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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]

In this paper I focus on designations of 'our culture and heritage' that defend practices and symbols of religious majorities. I consider the entanglement of nationalist narratives, secularity and the 'us' in the claims of social actors and public discussions about culture and heritage. What is understood as being religious and what is culture/heritage is dependent on the social actors involved, their position in society and the interpretive frameworks available to them. I consider the following questions: How are culture and heritage used in legal and public discourse to justify the continued presence of such symbols and practices in Christian majority countries in the West? What are the religious histories implicated in this process? Who is imagined to be included when crosses and prayers are staked out as 'our culture and heritage'? What is the relationship between culture and heritage and national imaginaries? Ultimately, as religious majorities see their numbers dwindle and power relations shift, the attempt to imbricate religious practices and beliefs in public spaces and rituals is quite possibly a translation of the religious to the secular. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is an ethnography of the articulation of ethnicity in the politics of blackness in Colombia. Based on the author's fieldwork in the southern Pacific region over the last 10 years, the paper briefly describe the ethnicization of blackness in Colombia and shows how this process implies a particular articulation of memories and identities in the politics of representation of alterity. The ethnicization of blackness involves a specific 'imagined (black) community' both within and beyond the nation. The specificity of this imagined black community is anchored in the objectification of memory, culture, nature and identity. Therefore, it is argued that the ethnicization of blackness is not a new euphemism for race, but that to understand the particular inscriptions of blackness as an ethnic group one has to problematize the 'racial closure' assumed by most scholars in the study of blackness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article challenges some of the assumptions made in the paper "Video As the Diasporic Imagination of Selfhood: A Case Study of the Croatians in Australia" by researcher Dona Kolar-Panov. Kolar-Panov's paper is concerned with the role and effects of video on cultural technology in the Croatian diaspora in Australia in the light of the war in the former Yugoslavia. It is informed by research among Croatians and Macedonian's in Perth, conducted between 1989 and 1994. The media and communication technologies are of central importance to late modernity.

Drawing on the perspectives of science studies and actor-network-theory, this paper develops the perspective of 'culture studies' to offer an account of the ways in which culture, understood as a specific form of public organisation, is produced and sustained through the assemblage of materially heterogeneous elements. This is related to an account of the ways in which culture acts on the social through the distinctive 'working surfaces on the social' that it organises. The distinctiveness of the perspective of 'culture studies' is highlighted by comparing it with more familiar traditions of analysis within cultural studies and cultural sociology. Francis Mulhern's account of cultural studies' relations to the practice of Kulturkritik associated with the formation of Bildung and the programme that Jeffrey Alexander proposes for the development of cultural sociology are paid particular attention in this regard. The paper concludes with a consideration of the forms of analytical attention that are needed to investigate the ways in which cultural and social science disciplines interact in the production of 'working surfaces on the social' through which their modes of action on the social are coordinated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper draws on research conducted in the late 1990s into the workplace cultures of London-based advertising agencies and the subjective identities of a group of young, largely male art directors and copywriters (Nixon 2003). The paper explores how these practitioners used the trope of creativity to describe the work they performed and considers what was at stake in their easy but insistent recourse to the term. It suggests that their extraordinary valorising of creativity was bound up with the extrapolation from quite small degrees of different-ness in the work they produced or strove to produce. In this sense, their cult of creativity was partly bound up with a ‘narcissism of minor differences’ in which creative teams sought to differentiate themselves from each other in the advertising that they generated. Furthermore, the valorisation of creativity was tied up less, in this sense, with making a client's product stand out – the manifest commercial reason for finding new ways of communicating with consumers – so much as with drawing attention to the creative teams in an intensely competitive occupation. The pursuit of newness also often came to be bound up with struggles over genres and genre hierarchies that themselves become coded in generational terms. Young creatives would ally themselves with ‘newness’ in order to challenge more established colleagues. We might read into this pursuit of newness and creativity, then, a strategy of distinction and position taking by differently placed practitioners over the accumulation of recognition and status and its conversion into tangible economic rewards. As such the cult of creativity amongst these creative people formed part of the cultivation of a distinct habitus in this ‘talent-led’ field of cultural production in which speaking the language and pursuing the signs of creativity was central to the successful shaping of an identity at work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the last decade, the phrase ‘visual culture’ has come to identify a variety of interdisciplinary approaches to the visual in everyday life. While analytic perspectives may come from gender, race or media theory, political economy, psychoanalysis, and so forth, there is an apparent agreement about the critical relation the visual has to subjectivity and social organization. The travelling of critical and cultural theory across disciplinary boundaries has given ‘visual culture’ an institutional form through new degrees, programmes, cross-faculty appointments, courses, introductory textbooks, and research publications. This paper comments on the intellectual history of ‘visual culture’, identifies cultural aspects of visual performance that have been understated in recent formulations of visual culture and visual studies, and argues that the current institutional form of visual culture research has contributed to the disappearance of cultural and anthropological approaches within visual culture. The paper is developed in relation to a case study involving popular photography as a cultural performance of the Canadian north, and considers the