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

An introduction to articles published within the issue is presented on topics including the approach of school/educational psychologists to the conduct of research, how research can work with individuals and communities to engage in qualitative research, and the Indigenous philosophy of Botho/Ubuntu as an alternate paradigm to varieties of epistemic injustice.

The cultural turn has yet to fully reconfigure 'class' as a set of fictions, tropes, discourses and enduring culture-structures. Existing Durkheimian approaches have stalled at his middle period morphological reductionism. This paper constructs a more radical understanding in the late-Durkheimian idiom. It shows how class operates as a signifier in a language game of purity and pollution, virtue and vice. Taking a lead from studies of the 'unruly' working class, the paper opens up the more subtle pollution that attends to the mythical 'bourgeoisie' and its associated and imagined 'bourgeois' culture. As a sign system this class location is deemed inauthentic, sybaritic, and as strangely deadening to cultural vitality. Although commonly found in contexts of gentrification and commodification that involve class conflict, this critical discourse is also applied within the bourgeois milieu. Such needless auto-critique suggests a relative autonomy from determination by class struggle. The possibilities for this approach are illustrated at length with reference to a paradigm case: the highly bourgeois milieu of the composer Richard Wagner and his Bayreuth Festival. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Mainstream television scarcely features Deaf persons. When they do, they are usually cameo, secondary, and rarely multidimensional characters. This paper examines Deaf identity of a main character, Daphne Vasquez, on the popular show Switched at Birth. We analyze moments where Daphne's identity, a constructed Deaf identity, is showcased. We map how her identity is salient across seasons and then examine key moments of identity formation as Daphne negotiates her Deafness. We find a strong display of Deaf identity salience and impactful moments in the show that resulted in more positive, holistic representations of Deafness. In recent years, the media has come under increased scrutiny for limited representations of minority identities; this case study seeks to contribute to that conversation by studying a show explicitly focused on increased representation. This work is important as it not only examines a show which successfully features a character with a traditionally stigmatized identity but simultaneously quantifies how that identity is invoked as a message to viewers. This paper bridges cultural sociology with social psychology to gain a deeper understanding of the importance of identity representation in entertainment media and comments directly on the social impact of Daphne's character on Deaf presence in 21st century media. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines key socio-cultural factors that influence Saudi tourists' decisions to travel abroad. The paper utilises qualitative data collected through semi-structured interviews with males and females, whose views remain under-researched. It explores how Saudi Arabia's deeply embedded religious and tribal value systems and structures shape tourists' destination choices and travel behaviours. The findings show that social norms and cultures of surveillance, alongside social obligations, act as push factors, decreasing the appeal of domestic tourism. Moreover, data suggest that seeking personal space and freedom, and the ability to engage in norm-breaking practices, are pull factors that make international destinations, especially those with fewer co-nationals, appealing. Practically, the study helps to identify marketing strategies that domestic and international destinations can adopt to target and accommodate Saudi tourists more effectively. Theoretically, the findings help to conceptualise a middle ground between what we call 'extensionist' and 'rejectionist' views of cultural influence and to appreciate the cumulative, intersecting impacts of socio-cultural imperatives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper aims to diagnose the information culture of the university administration. Although university administrative work is commonly associated with bureaucracy, it is a bureaucracy of people in which employees demonstrate a set of competitive group information behavior focused on knowledge sharing and information use in day-to-day tasks. A group of 345 respondents, representing office staff from three institutions in Poland, answered the survey related to information culture. The research framework included 16 information behaviors, grouped by four levels of information and knowledge management and four types of information culture. The results were examined using statistical packages to perform the Kruskal-Wallis H test, Spearman's rank correlation coefficient, and ordinal/linear regression analysis. Professional Bureaucracy culture is the dominant characteristic of the information behavior of university administrations, but its functioning is supported by three parallel information cultures included in the research model. The main limitation of the study is that it covers only lower-level employees' information practices. The applied scale, based on professional stratification within the university administration, is highly sensitive regarding different institutional contexts covered in the information culture diagnosis. To support the development of Professional Bureaucracy, it is necessary to support internal openness of behavior (socialization), internalization of knowledge, and external networking. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This document introduces a special section on therapeutic cultures in contemporary societies. It discusses the growing prevalence of psychologically and psychotherapeutically informed ideas and practices in everyday life, as well as the commercial success of the 'happiness industry' and the implications of therapeutic discourses in power and governance. The document also examines the assumption that therapeutic cultures are closely linked to neoliberal capitalism and individualization, questioning whether this is still the case in the 2020s. The special section includes four papers that explore therapeutic discourses and practices in various social contexts, emphasizing the need for further research in this area. The papers specifically examine the impact of neoliberal policies and economic crises on mental health and well-being in higher education in Finland and the United Kingdom, highlighting the pathologization of poor academic performance and the neglect of broader social and economic issues. The authors argue that the emphasis on individual responsibility and autonomy contradicts the actual experiences of students. Additionally, the papers investigate the role of self-help books in shaping modern subjectivity in the UK and the contradictions between the neoliberal therapeutic ethos and the construction of a measurable selfhood through digital therapeutic cultures. Overall, the papers demonstrate the pervasive influence of therapeutic discourses in contemporary society and the importance of sociological analysis in understanding this psychologization of society. [Extracted from the article]

