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

Culture is an essential component of Indigenous public spaces. However, a gap in knowledge exists regarding cultural influences on Indigenous public spaces in Africa. This paper, therefore, explores the impact of cultural worldviews on the landscape and functionality of Hausa, Yoruba and Igbo squares in Nigeria. It also assesses the contemporary state of the Nigerian squares. The paper employs mixed methods, including a systematic review of literature, observations, interviews, and photographic recordings, to shed light on the strengths and deficiencies of the Indigenous squares. Findings revealed that while Indigenous public spaces cater to the socio-cultural needs of different ethnic groups, they do not fully meet modern needs and expectations, especially concerning safety and comfort. This paper advocates for the fusion of Indigenous landscape practices with contemporary approaches to foster harmonious synergy between tradition and modernity and enhance public space utilisation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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

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

Cultural/Creative Quarters/Clusters/Districts' (CCC) have become very popular local development strategies in the last 30 years as reflected within the Urban Planning, Geography, Economics and Cultural Studies literature. However, this multi-disciplinarity has rendered the CCC academic field of research quite fuzzy as authors offers their own definition or borrow from each other without clear explanations. In order to address this issue, this paper presents a systematic literature review and analyses the ways these concepts have evolved, what have been the themes and dimensions associated with them, how they have been studied and researched, and then suggest a renewed research agenda. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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

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

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

In this paper, we investigate the characteristics and mechanisms of cultural diversity that affect foreign direct investment (FDI) using the panel data on provinces in China from 1999 to 2019 and find that, in general, cultural diversity inhibits FDI absorption. However, this kind of adverse effect has a nonlinear threshold characteristic. That is, when the population density reaches a certain level or urbanization is controlled within a certain range, the increase in cultural diversity can weaken the inhibitory effect on FDI. Additionally, by exploring the mechanisms of cultural diversity affecting FDI, we further find that cultural diversity inhibits FDI mainly through the channels of inhibiting population density and urbanization. The conclusions of this paper not only enrich the theoretical research on FDI location from the perspective of cultural diversity but also shed light on how to better attract FDI to China and other countries, such as resolving cultural conflicts and constructing an inclusive investment environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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

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

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

Written from the Global North, this paper offers an account of the interactional sociolinguistic underpinnings of research on language crossing, discusses the five papers in this special issue, and sets them both within the broader context of North/South knowledge production. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

I discuss Steven Cooper's (this issue) scholarly and original elaborations on Winnicott's theory of play, the ontological turn in psychoanalysis, and his posthumous conversation with Stephen Mitchell on the Developmental Tilt. While deeply appreciative of Cooper's project and insights, I suggest that Mitchell's paper is more polemic than precise, geared principally toward an elaboration of the early relational position. I compare and contrast Mitchell, Winnicott, and Cooper's aims and strategies, reflecting on areas of agreement and disagreement. Finally, I focus on the evolution and dialectics of intellectual thought in psychoanalysis, querying how contemporary theories can reach new synthesis, integrating the rich descriptions of "individual" models with the insights of cultural studies, in order to meet this current moment of social crises and change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many places in the world claim to be the 'home of' a particular sport, for example, Cooperstown and baseball; Springfield College and basketball; Lord's and cricket; St Andrews and golf; Newmarket and horseracing; Twickenham and rugby; and Hawaii and surfing. This appellation is a desired title because it suggests distinctiveness and authenticity, and so provides the potential for tourism, inward investment and a sense of place. However, some of these claims to be the 'home of' a particular sport may not be well-founded or are sometimes only a myth, and therefore may be contested by other locations. To help determine the veracity of claims to be the 'home of', this paper uses objective authenticity indicators of original artefacts and authoritative confirmation. Indicators of football cultural heritage are then identified and combined with authoritative sources to assess the claims of Sheffield to be the home of football. It is argued that the adoption of objective authenticity indicators might assist in disputes about where a particular 'home' might be located. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this paper is to explore how a concert hall can orchestrate and shape individuals’ classical music tastes. The paper is based on an 8-month ethnography at the Bridgewater Hall concert venue in Manchester. Our emergent findings illustrate how classical music tastes are influenced via the spatial meanings of the concert hall. These meanings include various physical, historical and sociocultural aspects that are revealed in the context of the Bridgewater Hall. Our study contributes to various streams of consumer culture theory research and opens up avenues for future research on the interrelationships of space and place with taste. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In this opening contribution to the Special Issue Cultural Studies and Education: A Dialogue of Disciplines?, Guest Editors Bill Green and Andrew Hickey survey the pedagogical and disciplinary intersections of Cultural Studies and Education. Positioning an account of Cultural Studies that draws attention (back) to Cultural Studies' founding pedagogical project, Green and Hickey note that Cultural Studies has always maintained a pedagogical imperative. Attention is given to how this concern for the pedagogical translates, now, across a range of educational settings, both formal and informal. The Editors cast a distinction between the pedagogical and educational, and from this basis argue that predominant accounts of Cultural Studies' educative purpose derive from the relationship that the field has maintained with formal and institutional sites of Education. The paper then moves to survey the contributions for this issue with attention given to the conceptual and theoretical connections that run through the collection. Highlighting that emphasis is given to Cultural Studies' attendant practices and intellectual foundations, the Editors identify how Education and Cultural Studies might continue to engage in dialogue and how common intellectual threads that generate critically motivated scholarly practices might (continue to) recognize the implications of the conjuncture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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