contribution of performance to visual culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines configurations of power, authority and culture in Portugal in the twentieth century, and intellectual practices and spaces related to those configurations and in opposition to them. Portuguese national history and essentialized versions of Portugueseness are analysed in the work of such distinguished and influential intellectuals as António Sérgio, António José Saraiva and Eduardo Lourenço, in articulation with the role of high culture in the process of nation building throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. One particular structure of attitude and reference, constructed in the latter half of the nineteenth century, is foregrounded with reference to the History of Portugal by Oliveira Martins, in the context of the persistent contradictions and conflicts between progressive and conservative, modernizing and traditional, 'historical', formations and projects. In such a context, moments of oppositional, alternative and independent projects are worth looking into. Two decisive moments of social change in the second half of the twentieth century were the 1940s, and the late 1960s and early 1970s. The paper pays attention to the politics of culture of Neo-Realismo in the 1940s and its consequences for high and popular culture over the following decades, especially in the years leading to the democratic revolution of 25 April 1974. A brief analysis of the 1990s is articulated to the study of the change-producing projects in the 1940s and 1960s as part of the cultural studies practice the paper argues for. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses some theoretical approaches to the question of how culture, technologies and the social interact. These considerations result from the author's research in the genesis of digital cultures in the 1980s. The paper begins by outlining the author's research project, and then continues with a discussion of some of the most influential approaches in the cultural studies of technology.This article then presents a small sample of the author's analysis, which combines narratological and discourse analytical methods with practice-oriented cultural theories, such as those of Pierre Bourdieu, Régis Debray and Bruno Latour. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using the work of Pierre Bourdieu and Sara Thornton, the paper investigates the problems of 'writing as a fan' through an analysis of cult movie fandom. It starts out from a critique of Jeff Sconce's work which claims that he fails to question the subcultural ideology through which fan cultures produce a sense of identity through their supposed difference from the 'mainstream.' It then moves on to an analysis of fan writing on the 'cult movie,' which examines not only the complex and contradictory strategies through which these writings produce a sense of subcultural identity, but also the extent to which these writings seek to construct identities through the construction of an inauthentic Other. The next section examines both exhibition practices and intellectual trends to illustrate the ways in which cult movie fandom emerged not as a reaction against the market or the academy, but rather through their historical development. Finally, the paper looks at the role of mass, niche and micro media within the production and maintenance of the scene and at the functions of rarity and exclusivity within it. In the process, the essay explores the contradictory and problematic nature of the concept of 'mainstream, commercial cinema', and the ways in which it is produced as the other of supposedly radical and alternative taste cultures, whether subcultural or academic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper considers the state of the ‘field’ of affect studies and its development – partly through the involvement of one of its authors – over the course of decades. It argues that rather than identifying affect as the ‘other’ of signification and representation, thus ‘subtracting’ it from the conjuncture, one should understand the question of affect to point to the multiplicity of forms of sign behaviours – or, better, of forms of expression or collective assemblages of enunciation (in the terms of Deleuze and Guattari) that constitute a conjuncture in all its complexity. This article attempts to map this multiplicity by refining and expanding Guattari’s ‘mixed semiotics’. Finally, it offers a brief example of how such multiplicities (and their resulting hybridities) might be used to compare the ‘affective topographies’ and structures of feelings that have differentially enabled oppositional movements in the 1960s and the current moment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper offers a new interpretation of Émile Durkheim'sThe Elementary Forms of Religious Life(1912) as the basis for reconsidering the Tarde–Durkheim debate of 1903 and the distinctions between a theory of social force and a theory of social assemblage. Resisting traditional interpretations of Durkheim's scientism, this essay traces how concepts of force and energy are centrally developed inElementary Formsto draw new lines between epistemology to ontology for twentieth-century theory. I argue that Durkheim develops an ‘energetic epistemology’ that conceives of the human capacity for shared meaning as a product of invested energy in the form of continually enacted and evolving material practice, thought, and attention. According to Durkheim, when a member of a collective perceives a god or feels belief, he or she actually perceives the accumulated energy of on-going creation and maintenance of objects and ideas by members of a collective. Sacred objects, images, and ideas bear the trace of collective energy the more they are carefully crafted, maintained in spaces that are specially arranged, and written into behavioural codes. This reading of Durkheim allows us to consider him in a lineage of social constructivists and, particularly, in relation to Ludwik Fleck, who has been largely confined to different theoretical discussions when his contributions to sociology have been acknowledged at all. By reconsidering Durkheim, we have occasion to rethink his sociology and understand how he redrew the lines between thought and action, between epistemology and ontology, through the material framework of energy and force. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper elaborates a general theory of scenes as multi-dimensional complexes of meaning embedded in material, local practices. It outlines techniques for measuring scenes empirically and shows how certain types of scenes provide environments in which new social movement (NSM) organizations (like human rights and environmental groups) tend to thrive. However universal and cosmopolitan the content of NSM goals, they appear to get much of their energy and support from the qualities that inhere in concrete local contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on an on-going, multi-method investigation into Media Molecule's popular LittleBigPlanet video game franchise and its ever-growing network of games, players, activities and events, this paper seeks to explore how the notion of ‘cultural scene’ might be used to better understand and analyse games-based, collaborative cultural activities. The discussion begins with a description of LittleBigPlanet, its contents and history, and the various actors involved in the social shaping of its wide-reaching community. The focus then shifts to identifying some of the ways in which LittleBigPlanet might be understood as functioning as (or at least akin to) a ‘cultural scene’, as well as to exploring those facets of LittleBigPlanet that challenge previous interpretations of this concept and its underlying assumptions. Particular attention will be given to the ways in which the LittleBigPlanet scene reflects, extends and deviates from the geographically situated notions of the cultural scene found in previous works in this area. An argument is made that understanding examples such as LittleBigPlanet as cultural scenes requires more than a shift in our notions and experience of locale, but also necessitates a renewed foregrounding of lingering questions relating to power and privatization within both traditional and digital cultural practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines how discourses about obscurity, ambivalence and nostalgia serve to perpetuate cultural scenes. I consider Toronto bar and performance venue the Rivoli and Canadian comedy troupe the Kids in the Hall (KITH) as part of a cultural scene that existed on Queen Street West in the early 1980s. I analyse this case study through media discourses found in reviews and interviews about the scene and argue that representations of KITH's participation in the early days of the scene continue to legitimize the troupe as a groundbreaking and countercultural comedy team. That is, even now that they have ostensibly left ‘the scene’ they are still defined by it. In contemporary interviews with the group, their origins on the Queen West circuit, particularly at the Rivoli, are consistently used to frame them as innovators in Canadian comedy. These discourses also work to obscure the extent to which scenes are constructed and at times part of profoundly predictable taste cultures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

“New Keywords: Migration and Borders” is a collaborative writing project aimed at developing a nexus of terms and concepts that fill-out the contemporary problematic of migration. It moves beyond traditional and critical migration studies by building on cultural studies and post-colonial analyses, and by drawing on a diverse set of longstanding author engagements with migrant movements. The paper is organized in four parts (i) Introduction, (ii) Migration, Knowledge, Politics, (iii) Bordering, and (iv) Migrant Space/Times. The keywords on which we focus are: Migration/Migration Studies; Militant Investigation; Counter-mapping; Border Spectacle; Border Regime; Politics of Protection; Externalization; Migrant Labour; Differential inclusion/exclusion; Migrant struggles; and Subjectivity. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Over the last 30 years, the victims' rights movement has expanded the role of victims in the American criminal justice system. As a result of this movement, judges, prosecutors and parole boards must now hear victims' views at all stages of the criminal justice process, including plea bargains, and sentencing and parole decisions. Legislative efforts have been spearheaded by victims' families, and legislation has been named after deceased victims. Also, victims' families can now view executions in states across the country. The victims' right movement assumes that the criminal justice system should privilege victims' interests over those of society. In so doing, it denies society as a consideration, which is tantamount to a denial of society itself. This article positions victims' rights' denial of society within the current conjuncture, marked as it is by the contradiction between neoliberalism and American liberalism. Victims' rights' denial if society is an expression of the denial of society implicit in American neoliberalism, which seeks to privilege individual interests over those of society. This paper argues that victims' rights is a powerful element of the neoliberal project for three reasons. First, victims' rights imputes the authority of legal discourse to neoliberalism's denial of society. Second, important actors in the rise of neoliberalism have also worked to establish victims' rights. Finally, victims' rights comprehensively circulates throughout America and offers powerful points of identification that incorporate Americans into the victims' rights formation. I explore the denial of society in three victims' rights practices: naming criminal legislation after crime victims and passing such laws in honour of victims; allowing victims' families to view executions; and prosecutors, judges and police personnel making legal decisions according to victims' wishes. I examine the consonant denial of society in three neoliberal practices -- monetarism, supply-side economics and welfare reform -- and demonstrate how neoliberal advocates like Bill Clinton, Ronald Reagan and Paul Gann worked to advance victims' rights. I also describe the production, consumption and comprehensive circulation of victims' rights texts. Finally, I consider Cultural Studies' unique contribution to legal studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cultural scholars are paying increasing attention to the ways in which choice has become a cultural obligation deeply ingrained in neoliberal, post-feminist, therapeutic and consumerist norms. Drawing insights from this literature, this paper first charts the changing discourse on choice, and then goes on to both examine and challenge the centrality of the rhetoric of choice in contemporary discourses of singlehood and single women. In my analysis, the idea of choice is posited as a multivalent signifier dependent on changing social contexts and denoting shifting aspects of feminine subjectivity and personal relations. It is my aim thereby to problematize notions of choice and singlehood, as well as to question the cultural processes that produce them. To do so, I probe the discursive relations that produce distinctive clusters of meanings, as well as the tensions and contradictions that emerge around them. Such a reading emerges from a content-based analysis of readers' comments and responses to an online Internet column depicting the various advantages of being ‘single-by-choice’. The findings show that while choice can be a discursive force that enables single women to resist traditional family forms and establish their chosen subjectivities, the centrality of choice in the construction of intimate relations today also casts in doubt and paradoxically delegitimizes single women's option of autonomy and individuality. Some of the social interpretations of choice denote that single women are endowed with a partial and incomplete subjectivity, while according to other stances the choice of singlehood signifies a radical option for claiming singlehood as a long-term way of life. However, the aim of the critique proposed here is not merely to deconstruct the discursive mechanism that delegitimizes singlehood, but also to point out some of the potential limitations emerging from the new counter-discourse of chosen singlehood. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper offers a genealogical sketch of the figure of the Muslim Other as it is figured in the post-Cold War popular and political imaginary. It explores why 'culture' has acquired a putative explanatory power in the post-Cold War (geo)politics. In addressing differentialist racism, it posits Islamophobia as an ideological response that conflates histories, politics, societies and cultures of the Middle East into a single unified and negative conception of an essentialized Islam, which is then deemed incompatible with Euro-Americaness. In this context, the category of brown, once the signifier of an exotic Other, is undergoing a transformation in conjunction with the deepening of Islamophobia, a formation that posits brown, as a strategy of identification, as alterity to the Euro-Americanness, and as terror and threat. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses how understandings of culture and place are deployed in governing colonial Aboriginal1 subjects in contemporary Australia. Recently, Australia's conservative Federal Government has sought to reorientate Aboriginal affairs away from debates about rights and inheritances, to the 'responsibilities' that communities must accept in order to be provided with infrastructure and services from government. Discourses of mutual obligation and responsibility target Aboriginal populations and are linked to claims that Aboriginal communities themselves have requested more overt and tailored interventions from central governments. The new 'Shared Responsibility Agreements' (SRAs) signal the formalisation of these shifts and oblige Aboriginal communities to conform to a series of specified disciplinary practices (such as improving personal hygiene, maintaining clean households, and preventing school truancy) in order to receive access to health care and other basic social services and supplies. We analyse how a hierarchy of 'culture' is articulated in SRAs, and highlight the particular complexity of governing remote colonial subjects and spaces at a distance. Although SRAs appear to indicate a novel policy direction, our analysis reveals how they mobilise longstanding colonial discourses of Aboriginal people and communities as welfare dependent and ungovernable, and reinstate donor/recipient relationships characteristic of earlier colonial rationalities and citizenship practices. Our case study demonstrates how governing practices are constantly reconstituted through knowledges of the governed, and through techniques that hybridise early illiberal practices with new neoliberal discourses. We argue that the act of governing remains thoroughly mediated by the inheritance of colonial visions of place and culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyses AIDS-prevention therapeutics as ethical technologies of governance relative to the experience of culture. As a number of AIDS scholars have noted, the concept of 'culture' has been a powerful rubric for organizing evidence about HIV-transmission behaviours and their modification in prevention research and programming. Indeed, culture has been one of the most important concepts in AIDS-prevention knowledge through which danger is problematized, or organized as a specific problem that can be entered into strategies and techniques of governance and reform. This is to say that 'culture' functions in AIDS prevention as an object and target of government, toward which instruments, knowledges, and programmes are directed with the goal of transforming the behaviours and meanings said to put individuals at risk for HIV transmission. I argue that culture is experienced in prevention therapeutics as an element of the self toward which one is to form oneself as an active and ethical subject of one's own health. In AIDS-prevention pedagogies, individuals encounter 'culture' as a potentially dangerous element of the self, a force or drive within oneself that will overwhelm one's free and responsible decision-making capacity unless one forms a deliberate and authoritative relationship to it. These pedagogies cultivate in subjects techniques for constituting an authoritative relationship to culture, seeking to guarantee responsible behaviour and decision-making about HIV risk by constituting individuals as authoritative subjects of their cultures. As such, AIDS prevention is best understood as what Foucault called an 'ethical' governing strategy that forms individuals as active and responsible subjects of their cultures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Teaching cultural studies to undergraduates in a period of marked political success for American conservatives and their evangelical allies might seem like a fruitless, even hazardous, adventure. This paper examines the malleable meaning of conservatism animated by religious revival in terms of micro- or regional cultures in the attempt to fashion a workable pedagogy for initiating students into the alien political commitments of cultural studies. In formulating a workable strategy for bringing cultural studies to spaces that cannot be shielded from the political and cultural currents that run off campus, the author argues that religion and those political commitments most receptive to literal interpretations of the Bible should not be taken as unbreachable, monolithic totalities. The contemporary nexus of religion and politics dominating the American landscape is a dangerously unstable construction that can and must be rigorously interrogated by both tenured radicals and their students. In forming an impossible coalition college educators should not presume that their most pious students, especially those who call themselves evangelical Christians, are forever barred from adopting progressive political positions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper takes as its point of departure the ethical problematization of debating both sides - having students argue both affirmative and negative on a debate resolution - in order to highlight the role of communication as a cultural technology of liberalism. It argues that debating both sides contributed to the cultural governance of cold war liberalism by separating speech from conviction to cultivate the value of debate as a method of democratic decision-making. The valorization of free and full expression as a pre-requisite for 'decision by debate' prepared the ground for dis-articulating debate from cold war liberalism and re-articulating it as a game of freedom that contributes to the moral education of liberal citizens. In so doing, debate becomes a global technology of liberalism creating exceptional subjects by circulating the communicative norms of deliberative democracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Originally published in France in 1980 (and translated into English in 1984), Michel de Certeau's The Practice of Everyday Life has assumed the status of an ur-text for many cultural