This paper explores the relationship between crisis and experience, concentrating on 'excentric positionality' in relation to the shared world, as presented in the work of Helmuth Plessner. A by-product of the 1920s Weimar Germany, Plessner's philosophical anthropology, it is argued, presents us with a forgotten blueprint for transitive and compositional approaches to the social world. Instead of the familiar 'crisis of experience' used to diagnose 'what has gone wrong', it allows us to re-learn how to work with 'the experience of crisis' itself. The latter holds the key to a different type of approach based on 'xeno-communication'. This type of communication utilizes the productive potential of crisis in its uncertainty and hesitation before a decision, showing a way to extend and enlarge experience itself. Cultivation of these 'excentric' dynamics in turn suggests new 'excentric methodologies' based on a more flexible fit between concepts and the worlds they are meant to describe. 'Excentric methodologies' constitute a type of experience-based, analytical response to the shared world. They work with phenomena across spaces and problems, analytically utilizing their joint emergence from the fundamental imbalance and discontinuity characteristic of the human environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on the history of the Rodez printing firm in provincial France from 1624 to 1820 (although the firm ran until 1984). In contrast to the world of clandestine printing and bookselling, very little is known about the lives of ordinary sedentary printers in ancien-régime France. The paper is organized in three parts and considers the following issues. How did the firm operate, who worked in it, what training was required, and what was produced? How did this change over time? Secondly, this was a family firm, so we may ask how was it kept in the family, and how did the family fare as it made a living out of printing? Here we have an insight into the history of an artisan family over nearly 200 years, the ascension of an artisanal family to the level of respectable bourgeoisie. The third area considered is the possible contribution to understanding the cultural world of a provincial town. The firm printed and sold books, and account books and order books give us further information, though of a fragmentary nature. From this it is possible to raise questions about recent research on the starkly contrasting world of Enlightenment bestsellers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Aims: Socio-economic inequalities originate from several channels, one of which is family origins, with clear effects on people's health. This paper aims to evaluate the role played by social mobility in determining health inequalities, relying on Blau and Duncan's status attainment model and focusing specifically on two moments of social reproduction of inequalities: one inter-generational, based on the transmission of resources from the family of origin, the other intra-generational, related to the capitalisation of economic resources to maximise well-being. Methods: Multi-group models of structural equations were used to examine the direct and indirect effects of parental cultural background, education and economic conditions of respondents on self-perceived health in 28 countries, relying on the European Social Survey (N =38,879). Results: Overall, the results confirmed the presence of an inter-generational transmission of social and health status. Different models of transmission of health inequalities emerged among the countries considered. Countries characterised by a social democratic welfare regime showed higher social mobility and fewer health inequalities, although in correspondence with a prominent role of economic factors in determining health conditions. On the other hand, in countries where social mobility is lower, health inequalities are more pronounced, yet driven by factors others than economics, such as socio-cultural origins. Conclusions: The presence of a higher economic-health gradient in social democratic countries – notwithstanding their egalitarian and universal welfare policies – provides support for the existence of a Nordic paradox in relation to health inequalities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the technical image, a central concept in Vilém Flusser's later main work Into the Universe of Technical Images (1985a). After identifying its various dimensions, the analysis frames the concept as an amalgamation of disciplines, theories, and artistic practices the cultural philosopher Flusser explored during the 1960s and especially the 1970s. In particular, the field of information aesthetics developed by Max Bense and Abraham A. Moles, among others, as well as artistic video practices in France and the United States played an important role in both Flusser's biography and the formation of his technical image concept. At the same time, in Flusser's cultural philosophy the technical image is the condition and result of a new kind of human imagination, which in this paper is specified as 'projective imagination'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Experiencing the continued presence of the deceased is common among the bereaved, whether as a sensory perception or as a felt presence. This phenomenon has been researched from psychological and psychiatric perspectives during the last five decades. Such experiences have been also documented in the ethnographic literature but, despite the extensive cross-cultural research in the area, anthropological data has generally not been considered in the psychological literature about this phenomenon. This paper provides an overview aimed at bridging these two areas of knowledge, and approaches the post-bereavement perception or hallucination of the deceased in cultural context. Ongoing debates are addressed from the vantage point of ethnographic and clinical case study research focusing on the cultural repertoires (in constant flux as cultures change) from which these experiences are labelled as desirable and normal, on the one hand, or as dangerous and pathological, on the other. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The population of sub-Saharan children and adolescents is substantial and growing. Even though most of this population is vulnerable, there is no comprehensive understanding of the social-ecological factors that could be leveraged by mental health practitioners to support their resilience. The present study undertakes a narrative scoping review of empirical research (quantitative, qualitative, and mixed) on the resilience of children and adolescents living in sub-Saharan Africa to determine what enables their resilience and what may be distinctive about African pathways of child and adolescent resilience. Online databases were used to identify full-text, peer-reviewed papers published 2000–2018, from which we selected 59 publications detailing the resilience of children and/or adolescents living in 18 sub-Saharan countries. Studies show that the resilience of sub-Saharan children and adolescents is a complex, social-ecological process supported by relational, personal, structural, cultural, and/or spiritual resilience-enablers, as well as disregard for values or practices that could constrain resilience. The results support two insights that have implications for how mental health practitioners facilitate the resilience of sub-Saharan children and adolescents: (i) relational and personal supports matter more-or-less equally; and (ii) the capacity for positive adjustment is complexly interwoven with African ways-of-being and -doing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Autoethnographic research has described the tendency to ascribe blame to mothers for their daughters' disordered eating patterns, but the mechanisms by which these attitudes develop have been insufficiently investigated. The literature on mother-blaming and mothers' roles in the development of women's eating disorders has provided macro-level theoretical explanations for this attribution of blame but lacks depictions of women who subscribe to these macro narratives and yet subsequently attribute blame to their own mothers on the micro level. In this paper, I address these two gaps by conducting a feminist autoethnographic inquiry into my own history of blaming my mother for my anorexia and other disordered eating patterns. I use classical structuralist and post-structuralist theoretical concepts, as well as Althusser's proposed neo-Marxist idea of ideological state apparatuses (ISAs). Results indicate that my mother-blaming behavior was mainly influenced by apparatuses of medicine, church, education, family, and culture. Legal, political, civic, and media apparatuses were less involved in the construction of my perception in this area. All in all, my findings provide richer insight into mother-blaming internalization on the micro level and enlarge the "palette" of feminist approaches to eating disorder analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Aims: This paper focuses on how social inequality is associated with overweight and obesity in children. There is a lack of research with a focus on an important distinction in social inequality, namely geography. The aim of this study was to reduce this knowledge gap by looking closely at the links between rurality and overweight. Methods: The findings in this paper are based on in-depth interviews with school nurses and teachers in rural Norway. The focus was on their experiences with and knowledge about overweight and obesity numbers in rural versus urban areas. Results: We used Bourdieu's terminology to address the challenges related to urban–rural differences, and found that cultural factors connected to tradition, identity and courtesy play an important role in the rural overweight and obesity discourse. Conclusions: Actors and 'experts' working with overweight and obesity and national guidelines need to understand rural contexts and customs and address problems of the countryside on rural, not exclusively urban, premises. Different contexts imply different needs when it comes to reducing the inequalities between rural and urban areas regarding overweight and obesity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This ethnographic paper explores gender inequality in tribal societies vis-à-vis customary practices and challenges the notion of egalitarianism of tribal society by taking Chuktia Bhunjia tribe of Odisha, India as an analytical category. In the light of a discussion on women specific taboos and restrictions, captured through formal interview, narrative and lived experience approach, the paper explicates the deeply embedded nature of the taboos in Chuktia Bhunjia society and unravels how prohibiting women from socio-economic and religious space, backed by purity-pollution philosophy, perpetuate the gender inequality among them. It was found that although economic division of labour is indistinct; women are perceived being portrayal of misfortunes during perceived pollution periods and are prohibited to enter into sacred places – kitchen room, cowshed, sacred groves and forest – and take part in community festivals and other auspicious occasions. The existing material culture, especially kitchen room, alongside economic structure, self-notion of 'outsiders' and apparently fixed customary laws have direct influence on the position of women in this society. It is found that the customary laws are not mere symbolic expressions in perpetuating the gender asymmetry, but have become a powerful tool to patriarchal controls not only over women's education, health, properties and knowledge, but also over individual's choice, freedom, decision-making and sexuality. However, internal challenges are reported against customary laws and taboos, the fear of social ostracism, the obligation to restore the purity of cultural entity and anxiety reinforce people to be always submissive to those practices. Therefore, unless there is transformation alongside their culture, it is fruitless to think of gender equality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Muscle dysmorphia (MD) is a pathological preoccupation with muscularity characterised by negative body image, compulsive behaviours, and obsessive thoughts. Since its first identification academics have suggested that it is caused by sociocultural factors. Despite this there has been very little research exploring the role of sociocultural factors in the development and maintenance of MD, and no research that examines MD from within its cultural context. Instead the medical model of MD has dominated understanding. This model presents professionals as the experts on this disorder, and sufferers as pathological individuals in need of expert treatment. This renders cultural context largely irrelevant to understandings of MD. In this paper we present a different kind of expertise with regards MD. We describe the expertise of those most likely to suffer from MD, and upon whom medical descriptions of MD are based: bodybuilders. Specifically, we describe how bodybuilders explain MD (their definition, theory of aetiology and experience of MD, as well as their suggested management strategies), and compare these explanations to the dominant medical model. Through a consideration of the expertise of bodybuilders we break the tunnel vision of medicine, and suggest ways we can move beyond our current under-developed understanding of MD. This paper examines MD from within its cultural context, and in so doing it lays the foundation for a sociocultural explanatory model of MD. If we are to significantly reduce the harms of this disorder we cannot rely solely on treating the few individuals who present to clinicians. Rather we must develop ways to help sufferers to manage their disorder, and to prevent the development of this disorder among those at risk in the first place. To do this we must understand the sociocultural dimensions of MD, and collaborate with bodybuilding communities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What is cultural 'appropriation'? What is cultural 'appreciation'? Whatever the complex answer to this question, cultural appropriation is commonly defined as 'the taking of something produced by members of one culture by members of another' (Young 2005: 136), whilst appreciation is typically understood as mere 'exploration': 'Appreciation explores whatever is there'. (Gracyk 2007: 112). These provisional definitions suggest that there is an in-principle distinction between the two concepts that presupposes the following: what is appreciated is already available; what is appropriated was, prior to its being taken, not already there or available. Moreover, perhaps appreciation, when contrasted to appropriation, is unproblematic precisely due to this basic difference. In this paper, we argue that the exclusive disjunction – appropriation or appreciation – rests on a false distinction between the two. We also show that this distinction presupposes a false normative principle that to the extent that x is appreciation rather than appropriation, then x is not – relevant to this issue – a wrong. Against these presuppositions, we defend the view that appropriation is already built into appreciation. This does not mean that we cannot ask questions of appreciation, but that questions of appreciation do not preclude the problematics of appropriation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This issue of Transcultural Psychiatry presents selected papers from the McGill Advanced Study Institute on "Cultural Poetics of Illness and Healing." The meeting addressed the cognitive science of language, metaphor, and poiesis from embodied and enactivist perspectives; how cultural affordances, background knowledge, discourse, and practices enable and constrain poiesis; the cognitive and social poetics of symptom and illness experience; and the politics and practice of poetics in healing ritual, psychotherapy, and recovery. This introductory essay outlines an approach to illness experience and its transformation in healing practices that emphasizes embodied processes of metaphor as well as the social processes of self-construal and positioning through material and discursive engagements with the cultural affordances that constitute our local worlds. The approach has implications for theory building, training, and clinical practice in psychiatry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses Eastern European Marxists' consideration of science and technology