art competitions across Mexico, this paper describes how indigenous artists in rural Michoacan are routinely incentivized and sometimes cudgeled within majoritarian institutions of art in Mexico to enact self-racializing stereotypes and stigmatized indigenous identities and to produce and showcase the so called traditional works and performances that conform to static and primitivist stereotypes. At play here is the interlinked legacy and persistence of paternalism, indigenismo, nationalism, and primitivism. These logics continue to play out in reconstituted terms beyond or after the legal, political, and official embrace of pluriculturalism and the multiethnic community in Mexico. The embedded ethnographic vignette and the analysis that follows suggests how a strategy of ‘studying-up’ into coloniality furthers the delinking program. In line with the strategy of delinking, the ethnographic and conceptual work in this article proceeds by decentring or provincializing a set of dichotomous or binary oppositions that are commonly expressed and articulated within the Mexican heritage field, which would oppose indigenous tradition and culture against urban and mestizo modernity, civilization, and culture. The analysis diverges from a common or dominant approach to delinking in one crucial way - it does not engage in ‘borderthinking’ by looking towards the margins; it does not counterpose subaltern indigenous knowledge with privileged occidental knowledge. Instead, presenting an analysis that ‘studies up’, the paper applies the tools of decolonial theory and method and critical theory to analyse and interrogate elite Mexican patrimonial institutions and culture, which in fact epitomize coloniality and engender indigenous vulnerability. The article concludes by discussing the value and the potential pitfalls of this approach, in order to further the decolonizing project from within the space of cultural studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1993, The New York Times Magazine published a story entitled 'The anguished politics of breast cancer.' The image on the cover was a self-portrait of artist and model Matuschka showing the physical consequences of a radical mastectomy. The picture elicited heated reactions, and the protagonist became an icon of the Women's Health Movement. Twelve years later, another model and photographer, Lynn Kohlman, published Front to back, which included portraits of her body after treatments for breast and brain cancer. Although free of the marks of pink ribbon culture, Kohlman's work was framed within the dominant discourse of breast cancer in the twenty-first century, characterized by individualism, positive thinking, and the idea of consumer's choice. This paper discusses Matuschka's and Kohlman's cancer photography within a comparative diachronic framework, focusing on the turn-of-the-century politics of representation. We argue that, despite their common traits, their respective productions are signs of a radical shift in the cultural paradigm of breast cancer. Through an analysis of the studium of their photographs and the preferred meaning that they suggest, we conclude that Matuschka's project feeds into the feminist battle for equity in health initiated by the early Breast Cancer Movement, whereas Kohlman's strengthens the postfeminist stance that is prevalent in the current panorama of neoliberal capitalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues that consumers of popular culture engage in practices of 'ethical cultural consumption', whereby the consumption of cultural texts is imagined as having the potential to 'do good' both individually and socio-politically. The paper explores data from an online questionnaire and drawing activity with girls aged 5–10 and their parents on the experience of costume playing as Rey from the contemporary Star Wars trilogy. Imagined as a 'girl who can do anything', Rey represents a new kind of popular feminist hero and role model for girls, enabling a degree of critique of normative gendered role models for children. 'Being Rey' also represents a deterministic project through which parents aim to cultivate the 'right' kind of girls, seeking to instil the resilience to 'cope' with unknown futures. More than a purely individual project, we argue that parents invest in an individualized idea of doing 'good' through consumption, drawing on a notion of the consumer as a political actor with the power to affect social change. Investigating the project of participating in and consuming culture 'ethically' allows for an exploration of what it means to 'be political' and 'do good' as a consumer in neoliberalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the basis of Asianist sympathy for 'New China', as the People's Republic was often styled, in the early 1950s by examining the writings of Indian diplomats, journalists and academics. These elite Indians either visited China as part of a 1951 delegation, making them witnesses to the ongoing New Democracy experiment. Since their experiences of China were definitely not comprehensive and hinged on the Chinese state's goodwill, the interesting question to ask is not whether these first-hand accounts of 'New China' were accurate but in what ways the Chinese revolution was made comprehensible in light of the Indian elite's own priorities as nation builders and social activists. This paper reconstructs major tropes of the Chinese revolution that appealed