studies academics and students. In particular, his chapter on 'Walking in the City' is often cited as a blueprint for understanding key terms in the cultural studies repertoire such as 'power' and 'resistance'. This article revisits 'Walking in the City' in order to supplement some of the established understandings of his work circulating in the field of cultural studies, as well as the intersecting fields of cultural geography and urban studies. The paper begins by suggesting ways in which established understandings of Certeau's work might be usefully rethought and extended through a consideration of differentiated instances of walking. Critiquing the account of body-subject relations posited by Certeau through reference to the writings of Marcel Mauss on techniques of the body and self, the author calls, in particular, for a greater consideration of the role of assemblages and affect in understanding everyday urban practices. By the conclusion of the article, the author arrives at a more nuanced understanding of the feedback loop between the body-subject and the city, and suggests ways in which Certeau's writing on walking remains productive for those strains of cultural studies interested in the practices of an increasingly virtualized urban space. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores aspects of the everyday through a consideration of shame. Drawing on and extending Bourdieu's notion of the habitus, notably in relationship to Silvan Tomkins' affect theory, and to Bourdieu's predecessor Marcel Mauss, the paper argues for the positivity of everyday shame. The very different although complementary privileging of the physiological in Tomkins and in Mauss allows for a radical rearticulation and understanding of the habitus and of everyday life. In this article, their understandings serve to provide a model that more fully comprehends the productive nature of shame within postcolonial societies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For Bourdieu, the extent to which agents can attain knowledge of, and negotiate, various cultural fields is dependent upon, and explicable in terms of, two epistemological types. The first is a practical sense (the 'logic of practice'), while the second involves a sort of conscious comprehension that he names 'reflexivity'. Bourdieu defines reflexivity as an interrogation of the three types of limitations (of social position, of field and of the scholastic point of view) that are constitutive of knowledge itself. But the reflexive relation to the habitus, the demands and influences exerted by cultural fields, and one's own practices within those fields, cannot be understood simply as something that is obtained by the subject; rather, any reflexive relation to the doxa and illusio of the field must be a constitutive part of that field. This paper identifies a number of principles taken from Bourdieu's work that clarify how, where and why the reflexive 'surpassing' of literacy might occur. But we also suggest, contra Bourdieu, that only fields that are informed or characterized by the scholastic point of view are likely to be characterized by the set of conditions constitutive of reflexive knowledge; and that the scholastic point of view is therefore, simultaneously, both a potential impediment to, and a condition (almost necessary) of the production of reflexive knowledge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Bourdieu's development of the notion of 'habitus' has proved a rich vein for cultural theory. Habitus has been useful, with the growing interest in processes of embodiment, in countering the cognitive and representational bias in much cultural analysis, and in providing a basis for avoiding the dualisms - of mind and body, structure and agency - that trouble social theory. However, in stressing the unconscious nature of embodiment, and refusing to engage with the question of consciousness, an implicit form of mechanistic determinism has crept into Bourdieu"s implementation of habitus. By returning to the Spinozan monism that informs Bourdieu's work, this paper elaborates a productive conceptualization of habitus that attends to the various intensities of consciousness, the relations between multiple mind-bodies and processes of habituation through a focus on the literature of sports training. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The German fashion magazine Burda epitomized the success of many pattern magazines in the immediate post-war era that aimed at providing information about creating one's own fashion clothes, as well as tips about adapting existing wardrobes. This concept proved highly topical in Austria too, as it offered women almost unlimited possibilities in their search for a new 'feminine' identity full of elegance and style after a period of austerity. This essay sketches opposing theoretical approaches towards the popular practice of home-dressmaking among women, linking these approaches to post-war discourse about femininity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines some of the current metacritical perspectives to postcolonial cultural studies, and discusses an alternative cultural contextualist perspective through the case of Hong Kong cultural studies. I first demarcate between contextualist and non-contextualist metacritical perspectives as well as between political-economic and cultural-contextualist ones. Then I identify major metacritiques that are currently made against postcolonial studies, and by showing how they may be applicable to Hong Kong cultural studies, I suggest ways to re-interpret these metacritiques from a cultural sociological perspective. I shall highlight important structural characteristics of Hong Kong cultural studies, and analyse them in terms of a cultural sociology of the postcolonial intellectual field. Ultimately, I argue that the problems associated with this postcolonial intellectual field appear to originate from the hierarchical global cultural context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article attempts to develop a critical understanding of the reconstitution of Hong Kong identity in Hollywood productions involving Hong Kong film talents. It argues that the'local' in the city's historical context of the nineties no longer refers to any entity pertaining to a particular locality and culture but is always already determined by the framework of the transnational, which structures the perception of its local social reality. In particular, the paper suggests that the remaking of Hong Kong cultural identity in Hollywood films could be grasped in terms of the notion of a double negation. While the formation of such an identity is based on a negation of Chineseness, Hong Kong'stransnational crossing to Hollywood initiates another negation that negates the very symbolic realm common to Chineseness. Jackie Chan's Hollywood blockbuster, Rush Hour , is used to illuminate the ways in which Hong Kong film stars and directors working for the global entertainment syndicate re-appropriate their agency in the production of a transnational narrative of their identity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper the way in which