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

Deepfakes draw on algorithmic powers, machine learning and modern capabilities for processing information to allow users to insert the face, body, and visual information about a real-world person into a false setting, producing highly convincing videos that appear to be a 'true' record. Emerging on the scene in the past half-decade, deepfake applications have become an object of widespread social concern and calls for regulation, ostensibly to prevent electoral fraud, defamatory misuse, the pornographisation of public figures and to restore a sense of veracity to texts and communication. This paper addresses deepfakes from a cultural studies standpoint, asking what happens if we shift away from perceiving the technology as having a negative impact and, instead, appreciating it as a cultural technology constituted in widespread shifts in the cultural sense of texts, representation, play, co-creativity and pastiche. In doing so, the paper uses cultural theory to address three points: the cultivation of the deepfake in older communication practices, the ways in which it enters public debate as an object of social concern and, finally, how calls for the regulation of deepfake technologies and products misses an opportunity to reassess the cultural ethics of communication. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A particular strand within cultural heritage studies has been developing, known as "dark" heritage. However, its usage does not always point to a clear or universal definition, but rather tacit assumptions over what it might mean. The author and colleagues have contributed to perpetuating the continued "dark heritage" referencing through the ongoing research collective "Lapland's Dark Heritage". Investigating the ongoing impacts of the legacy of the Second World War in Finnish Lapland, the project has shed light on local sentiments towards both tangible and intangible reminders of conflict. It has critiqued the apparent state-sanctioned silencing of some aspects of that past, and analysed the ruptures caused to traditional Northern lifeways in the continued context of colonial frameworks. Yet scholars are not merely innocent observers. This paper approaches "dark" heritage on three levels. Firstly, it summarizes Lapland's Dark Heritage and its impact on discussions and actions outside academia, including heritage management policy. Secondly, it problematizes the term and its development through the frameworks of critical heritage – challenging the assumptions inherent in the term concerning what makes its focus either "dark" or "heritage". Finally, it takes a wider view, questioning whether the analyses that scholars make have relevance or interest to the wider society. By so doing, the paper contributes to the broader debate concerning the future directions of heritage studies, including the apparent disconnect between applied heritage management training and methods, and more theoretical critical heritage discourses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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