to Indian observers – self-sufficiency, empowerment of workers and peasants, a palpable sense of social vitality – and underscored their enthusiasm for Beijing. Most significantly, communism was subsumed in favourable accounts of 'New China' as a nation and society-building project. The Chinese revolution, the nature of which was still in flux, was absorbed into and understood through India and Asia's long struggle against Euro-American domination. In addition, the Chinese revolution was deployed as an example with which Indian observers assessed contemporary developments in their own country. The celebratory reception of 'New China' in India suggests that the subsequent rapport between the Chinese and Indian states was a result of not only high-level diplomatic manoeuvres but also pan-Asian epistemological bridging between socialist revolution and decolonization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper attempts to re-examine Moroccan non-canonical voices, their forgotten experiences and their itineraries beyond borders. It aims to uncover cultural discourses pertaining to early cultural and artistic interactions through acrobatic performances between Morocco and the West, namely America. In fact, less attention has been given to the presence of Moroccan entertainers beyond borders in the archives of history as Moroccan historians and cultural critics seem to have paid little critical consideration to Moroccan artistic encounters with Europe and America. They have overlooked to deal with travel performances, professional entertainments, and artistic spectacles, initiated by acrobats, as instances of visual cross-cultural encounters. This contribution attempts to locate the contesting acrobatic experiences of Moroccan professional entertainers in the American show business of the nineteenth century by emphasizing connections between theatrical performances, ethnic exhibition and world fair expositions. With a postcolonial inflected consciousness, the paper also investigates the shifting discourses about the display of Moorish culture and people within the fairgrounds wherein cultural identity became a discursive battleground for ethnographic classification and racial categorization. Popular theatrical venues offered substantial oriental-themed performances that resonated with a distinctive view about Self and Other paradigms as theorized by Edward Said in Orientalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper treats the documentaries Sunday Beauty Queen (2017) and The Helper (2017) to explore how domestic workers in Hong Kong are represented as forcibly queered, forced by circumstance to operate on the queer time of non-normative gender roles, rather than the 'natural' straight time of maternity and unpaid domestic labour for their own family. Popular media, including documentaries, see this queering as a violent act, one at the heart of the domestic worker's exploitation, and thus attempt to 'rescue' this queered figure by reinforcing her heteronormativity – not as Filipina/Indonesian, not as workers, but as women and mothers above all else. I consider how, in these films, unspoken forms of queer culture and queer relationships contrast dominant depictions of asexual matronly caretakers. Attempts to capture domestic workers through the documentary camera inevitably reveal the queer practices and desires that migrancy makes available, as the communal and non-filial intimacies within these films also depict domestic workers outside of the 'straight time' of motherhood and reproduction, and within a 'queer time' of non-biological reproduction and same-sex community. To better understand the preoccupation with the workers' 'voice', this paper also reflects on the intersections of queerness and migration with brownness, a racial optic that signifies ambiguity and mixture, but also restricts brown women into lower-class migrant labour, and imports colonial attitudes towards Southeast Asian sexuality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Karaoke has long been understood as an imitative musical practice, popular among the working class in western society. While scholars have noticed the communicative significance of karaoke in generating interpretive creativity and social interaction, they also point out the tendency of offline karaoke practices to strengthen cultural rules and social hierarchies. For this reason, this paper examines vibrant Chinese streaming karaoke practices and explores how Chinese streaming karaoke, as the originator of cultural and social enclave, offers hope for resistance against cultural censorship and social restriction. Through the lens of the theoretical concepts of tactics, affect and human flourishing, the analysis reveals that the karaoke enclave generates an affective field for vernacular creativities that foster personal wellbeing and social publicness in everyday life, through four playful tactics: to ‘water’ the vibrancy of life, to build ‘asylum’ so as to seek more intensified experiential connections and connect with total strangers, to ‘morph’ into unknown spontaneity and set up non-monetary values, and to perform ‘freak show’ to voice political affect and resonate with the most unlikely of people. The emancipatory power of streaming karaoke play, lies in the interdependence and interconnection of those tactics and they as a whole contribute to the human flourishing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]