the concept of lifestyle has been mobilized in the debate over healthcare in the last decade is analysed. Has the USA become a more compassionate nation as former President George Bush urged? Or have neo-conservative and right-wing groups continued to impede the democratization of well-being? And, in the absence of full democratization through public provision, how have private sector health and fitness industries capitalized upon the lifestyle concept in the marketing of their wares? These questions are addressed as they pertain to the United States in the time immediately prior to and during the Clinton period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper attempts to examine the colonial experience of Hong Kong as a function of the historicity of British imperial rule, whose ideology and practice can be contrasted with experiences in other places (India, Oceania, Africa, etc.) as well as other times and where the changing nature of colonial governmentality can be seen to be influenced by the concurrent emergence of the state, modernity and commoditization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Automation has a long history in cultural production, but the contemporary moment presents a range of new possibilities and demands for the deployment of automated and autonomous systems in the shaping of our cultural and social worlds. The cultural implications of the deployment of automated systems for producing, curating, and distributing a growing range of cultural texts and artifacts extend beyond the realm of content to encompass their pace, rhythm, and scale. Understanding the significance of these shifts remains a central task for cultural studies research that builds on the field's historical engagement with the entwinement of cultural practices, social relations, and power. This theme issue builds on the historical and recent concerns of cultural studies to provide a range of approaches to the cultural significance of automation. Given the scope of the transformations, the coverage of possible topics is indicative rather than exhaustive. The articles in this collection range across the realms of automated news curation, credit scoring, image curation, deep fakes, data science, the gig economy, and content moderation. They engage with possible responses to the real and potential pathologies of automation in the cultural realm – while highlighting the links between culture, politics, and economics. Taken together they develop a range of critical approaches to the sometimes creeping, sometimes galloping automation of cultural production, curation, and distribution. While stressing the moments of historical continuity with earlier forms of bureaucratic and administrative rationality, they simultaneously indicate that we are, in many ways, still in the very early stages of a process that is likely to encompass an expanding range of cultural practices and texts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the 2015 film Ex Machina as a cultural text that exemplifies the technologization of gender within algorithmic culture. Analysing different textual elements — the narrative diegesis, the marketing material, and the digital techniques used in the VFX post-production process—I argue that gender is consistently figured as a kind of technology. That is, gender is systematised, codified, and reduced to a programmed set of instructions that can be used by machines to manipulate and deceive. I argue that understanding gender through its figuration with the technological, specifically through code and algorithms, raises pertinent issues concerning surveillance, race, and bias. This is reflected in the film through a problematic representation of racialised figures, particularly techno-Orientalist tropes of labouring Asian bodies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In her 2008 novel The Knitting Circle, American writer Ann Hood identifies knitting as a form of prayer, with every stitch connecting her to her deceased daughter. In 2016, a Rotterdam-based knitting icon, Loes Veenstra, passed away. For many years, Veenstra knitted hundreds of jumpers that were not intended to be worn. She knitted solely to fight her smoking addiction. In 2010, hundreds of Peruvian women knitted together in a square in Ayacucho to commemorate their missing relatives, whose fate had remained unknown since the civil war in the 1980s and 1990s. The scarf they created served as a symbolic grave because these women knew that their relatives would probably never get a real one. The written and spoken testimonies of these women as well as the knitted objects reveal the significance of knitting as a remedy. This creative endeavour practiced in daily life becomes a remedy when it is the only activity that women want or are able to undertake while experiencing grief, trauma or addiction. Knitting is a cure for women who have no other recourse to action within their social or cultural circumstances. These case studies illustrate how being creative (as a woman) in daily life can be beneficial in difficult times. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on Tenth David Nicol Smith Conference on Eighteenth-Century Studies. The main theme for the HRC during 1996 will be 'Culture and Science, exploring dialogues between various strands of the humanities, social sciences and natural sciences in both western and non-western social contexts. The conveners are particularly interested in papers which address the uses and understandings of flora, fauna, land, intellectual and cultural property and bio-technologies. Science, as well as literature, was a key site of this cultural interaction.

Emergency dispatchers who receive 9-1-1 calls and initiate various emergency response services perform media work that produces 9-1-1 as an infrastructural system for the public at large. This should be considered media work because it centres the interpretation of media content and navigation of multimedia systems. While a nontraditional site for the study of media work, emergency dispatch can be studied through methods of media industry and infrastructure studies in order to understand how these workers are shaped by and shaping cultural attitudes toward new media, labour, and emergency itself. Using interviews, observations, job advertisements, and management literatures, this article traces the values and practices of dispatcher culture through the sites of 'the job', 'the console', and 'the community.' Through dispatchers' media work, the logistical infrastructure of 9-1-1 is gradually transformed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article begins with an analysis of the various concepts of home in feminist writing, arguing that such concepts often retain certain key dichotomies relied on by modernism, in particular home/voyage, statis/movement, private/public, tradition/modernity, connectedness/autonomy. It also examines body of historical material which suggests that women have struggled at various times to overturn precisely this concept of home. This material provides insights into women's different historical experiences as well as their potentially different visions of modernity.