In this paper, we report on an 18-month ethnographic field study inside the newsroom of a popular newspaper in Belgium, chronicling the endeavours of editors and journalists as they shift from a classic division between print and online beats to an integrated digital first-based newsroom. Throughout the paper, we stress the messiness and contingencies of changing the fixed structures of working journalists who are forced to undergo radical changes in their daily work, and how top-down communication affects their disposition towards, acceptance of and commitment or resistance towards the shift. We establish three types of newsroom tension (vertical, horizontal and diagonal), as well as five recurring steps faced by all hierarchical levels of the newsroom in its innovation attempts (contemplation, preparation, frustration, negotiation and adaptation). We conclude that flawed communication impacts dispositions towards innovation at various stages of the integration process and fuels tensions between various hierarchical levels. With journalistic practice in a constant state of flux, in-depth ethnography-based studies remain vital to analyse newsroom innovation and change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While agenda-setting has developed into one of the leading concepts in communication studies, "agenda-cutting" has so far remained a theoretical blind spot. This paper argues that the non-reflected, tacit assumption of agenda-cutting as a by-concept to agenda-setting represents one cause for this theoretical neglect. Thereby, the agenda-cutting concept finds itself in an epistemic dilemma: Since empirical evidence has been scarce so far, theoretical endeavors miss the experiential material to build on, whereas on the other hand operational enquiries struggle as conceptual groundwork is largely missing. In this light, this paper proposes a research agenda for a media phenomenon which requires an analysis distinct from its current parent concept agenda-setting in order to come to the fore to begin with. Furthermore, following the definition of conceptual key aspects a model for operationalizing agenda-cutting is put forward. If conceptual and empirical advancements could be made, agenda-cutting would possibly have a theoretical potential for application in a wide range of contexts such as journalism studies, cultural studies, political communication, or public relations. On the whole, this paper aims to initiate a scholarly debate by establishing conceptual common ground and proposing a research direction for what the author considers an unduly neglected media phenomenon. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper contends that much of the discourse produced, received and exchanged online by 'progressive subjects' – activists committed to contesting oppression and examining privilege – is structured by neoliberal ideology. Human capital theory functions as the 'interpellative arm' of the neoliberal project, and a subject conceived as human capital is neoliberalism's discursive mark. Via the articulation and application of an innovative reading method, this paper explores some political ramifications of the neoliberal structuration of 'progressive discourse' in the very recent past, recognising that the relationship between subjects and discourse is complex and dialectical. This paper's methodology is two-pronged. A method of reading for the presence of human capital theory is articulated, with six distinct markers of a subject conceived as human capital established. The reading method produces data that supports this paper's contention: many forms of progressive discourse unwittingly reproduce neoliberal norms via the production of a subject as human capital as 'the subject of the discourse'. Indeed, neoliberal human capital theory is a structural determinant of the progressive discourse analysed via the reading method demonstrated in this paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is interested in thinking more about sexuality education at school. As such, it is concerned with a mundane and unacknowledged feature of the sexuality classroom - the mapping of movement. While human movement is a familiar focus of educational research, the movement of things is not. With reference to Barad’s concept of intra-activity, the paper maps human-non-human movements and characterises these as a sexual choreography of schooling. Instead of asking what does movement mean or reveal about sexuality education, I attend to the event movement inaugurates. Predominantly theoretical, the paper weaves together ideas from conventionally disparate disciplinary fields. These include Edensor’s concept of rhythm from geography, Eggermont’s notion of the choreography of schooling from education, and Barad’s spacetimemattering from quantum physics. This theorisation enables a recognition of movement as a force in human-non-human classroom intra-actions implicated in the becoming of sexuality education as event. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research on indigenous-language media in Africa is often neglected for several reasons, such as an obsession with research on mainstream media that uses colonial languages of English, French and Portuguese and a general lack of scholarly interest. This semi-systematic review paper looks at the research trajectory of the last two decades, identifying gaps and proposing a new research agenda. Available research conducted from a cultural studies and critical theory perspective reveals the intersection of indigenous-language media with gender and health communication; democracy and development; economics and management; and digitalisation. A broadened new research agenda that follows the critical theory tradition is proposed to critique the dominance of mainstream media together with a decolonial reform agenda that appreciates the importance of indigenous-language media in Africa. Research highlighting new case studies, representations, audiences, business models, innovation and digital journalism by indigenous-language media is proposed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Contemporary Australian curricula require teachers to promote reconciliation through the teaching of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander histories, cultures and languages. Engaging with First Nations knowledges and histories in education comes with a very complex and historically layered legacy. This paper examines the role of education in the ongoing process of colonisation by critically analysing historical and contemporary documents prescribing what Victorian students should learn about First Nations peoples, histories and cultures. These documents are discussed in the context of relevant events and policies, from the Terra Nullius ideologies that dominated curricula until the 1960s, through the growing agenda of self-determination in the 1970–1980s, and into the current swinging pendulum of political agendas. It is argued that contemporary curricula and policies promote reconciliation without embracing the necessary social justice and decolonising ideologies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Amid technological convergence and the proliferation of new digital distribution methods, at-home fitness devices and fitness media have entered the cultural mainstream. However, fitness media companies like Peloton, Mirror, and Tonal, as quasi-television producers and distributors, have yet to be contextualized within critical media and cultural studies. Leveraging press coverage, interface and hardware analysis, and marketing paratexts, this paper turns to television's cultural and economic history to consider the continuities and changes concerning visual media's place within the domestic sphere and the economic conditions that have led fitness companies to venture into media production. Ultimately, this research concludes that home fitness technologies and their associated marketing work through long-held cultural anxieties regarding surveillance and technology with the home. This paper also updates critical theory to argue that these new media devices have oriented users as information-age consumers of digital products and have obfuscated data surveillance by anthropomorphizing digital spaces and making such products seem immaterial and innocuous. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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