concerning aesthetic dimensions. Different from most of Western Marxists who take negative or dystopian attitudes towards modern science and technology from the aesthetic utopian perspective, those Marxists who come from countries such as Hungary, Yugoslav, Poland, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Bulgaria or Romania, which once belonged to the socialist camp, under the influence of Soviet and Western culture, pay attention to the complicated tension between science-technology and aesthetics. In this paper, I probe into these notions by reading György Lukács, Budapest School, Romanian theorists and the Yugoslav Praxis Group, which are divided into four key points: basic nature of science in contrast with arts; modern tension of culture between science and arts; the possibility of scientific aesthetics; and development of arts in the world of technology. There is a dialectical understanding of science and technology here which contributes to contemporary recognition of science and technology from the point of view of neo-humanism, not only in aesthetics but also human existence. This is relevant to theoretical reflection on the present and future Chinese socialist aesthetics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Previous research has shown that worldviews can serve as a coping response to periods of difficulty or struggle, and worldviews can also change on account of difficulty. This paper investigates the impacts worldviews have on the nature and trajectory of meditation-related challenges, as well as how worldviews change or are impacted by such challenges. The context of meditation-related challenges provided by data from the Varieties of Contemplative Experience research project offers a unique insight into the dynamics between worldviews and meditation. Buddhist meditation practitioners and meditation experts interviewed for the study report how, for some, worldviews can serve as a risk factor impacting the onset and trajectory of meditation-related challenges, while, for others, worldviews (e.g., being given a worldview, applying a worldview, or changing a worldview) were reported as a remedy for mitigating challenging experiences and/or their associated distress. Buddhist meditation practitioners and teachers in the contemporary West are also situated in a cultural context in which religious and scientific worldviews and explanatory frameworks are dually available. Furthermore, the context of "Buddhist modernism" has also promoted a unique configuration in which the theory and practice of Buddhism is presented as being closely compatible with science. We identify and discuss the various impacts that religious and scientific worldviews have on meditation practitioners and meditation teachers who navigate periods of challenge associated with the practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Indigenous Psychologies is an approach/movement premised on cultural constitution of psychological functioning. Its most significant concept is 'culture' as it aims to be rooted in the culturally relevant and derived categories and theories of the participants whom it intends to study. However, the concept of 'culture' in Indigenous Psychologies is replete with several problematic assumptions that limit its potential to recover local knowledges and move beyond Western taxonomies. The paper takes a critical psychological lens to focus on these assumptions and critique them. It also attempts to draw the contours of Critical Indigenous Psychologies as a dispersed, disjointed field by addressing points of productive tension and predicaments that animate it. It suggests that indigenizing the 'critical' discourse and developing a 'critique' of indigenous discourse is the unending dialogue that Critical Indigenous Psychologies have to engage with. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Media scholarship has long argued that public discourse is a function of the architecture of the media by which it is carried. Media architecture is, as political economists have argued, in turn shaped by the capitalist regime of accumulation within which the media operate. This paper draws together these two strands of literature to ask: as the accumulation of data is coming to define contemporary capitalism, what cultural logic does this produce? The paper argues that, as media are shaped around the extracting user data, they become organized around personhood and the extension of commodification deeper into our sense of self. The lifestyle fragmentation and segmentation engendered by new media technologies carry over into public discourse, shaping a public, and political life defined by identity and difference. If, as Neil Postman suggested, a society's way of knowing reflects its media technology, the emerging epistemology of the social media society is truth as identity, as our very ways of knowing are reduced to expressions of who we are. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

National histories of violence shape experiences of suffering and the ways that mental health professionals respond to them. In Ecuador, mental health literature addressing this crucial issue is scarce and little debated. In contrast, local psychiatrists and psychologists within the country face contemporary challenges that are deeply rooted in a violent colonial past and the perpetuation of its fundamental ethos. This paper critically reviews relevant literature on collective memory and historical trauma, and focuses on Ecuador as a case study on how to incorporate history into modern mental health challenges. The discussion poses key questions and outlines possible ways for Ecuador to address the link between history and mental health, including insights from countries that have struggled with their violent pasts. This paper contributes to ongoing international debate on the role of cultural history in mental health with implications for social scientists and practising clinicians in former colonised nations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Grief is a universal emotion, both layered and multidimensional. Grief in Arab cultures center around three ideals: culture, family, and religion. This paper examines the multiple different factors that influence Arabs during their grief, broken down into how different religions process and view death, along with the impact of Westernized ideals and other relationships. We explore physiological responses of grief, gender differences in expressing emotions, self-care practice, and utilizing religion as a strength. The rules and traditions surrounding grief and loss in Arab communities need to be acknowledged by clinicians and incorporated into their practice. Recommendations and future directions for clinicians to support Arab grief within the three lenses of culture, family, and religion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper uses examples of multimodal discourse to show how frame analysis can account for the choices of form in a range of multimodal (image or image-plus-text) artifacts addressing issues of climate change. Relying on the concepts of frame metonymy and blending, the article discusses a selection of artifacts representing emergent frames such as Save the Planet and Hourglass, which are pervasive in multimodal representations of climate change. The article describes the advantages and disadvantages of common multimodal stylistic choices, while addressing issues of 'persuasive bleaching/overload'. It also uncovers some frame-related specificities of multimodal discourse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using a small corpus of marriage proposal stories authored by British citizens, this paper aims to identify and make explicit seven defining parameters of frames (namely, default elements, default scenario, default context, default inference, default form, default argument, and instantiations) and explain and exemplify each. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The efficacy of indigenous knowledge and local participation has been argued to be some of the pathways to curbing the present indigenous community development impasse. Employing an in-depth qualitative research approach, 32 traditional and community development leaders as well as local government officials were interviewed to ascertain local the present community development paradigms and proposed future pathways. Drawing from local insights and a range of scholarly perspectives this paper assessed how meaningful indigenous knowledge systems and indigenous people can actively engage and sustain community-driven development programmes. Utilizing a process analysis, the paper, established that there is a disconnect between indigenous community knowledge systems, values, norms and other cultural realities and contemporary participatory community development approaches. It further illustrates, the absence of local participation in community development and proposed a framework for the integration of indigenous knowledge systems, institutions and other cultural realities in community-based development programmes to ensure development sustainability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article introduces a thematic issue of Transcultural Psychiatry with selected papers from the McGill Advanced Study Institute in Cultural Psychiatry on "Pluralism and Polarization: Cultural Contexts and Dynamics of Radicalization," which took place June 20–22, 2017. The ASI brought together an interdisciplinary group scholars to consider the role of social dynamics, cultural contexts and psychopathology in radicalization to violent extremism. Papers addressed four broad topics: (1) current meanings and uses of the term radicalization ; (2) personal and social determinants of violent radicalization, including individual psychology, interpersonal dynamics, and wider social-historical, community and network processes; (3) social and cultural contexts and trajectories of radicalization including the impact of structural and historical forces associated with colonization and globalization as well as contemporary political, economic and security issues faced by youth and disaffected groups; and (4) approaches to community prevention and clinical intervention to reduce the risk of violent radicalization. In this introductory essay, we revisit these themes, define key terms, and outline some of the theoretical and empirical insights in the contributions to this issue. Efforts to prevent violent radicalization face challenges because social media and the Internet allow the rapid spread of polarizing images and ideas. The escalation of security measures and policies also serves to confirm the worldview of conspiracy theory adherents. In addition to addressing the structural inequities that fuel feelings of anger and resentment, we need to promote solidarity among diverse communities by building a pluralistic civil society that offers a meaningful alternative to the violent rhetorics of us and them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Colonised indigenous minorities around the world are constantly navigating the complex space between their heritage culture and mainstream society. In this paper, we explore how embeddedness in heritage cultural values, beliefs, and practises influence the behaviours of indigenous minorities, particularly during intercultural contact with the post-colonial majority where values, beliefs, and practises often clash. To support our theorising, we introduce the concept of cultural embeddedness, relating to enculturation in one's heritage cultural values, beliefs, and practises. We then introduce the Dual-Pathways Model of Embeddedness to Culturally Valued Behaviours for Indigenous Minorities (DPM), which seeks to outline the two separate but interrelated pathways through which cultural embeddedness leads to culturally valued behaviours. The dual pathways include an implicit pathway, which begins with cultural values, and an explicit pathway, which begins with cultural practises. We use an indigenous approach, drawing on the first author's experiences as an indigenous Māori in New Zealand to illustrate the concepts of the DPM. The model attempts to integrate the various ways in which cultural identity has been defined by indigenous authors into a single theory. We invite future qualitative and quantitative research, especially by indigenous scholars, to challenge and/or validate the DPM. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article investigates the idiosyncrasies of creative work in Russian art institutions through a study of their materialities. As identified in previous research, social inequalities are a significant feature of creative work. I argue, however, that in order to reveal inequalities that are constructed performatively, that is, in the 'here' and 'now', we need to further develop the existing arsenal of methods that is employed in critical creative work studies. In the Russian case, art institutions display a wealth of techniques for constructing and maintaining hierarchies, which of necessity must frequently be re-established due to conditions in the local context. In particular, the following explores two perennial paradigms of cultural production: 'high culture' and 'creativity'. As these paradigms coexist in the economy of the Russian art world, they compete for resources, including funding, public attention and legitimation. In the struggle, a binary of purity/dirt develops the social space of institutions, organisational identities and hierarchies inside and between organisations. This paper primarily focuses on an ethnographic study of cultural producers from the visual arts sector in Russia's two largest cities: Moscow and St. Petersburg. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper describes a pattern regarding the relationship between feminine sexuality, religiousness and psychotic distress that was discerned in two independent multiple case studies in Greece. One study utilized grounded theory to develop a model of therapeutic change through recording the development of voice hearers' understanding and coping with their voices during a therapeutic intervention. The other study applied biographical and thematic analysis to interviews with persons with psychosis and their families, in order to explore family narratives regarding life with a family member with psychosis. A common pattern was detected for all the female participants, whereby following a religious upbringing in childhood and pursuing independence from the family together with social and sexual exploration in early adulthood, the onset of psychosis marked a return to the family home and a religious frame of reference. The psychotic experiences seemed to resemble engrained experiences of shaming regarding sexual and gender norms. Moreover, they had the effect of re-signifying female identity and sexuality, bringing them into line with conservative religious principles. This pattern suggests that psychotic experiences may not only express culturally prescribed female gender norms but also may serve to regulate women's sexuality in conservative religious cultural environments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Resilience has proved to be a versatile notion to explain why people are not defeated by hardship and adversity, yet so far, we know little of how it might apply to communities and cultures in low to middle income countries. Aim: This paper aims to explore the notion of resilience in cross-cultural context through considering the lived experience of internal migration. Methods: A sample of 30 participants with experience of migration was recruited from a low-income slum dwelling neighbourhood in the city of Pune, India. These individuals participated in biographical narrative interviews in which they were encouraged to talk about their experience of migration, their adaptation to life in their new environment and making new lives for themselves. Results: Participants referred to a variety of intra-individual and external factors that sustained their resilience, including acceptance of their circumstances, the importance of memory, hope for their children's futures as well as kindness from family friends and community members and aspects of the physical environment which were conducive to an improvement in their lives. Conclusions: By analogy with the widely used term 'idioms of distress', we advocate attention to the locally nuanced and culturally inflected 'idioms of resilience' or 'eudaemonic idioms' which are of crucial importance as migration and movement become ever more prominent in discussions of human problems. The nature and extent of people's coping abilities, their aspirations and strategies for tackling adversity, their idioms of resilience and eudaemonic repertoires merit attention so that services can genuinely support their adjustment and progress in their new-found circumstances. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To bring empirical scrutiny to the often very general and theory-driven debates on cultural globalization and to broaden the geographical scope of previous studies on the topic, this paper presents an analysis of the changes in the relative weight of national and global culture in the culture sections of quality European newspapers from 1960 to 2010. Through content analysis of newspaper articles, the paper examines how the composition of geographical origin of the cultural products discussed has changed over a half-century. The paper asks whether globalizing trends exist in newspaper coverage of culture or whether coverage of national culture remains dominant; to what degree is there variation, based on the art form discussed; and whether newspapers embedded in their national contexts differ from each other in these respects. The results show only a moderate increase in coverage of global products. However, clear trends were found that are associated with both the geographical origin of cultural products and the art forms discussed in the articles, highlighting that post-1960s cultural globalization is best understood as being intertwined with the rise of popular culture and the corresponding decline of traditional – and very European – highbrow culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper seeks to understand the social power of maternal shame, using a framework that integrates feminist criticism of contemporary motherhood ideologies with philosophical theories that discuss shame in the broader context of visual perception. By using Lionel Shriver's (2005) novel We Need to Talk about Kevin, the paper illustrates how shame operates in the interplay between the socio-cultural, gendered ideals of motherhood and mothers' representations of these ideals. Specifically, the paper suggests that today's mothers operate under a social gaze that expects them to meet the cultural and moral standards of "good" motherhood. This internalized societal judging gaze and the perception of failing to meet these standards are often the source of maternal shame. In line with philosophical accounts which focus on the primacy of vision in shame, I argue that empathy ("seeing with the eyes of the other") is the most powerful antidote to shame. While shame is induced by a judging gaze, empathy develops through connected gazes, each acknowledging the other's subjectivity. Locating shame within a socio-cultural context can provide invaluable insights for psychological research and practice that pay critical attention to positionality, reflexivity, and the power relationships inherent in contemporary motherhood. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1968, the Social Science Research Council of the United States established the Committee on Afro-American Societies and Cultures which lasted until 1975 and which was initially chaired by the anthropologist Sidney W Mintz. In April, 1970, the committee held a conference on 'Continuities and Discontinuities in Afro-American Societies and Culture' at the University of the West Indies in Mona, Jamaica. The conference occurred in the context of civil rights struggles and the prominence of the Black Power movement in the United States, the near-simultaneous rise of the Black Power movement in Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago, and elsewhere in the Caribbean, and on the heels of protests by black and African scholars and students at the African Studies Association meetings in Montreal in 1969, and similar protests at other scholarly venues. A number of prominent white Caribbeanist anthropologists and other social scientists were invited to present papers at the Social Science Research Council conference. When black academics, such as the anthropologist St Clair Drake and the sociologist Joyce A Ladner, were invited, seemingly as an afterthought, they refused to participate, citing the lack of representation of scholars of colour on the committee and in the conference program. And at the conference itself, there were subtle conflicts and misunderstandings over styles of presentation and argumentation. This article develops a theoretical model appropriate for the history of science to illustrate anthropology's contested identity politics of representation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It takes material as well as immaterial elements to have a good life. Among some upper middle-class Iranians, there is a growing interest in having a healthy lifestyle and increase one's quality of life to the extent that we can talk about a culture of health and wellbeing in which different rituals and body management practices are employed to help people follow their sense of the good life. This is studied in this paper from a "resource culture" perspective wherein resources are the means to create, sustain, and alter social relations, units, and identities within the framework of cultural ideas and practices. This paper examines how undertaking a new health-based lifestyle transforms people's social network, sense of identity, or group memberships, providing them with new opportunities to pursue what they think is the good life. Participants of the study include 30 members of a social media group named "Our keto Lives" in Tehran who were interviewed in two intensive, online focus group sessions. The result of the study indicates that as an increasingly popular dietary movement, Keto is capable of inspiring its followers to significantly change their life circumstances through a variety of body management practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

"The Imposter as Social Theory: Thinking with Gatecrashers, Cheats and Charlatans" is a book that explores the concept of imposters and their role in society. The book brings together papers from scholars in various disciplines who examine different aspects of identity deception. The editors define an imposter as someone who pretends to be someone else to deceive others, and argue that imposters can be found in various realms of society, including media, science, politics, and everyday life. The book argues that the concept of imposters can be used as an analytical tool to understand social relations and cultural forms. While the book provides a wide range of interesting studies, it misses an opportunity to explore the micro-sociological perspective on identity deception and does not pay enough attention to the subjective experience of being an imposter. Overall, the book offers a unique and thought-provoking perspective on the topic of imposters. [Extracted from the article]

The article "Advancing understanding of overparenting and child adjustment: Mechanisms, methodology, context, and development" explores the impact of overparenting on child development, emphasizing its prevalence, consequences, and underlying mechanisms. Topics include the various forms of overparenting, its effects on adolescent and emerging adult adjustment, and the need for nuanced research to understand its complexity and cultural context.