This essay both inaugurates the editorship of Ted Striphas and reflects on the contributions of Cultural Studies' longtime editor, Lawrence Grossberg. It opens by reflecting briefly on the journal's transformations over the last 28 years before taking stock of the wellbeing of Cultural Studies, the field. The claim here is that Cultural Studies devotes less time and attention than it used to in thinking through first principles, and thus that the future of the field hinges, in part, on asking whether core concepts are up to the task of answering to the urgent political questions of our time. The essay then recontextualizes the concept of culture, specifically with respect to the much-maligned (indeed, deservedly-maligned) 'high culture' tradition. In its recesses the author identifies a fugitive theoretical line in which culture signifies care, as opposed to subordination to patrician interests and aesthetic styles. This conceptual move sets the stage for the central argument of the essay, namely, that for Cultural Studies to live up to both its name and intellectual-political ambitions, it must devote significant time to caring for the infrastructure that sustains its body of ideas. The piece concludes by highlighting some of Lawrence Grossberg's efforts, as an infrastructuralist, to care for Cultural Studies and by observing how, moving forward, neither the field nor this journal will take care of itself. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The essay offers one piece of a larger conjunctural analysis, in an effort to contribute to a better story of the contemporary organic crisis. It considers three elements of the complexity of the ‘crises’ of knowledge: First, it explores the increasingly feltsocialperception that knowledge (and the forms of authority that accompany it) has become less determined and determining, less identifiable, less effective, more troubled. It argues that one must think about these developments historically and contextually, rather than going along with the panic that has surrounded their increasing visibility in recent political events. Second, it considers some of the attacks on the university as well as some of the recent changes in the political economy and institutional forms of the academy. Finally, it argues that academics have failed to examine their own contributions to the crises of knowledge, failed to consider the ways their own cultures and practices can be located within rather than against the crises of knowledge. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This essay reflects on the lives of two people whose publications, pedagogy, lectures, and crucially, whose experiences helped set the terms of the debate about so-called high culture in Cultural Studies: Matthew Arnold (1822�88) and Frank Raymond (F. R.) Leavis (1895�78). Who was Matthew Arnold? F. R. Leavis? What were the conditions of possibility of their work and words � that is, for the practices and positions for which they advocated? What new questions might emerge by sharing in detailed and perhaps unexpected stories of individuals who, presently, seem to function in Cultural Studies mainly as known-unknowns? The argument is that the details of both Arnold and Leavis� lives are integral to understanding the conditions of possibility of their work, both individually and collectively, and indeed to more fully appreciating the meaning and implications their work holds for Cultural Studies. Apropos, this piece refines the methodology of keywords introduced by Raymond Williams [1958. Culture and society, 1780�50. New York, NY: Columbia University Press; 1983. Keywords: A vocabulary of culture and society. Rev. ed. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.]. It also challenges some of the theoretical, historical, and analytical claims underpinning Tony Bennett [1996. Putting policy into cultural studies. In: what is cultural studies? A reader. London: Arnold, 307�1] and Ian Hunter抯 [1988. Setting limits to culture. New Formations, 4, 103�3; 1994. Rethinking the school: subjectivity, bureaucracy, criticism. St. Leonards: Allen & Unwin] work on culture as governmentality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Most commentary on the Edward Snowden affair and other recent accounts of government spying leaked in the media has focused on individual privacy concerns, while overlooking how contemporary neoliberal modernity has created a social order in which new surveillance technologies grant the state a degree of power unthinkable to past generations – exceeding in reach and complexity even the totalitarian state imagined in Orwell's dystopian account, 1984. Any critical analysis of the modern surveillance state must move beyond documenting abuses of state power to address how government repression has been allowed to proceed unchecked, and even to flourish, through its support of an antidemocratic public pedagogy produced and circulated via a depoliticizing machinery of fear and consumption. In the USA, repression works through the homogenizing forces of the market as well as a corresponding loss of public memory and political identity to encourage the widespread embrace of an authoritarian surveillance culture. The state and corporate cultural apparatuses now collude to socialize everyone into a surveillance regime, even as personal information is willingly given over to social media and other corporate-based sites as people move across multiple screens and digital apparatuses. It is no longer possible to address the violations committed by the surveillance state without also analysing this broader regime of security and commodification. The authoritarian nature of the corporate–state surveillance apparatus in the USA can only be fully understood when its ubiquitous tentacles are connected to wider cultures of entertainment, commerce and punishment, and the increasing labelling of democratic dissent as an act of terrorism. If democracy is to have a future in America, then it is imperative to organize social movements capable of recovering public memory and reclaiming dissent as essential features of responsible citizenship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

‘Culture’ is one of those concepts so widely used that it tends to fall into ambiguity and vagueness. Institutions dealing with power use them quite often in order to produce profuse, but somehow vacuous, discourses. That would be the case of the influential Human Development Reports of the United Nations Development Program (UNDP). After evidencing there is not a clear, plain, unitary idea of what ‘culture’ means in these yearly published reports, this research makes explicit – through a hermeneutical approach – the cultural logic underlying the ‘human development’ framework. UNDP turns qualitative culture into a quantitative matter. Thus development discourse becomes one of identity. While explicitly speaking about cultural diversity, implicitly it splits the world in a binary, dichotomic way: the West and the Rest, Developed and Developing and us and them. Hence, instead of a supposedly universal discourse promoting change, we find a culturally and historically defined one that reinforces – in a subtle way – the hegemonic epistemological and political patterns that sustain the present status quo. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay is framed by discussions on the civil unrest in British cities in 2011, the politics of austerity, the mass unemployment of the young, ‘the war on terror’ and ‘radicalization’ and the vulnerability of the poor and ‘unrespectable’. It advances a concept ofbiocolonialityand explores ‘respectability’, class and transnational post colonial urban cultures in contemporary London. The essay argues for a theorization which can account for how a divided subjectproducestheeffectof an undivided and self-governing ‘core self’ who ‘possesses’ distinguishing ‘biological’ ‘capacities’, ‘psychological attributes’ and cultural ‘characteristics’. It considers how this is accomplished through our daily practical activity such as our ‘imaginable’, ‘possible’ sexual desires, everyday practices of reflection, our bodily demeanour and bodily significations. This concept of biocoloniality is composed of two theoretical strands. In ‘on inscription and creolization’ and in dialogue with a single respondent on ‘respectability’ and ‘beauty’, I entwine disparate theoretical threads from work on biopolitics and governmentality, racialization, psychoanalysis and post coloniality and performativity, sexualization and intersectionality together. I forward a formulation ofinscriptionthat can reveal how we inscribe and sculpt our ownandother bodies with different ‘capacities’ and ‘qualities’. I then tie strands of work on repetition together and advance a theorization ofreiteration. I consider how we struggle with, overcome and are defeated by ourselves as we reinscribe our ownandother bodies. The essay thus considers how it is through in part our daily biocolonial practice that different bodies that are closer to and more distant from notions of the human, the un/respectable, un/desirable, ab/normal, ir/replaceable and expendable come into being and how this unsettles clear distinctions between coloniality and post-coloniality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In light of recent discussions of Jacques Rancière's notion of the political in cultural theory and the ‘left turn’ in Latin America, exemplified in the election of Evo Morales as the first indigenous president, this essay discusses concepts of governance elaborated by Bolivian indigenous intellectuals and media activists. It engages in detail with three examples of thinking through what is arguably a broad de-colonial process: the work of the Andean Oral History Workshop (THOA) and the movement to reconstitute the ayllu; Pablo Mamani's analysis of the micro-governments in El Alto; and CEFREC-CAIB's indigenous media activism. Thinking from the perspective of a long-standing struggle against global capitalism and its colonial legacies, the political constitutes – paradoxically – a complex and dynamic process of institutionalized consensus governance. Levels of community, regional, and national governance are bound into a feedback loop where representation gives way to the ideal of ‘mandar obedeciendo’ (governing by obeying). The Bolivian ‘democratic revolution’ is hence not conceptualized merely as a widening of the citizen base – a form of inclusion that Rancière would call ‘police’-but rather as profoundly reshaping the relation between the social, the cultural, and the state, and thus of democracy itself. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is nothing new about the use of sexuality as a metaphor in the place making of Ireland. This article considers how rhetorical strategies concerning homosexuality and the nation underwent distinct shifts in a period of intense economic growth and globalization in Ireland in the early years of the twenty-first century. The reading of media representations of homosexuality notes changes, both in what 'the homosexual' may come to represent in relation to Irish national identity, and in the connotations afforded to the idea of 'traditional Irish values' in relation to sexuality. The reading of the texts discussed makes evident how a 'local' version of cosmopolitan gay sexual identity was celebrated as an icon of a liberal and sexually liberated Ireland, while the figure of the Irish Roman Catholic priest, for so long an icon of the 'traditional values' at the heart of the Irish nationalist project, came to be characterised as 'the foreign at home' and as a 'moral contaminant' that Ireland has exported across the globe. Through these contrasting constructions a significant shift in public discourse on sexual morality is given a history. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Critical whiteness studies has produced significant analysis of the terrors of white supremacist power. However, in relation to cultural-media studies pedagogy, impassioned calls for the denouncement of whiteness raise troublesome concerns and limits for productively addressing students' racialized identities. I maintain that renouncing whiteness in anti-racist teaching does not adequately connect with commonsense and affective experiences of 'race' in everyday life for many students. Through a 'materialist' analysis of the film Crash (2005), this article opens up the question of the im/possibility of engaging whiteness from an anti-racist stance that neither condemns nor buttresses white identity. Crash, considered from a reading practice that does not simply dwell on textual meaning and interpretation, offers an opportunity to pedagogically engage with the ambivalent representations of 'race' which pervade contemporary culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents an exploration into the communication and cultural theories of James W. Carey on the role of journalism in society. Details are given highlighting Carey's scholastic work in the United States during the 1970s and its influence on the discipline of journalism education. Discussion is offered outlining Carey's views of the press and its moral and social responsibilities beyond the transmission of facts, the relationship between journalism and the developments of the university system, and his calls for educational reform within the U.S. industry.

In response to Daniel Mato's essay, this article argues against the concept of the creative industries and for a capacious understanding of culture to redefine the culture industries [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay aims to contextualize the debate of urban spaces experiencing cultural, social, political and economic changes in the East African region. With different population groups utilizing these spaces they become contested sites in the continued production of cultural knowledge, regional mutuality, and representation. In order to substantiate this argument, urban centres as nodal points for global networks promoting cosmopolitan lifestyles are seen to attract a growing number of youth musicians. In the fluid urban atmosphere, these youth musicians purposely beam their compositions beyond local geographies to avoid being muted or muffled since musical identity creates for them a subculture and creative space within which they thrive. Central to this drive given the historical musical past is the Kiswahili language. Contemporary modified Kiswahili sung music from Dar-es Salaam or Bongo Flava, distinctly articulates ensembles of class and power, while being embraced across all ethnic, religious, gender, socio-economic, age and political divides in the East African region. It is argued that shifting, any musical brand within the region, demands selected acclaimed musicians acquiring broadened felicity in music. Consequently, differences exist, in these translocational movements that reflect individual artists' styles, but which find space and meaning in borrowing and modification. By focussing on the emergence of youth musicians as agent involved in the construction of glocalized spaces the discussion situates the collective ability of youth as artists in taking advantage of opportunities in urban settings and appropriating spaces by the creation of a transversal urban cultural identity. The overriding quest for self-identity through labels and language by youth artists provides continual analysis into their metaphorically, African 'brewed' music as a partial solution in the deconstruction of obsessive-ness with Western domination and idols in music thus mapping out a future for regional musical artists. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]