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

Stan Cross's "For gorsake, stop laughing: this is serious!" (Smith's Weekly, 1933) is the symbol and bellwether of the Australian cartooning tradition. It is often lionised as a national treasure, but its archival history has been perilous in a way that shows a lack of care amounting almost to national negligence. The original of this most famous cartoon of the Depression era was lost for 80 years before being rediscovered in 2014, and this article notes for the first time that Trove Newspapers lacks a record of its initial publication. We use this troubled material history of one significant cartoon to raise a range of issues about the quality and purpose of collecting and presenting Australian cartoons as a resource for Australian studies in fields ranging from media and humour studies to cultural and political history. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Reports on the discussion-seminar 'Making the Means Transparent: exploring research methodologies in heritage studies' held November 16, 2002 at the Cambridge University, England. Discussion on methods used within heritage studies; Papers delivered; Account of sessions.

The paper addresses the implications for the contemporary academy of changes in the organization of journal editorship. Taking the example of cultural studies and the journal Continuum, it considers the shift from the intimate 'artisanal' mode in which many journals have had their origins to more impersonal alienated forms, organized through market or quasi-market relations. A common interpretation of this shift is that it has been driven by the interests of large commercial publishers, who have subordinated editing to the requirements of 'academic capitalism'. In contrast to this, the paper suggests that the demise of the artisanal mode might be understood through A.O. Hirschman's concept of 'exit'. Market or quasi-market forms have not been imposed but rather chosen as a response to a situation in which alienation has already occurred. The perspective allows us to see editorial work 'after exit' not as passively driven by external forces, but as involving its own kinds of creative choices. For the case of Continuum, particular tribute is paid in this context to the editorial direction of Brian Shoesmith. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cultural policies aim to respond to the widespread use of digital technologies in cultural practices by facilitating their application and addressing associated challenges. In arguing that policy positions emerge through the interface of digital technologies and culture and that they need to be negotiated in practice, this paper discusses how digital technologies are perceived and negotiated in traditional cultures of making. The immersive nature of cultural values is made explicit through symbolic work that embeds the digital as documentation of the life cycle of hand-woven materials. Applying the framework of cultural techniques, digital technologies are perceived as products of culture. They signify the interwoven complexities of values between people, cultural practice and materials recognising cultures of making as policy directives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper outlines initial findings drawn from the Cultural Studies Association of Australasia sponsored project Mapping Undergraduate Programs in Cultural Studies in Australia and New Zealand/Aotearoa. The project surveyed programs in Cultural Studies offered by Australian and New Zealand/Aotearoan universities to gauge how Cultural Studies is positioned and the extent to which programs are offered in each country. Highlighting that 'Cultural Studies' as both a concept and disciplinary designation conveys some confusion beyond the discipline, and that a 'failure of presence' is observable in wider dialogues in the humanities and higher education around the definition and purpose of Cultural Studies, this paper asserts that it is with undergraduate programs, as a major expression and point of contact with the discipline, that insight into Cultural Studies' disciplinary formulation is found. The paper concludes by drawing attention to initiatives that might be undertaken to further raise the profile of the discipline and define 'the brand'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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

Authenticity is a significant concept in the heritage field. However, the connotations of authenticity and its relevance to Intangible Cultural Heritage (ICH) need further consideration. This paper ascertains the function of authenticity in the heritage field and reconceptualises authenticity so as to relate it to ICH. The subjectivities of ICH practitioners, as well as their subjective perspectives and experiences are privileged in this research, in line with the general aims of Critical Heritage Studies. Drawing on the idea of ‘existential authenticity’, which was developed in tourism studies, this paper presents a concept of ‘subjective authenticity’ with which to describe the ability of ICH practitioners to convey the dynamic, subjective and developing ICH values in both intrapersonal and interpersonal embodiments. Using case studies of ICH from Lijiang, China, the idea of subjective authenticity is evidenced and illustrated. Meanwhile, the materialist or ‘objective’ authenticity that exists in the Chinese Authorised Heritage Discourse is critiqued as inappropriate. Theoretically, this paper investigates people’s subjectivities and experiences in the process of ICH value-making, as well as identity-making. The results contribute not only to the establishment of an inclusive concept of authenticity in heritage studies, but also to the theorisation of existential authenticity in tourism studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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