Studies in comparative penology still lack English writings about penal cultures in non-Anglo-European countries, particularly those that steer their focus away from imprisonment. This article fills this gap by giving accounts of penal control in Thailand and how its criminal justice practices differ from the Western models by which they were inspired. Although quite similar in forms, Thai court routines diverge from the West in the tightness of procedural control over defendants. This is the legacy of a selective importation of Western knowledge in response to Western colonial pressures in the past. With its own version of the rule of law and judicial culture of conformity, order is prioritised and control is emphasised arguably to the detriment of proportionality and due protection of defendants' rights. Such contrast to the liberal rights-based spirits of the Western-styled rule of law reflects cultural and socio-political differences which influence local adaptations of the Western-originated concepts. Although the propensity for crime control is defensibly prominent in many Western jurisdictions nowadays, this paper explains the Thai divergence in the underpinning legal mentality and intensity of control. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objective: There has been increasing interest in the physical health, mental wellbeing and burnout afflicting medical students over recent years. This paper describes the overall results from phase two of an international study including a further nine countries across the world. Methods: We sampled large groups of medical students in nine countries at the same time and with exactly the same method in order to aid direct comparison of demographics, burnout and mental wellbeing through validated instruments. Results: A total of 4,942 medical students from these countries participated in this study. Around 68% of respondents screened positive for mild psychiatric illness using the General Health Questionnaire-12. Around 81% and 78% of respondents were found to be disengaged or exhausted respectively using the Oldenburg Burnout Inventory. Around 10% were found to be CAGE positive and 14% reported cannabis use. The main source of stress reported by medical students was their academic studies, followed by relationships, financial difficulties and housing issues. Conclusion: Cultural, religious and socioeconomic factors within each country are important and understanding their effects is fundamental in developing successful local, regional and national initiatives. Further quantitative and qualitative research is required to confirm our results, clarify their causes and to develop appropriate preventative strategies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses the potential for accessing the intersubjective psychic dynamics that the use of oral diaries about everyday life can offer to Psychology, from an ideographic, cultural, and qualitative perspective. Based on the authors' experience with this research activity mediated by instant messaging applications, we argue about the singularity produced by such a field of elaboration of meanings regarding the affective, ambiguous and potentially creative and authorial face of such enunciations. The use of this research instrument took place during critical periods of the COVID-19 pandemic, a historical moment marked by a profound decentering of forms of life, which was the driving force behind significant cultural mutations both in the personal and collective spheres. We propose that the instrument provided interpretative access to three fundamental records of experience, namely: corporeality, temporality, and the meaning-making process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There has been a vast proliferation of categories, descriptors and labels used to describe gender and sexual identity over the past few years, with terms now numbering in the hundreds. Many terms, such as heteroflexible, asexual, demigirl and sapiosexual actively contest masculine/feminine and hetero/homo binary arrangements of identity, and LGBTQ minority rights discourses and arguably represent an epochal shift in gender/sexual knowledge frameworks. The cultural conditions that make such change possible have yet to be explored. This paper draws on theoretical approaches to populism to analyse the role of popular culture, digital communication and contestation of institutional and expert knowledges in driving the emergence of new gender and sexual terminology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Viewing psychology as a cultural activity associated with technologies of the self, and noting the cultural phenomenon of the Jungian movement internationally, this paper presents a reading of Jung's 'A Study in the Process of Individuation' through the lens of dialogism. Jung's study pivots on the interpretation of paintings by a middle-aged American woman, 'Miss X', whom he treated in 1928. The present paper critically examines dialogical aspects of the Jungian text, such as Jung's metaphor of a dialogue with the unconscious, how he and his patient co-constructed her 'inner' dialogue, and the text's dialogue with its audience. It is concluded that the process of individuation described by Jung is fundamentally dialogical, evincing the human capacity to co-construct meanings of self-experience and thereby to change how we experience our own selves. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is often suggested that the Greek tragedians present clinically credible pictures of mental disturbance. For instance, some modern interpreters have compared the process by which Cadmus brings Agave back to sanity in Euripides' Bacchae with modern psychotherapy. But a reading of medical writers' views on the psychological dimension of medicine offers little evidence for believing that these scenes reflect the practices of late fifth-century Athenian doctors, for whom verbal cures are associated with older traditions of non-rational thought, and thus are scorned in favor of more "scientific cures" based on diet or medication. This paper will argue that Athenian tragedians, working from older traditions that advocated verbal cures for some mental ailments, do understand the potential psychological effects that their work can have on audiences, since tragedy requires psychological interaction with its audience in order to be effective. From a close reading of select scenes in Euripidean tragedy, this paper suggests that the experiences of the characters who experience suffering in Euripides' Heracles and Bacchae are analogues of the experiences undergone by the spectators of tragedy at large. Parallels are made between the way that Agave and Heracles are both talked back to sanity by looking upon what has happened, and the way that tragedians make their audiences observe lamentations and meditations that follow the central tragic act, to help them return from the intense emotion provoked, perhaps, by the violence they have seen. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Theories of a new phase of earth history, the Anthropocene, position human world-making activity as a bio-geological force. Social interventions into earth systems have been extensive and malignant, altering the earth's surface, atmosphere, oceans, and systems of nutrient cycling. To adapt and respond to emerging planetary dangers requires the collaboration of scholars from many different disciplines. In this paper, I argue that a coalition of the arts and sciences might draw upon György Márkus's extensive studies of the topography of 'high' culture. I reconstruct Márkus's conceptual map of the arts and sciences as regions of 'high' cultural activity, each with their own criteria of value yet subject to an integral unity and shared ambition. Both regions of 'high' culture aim to create original works of significance for an engaged public. I then examine the implications of Márkus's claim that the classical vocation of robust, public-oriented culture has run aground. The field of problems that this paper traverses are not the ecological crises of the Anthropocene per se. I attend rather to Márkus's account of the neoliberal erosion of cultural infrastructure where democratic publics might engage with such problems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Executive functions refer to the neurocognitive processes that enable conscious control of goal-directed behaviour. Executive functions lay the neural and cognitive foundation for civilisation and culture with its far reaching effects in day-to-day planning, problem-solving, creativity, self-regulation, empathy and cooperative social behaviour. Though a celebrated area of research for cognitive scientists, contemporary studies find that most of the interventions that target executive functions promote academic achievement in children, but fail to transfer to real-life interpersonal situations. This suggests the need for breaking its cognitive shell and conceiving executive function development in the larger sociocultural context. Thus, the present paper inquires into the cultural space that provides collaborative learning experiences for young children to become efficient problem-solvers and empathetic social beings. After reviewing certain theoretical perspectives and research findings, it is concluded that the early experiences of scaffolding by more competent individuals, specific to the social context and culture, are the crucial determinant of positive executive function development and its expression in everyday situations. The process of such sociocultural influences seems to be mediated by learning appropriate rules that guide executive functions. The paper puts forth the need for culture-specific value-based training for children that can potentially improve the internally motivated execution of control in practical situations. Revival of activities inherent in cultures is also found to be a promising option for devising effective training methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What is a border? Who is a migrant? The paper uses these questions to distinguish between constructivist, Marxist and postcolonial answers provided by critical border scholarship, with three aims. First, identifying common concerns and interrogating divergent trajectories, the paper offers a practical invitation to dialogue between these various positions. Second, it evidences how critical border scholarship follows a social-to-spatial analytical trajectory to answer these questions: borders and migration function as a spatial confirmation of a pre-defined ontology of the social. As this is deemed unsatisfactory, third, the paper proposes turning this analytical trajectory on its head by going back to borders, i.e. by studying the spatial manifestations of borders and migration to investigate how the social is heterogeneously configured in place-specific and embodied settings. The paper argues that what is left after these debates is the need to focus on actual social hierarchies, as opposed to epistemological ones. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Introduction: Hikikomori is a Japanese term etymologically derived from ' hiku ' (i.e. ' to pull back ') and ' komoru ' (i.e. ' seclude oneself '), which identifies those subjects who deliberately withdraw themselves by social life, remaining confined into their own home/room. The phenomenon is widely diffused in Japan, even though it is currently spread outside the Japanese culture. However, a universally shared and cross-cultural adaptation of Hikikomori definition, phenomenological and psychopathological characterization is still missing. Methodology: An expert-guided opinion paper was here provided to clinical characterize the Hikikomori-like social withdrawal in the Italian context, by considering the transformation from a family-based society to a 'fluid' digital-structured culture, also discussing the concept of modern-type depression. This was provided deepening the principal current studies available in literature and giving an interpretation based on clinical experience in the Italian society. The work was supervised through a consensus by the most international expert of Japanese Hikikomori syndrome. Results: Current individual, family and social trajectories may potentially act as a mediator in favouring the occurrence of Hikikomori-like social withdrawal also in western countries, including Italy. Despite the differences between Japanese and Italian society and culture, the recent shaping of family structure and intra-familial dynamics, typical of the current post-modern society, may potentially influence the emergence of psychopathologies not typical of Italian culture. Unemployment and 'Not in Employment Education or Training' (NEET) conditions may represent another potential risk factor for economical/social marginalization of youngsters, together with the recent dramatic emergence of web-based psychopathologies. Conclusion: A diagnostic culturally-adapted flow-chart is proposed for clinical characterizing Hikikomori in Italian context, which may help in proposing preventive strategies, ensuring early identification and prompt therapeutic interventions, particularly among youngsters. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using decolonial perspective, this paper critically examines how certain child protection interventions in Kenya might increase childhood vulnerabilities among children from poor social backgrounds who are disproportionately represented in the justice system. Findings point to ambivalent child protection practices as a result of entrenched colonial legacies which criminalises juvenile 'delinquents', relying heavily on judicialisation while limiting social welfare investments. The study suggests alternative approaches to better child protection services that take into account southern-centric childcare practices and knowledge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]