This paper further explores the importance of "becoming-Aboriginal" as a postcolonial or decolonising strategy in terms of Australian national identity, specifically through the "gateway" of Aboriginal tourism. Here, however, this strategy is tied particularly to Felix Guattari's work The Three Ecologies (1989) as part of a more urgent need to confront the crises presently facing humanity. Through focusing on one region in northern South Australia, initially visited in 1980 then again in 2020, I reflect upon my own experiences with Aboriginal culture and its ecologies in this area as a way to explore and expand upon not only my own identity and subjectivity but that of Australia's more generally. Considering Australia has always suffered something of an "identity crisis" because of its often brutal white colonial history, the concepts of cultural transversality and ecosophy could provide a further turning point in the reconciliation process between Aboriginal and settler Australians. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Youth arts is a form of education that operates primarily through affect and, perhaps because of this, has not received attention in terms of its capacity to develop young people's employability. In this paper we identify and discuss the much vaunted and highly desirable '21st century skills' learnt in youth arts settings. Drawing on arguments first advanced by Dick Hebdidge and Raymond Williams, we show that while 21st century skills are learnt through affect, the processes through which this learning proceeds produces skills that are seen as valuable commodities. Taking the everyday seriously as a site for learning, we explore youth arts projects as a site for skills development and argue for a framing of micro-credentials that at once recognizes and problematizes this modality of training. We do so by outlining how our reading of cultural studies scholarship can provide a foundation for understanding the everyday spaces of youth arts as critical sites of knowledge production. Examining the intersections of identity, being and culture as pedagogical, we outline how the everyday experiences of diverse youth participating in arts might be captured so as to build pathways into the future based on competency in 'the now'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Spatiality and the spatial turn in cultural studies and media theory have critically influenced academic dialogues and the analysis of texts in contemporary discourses. In this context, the paper attempts to apply the discourse of spatiality to read into the family spaces in the New Generation Malayalam film narratives, holding the view that diegetic spaces in these films, directly and indirectly, attempt at foregrounding and subverting the normalisation of reproductive heteronormativity which had resulted in the gendered storytelling practices. To engage critically with the category of diegetic spatiality, two representational New Generation Malayalam films, Bangalore Days(2014) and Kumbalangi Nights(2019) are explored. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Archaeology lends a critical perspective to research on social inequality due to the field's unique access to deep history, emphasis on materiality, and explicit incorporation of multiple lines of evidence. This paper offers a concise overview of archaeological approaches aimed at students and scholars in other fields. We develop a categorization of disciplinary strategies, arguing that archaeologists address institutionalized inequality through examining inequalities in the accumulation of goods or resources (economic differentiation); access to resources or knowledge (social differentiation), and inequalities in action, the ability to make decisions for oneself or others (political differentiation). We illustrate these categories with reference to the distinctions between material, relational, and embodied wealth. We draw upon a broad range of geographic, chronological, and cultural case studies to illustrate the flexibility and utility of archaeological methods for answering questions about inequality in human societies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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

In recent cultural studies scholarship, native terms have been used to understand the affective state of a society. Accordingly, this paper focuses on the term "spicy Taiwanese sister," regarding its derogatory gender implications in the context of Taiwan's popular culture. Then, it discloses the strategic appropriation of the gendered term in the presidential campaign from 2019 to 2020. This analysis reveals why the affective campaigning led to a triumph of Taiwan's democracy. The affect and effect of this presidential campaign could not have been fulfilled without the China factor. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This forum-style paper presents contributions by scholars from the area of Critical University Studies (CUS). It articulates the ways that particular concepts from Sara Ahmed's scholarship have influenced or been useful in CUS. Across her scholarship, Ahmed offers intersectional perspectives on exclusionary practices and structures that many within CUS have drawn upon. The contributors to this paper hail from and research across a diverse range of fields that include cultural studies, queer studies, education, critical race studies, and organisational studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The rise of Visual Studies in the American academy during the 1990s is part of an after-effect of the institutionalisation of Cultural Studies in the United States. It specifically implies a decentring of the discipline of art history towards the interdisciplinary study of sociocultural visibilities. This paper deals with the development of this research field in an intellectual climate still characterised by the 'Culture Wars' engaged in by the neoconservatives against certain areas of the academy and the artistic world during the 1980s. By taking into account the struggles about Visual Studies inside the intellectual Left as an integral part of their definition, this paper analyses the academic politicisations of the notions of 'Visual Culture' (culture visuelle) and 'Visual Studies' (études visuelles) in the context of the current French importation and redefinition of these categories. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the author's view about the issue concerning everyday transformations. He notes that the special issue papers collected in this issue of the journal proceed from the annual conference of the Cultural Studies Association of Australasia held in Perth, Western Australia in December 2004. The papers in the issue are a combination of established voices in the field and emerging work. This grouping reveals the diverse approaches and applications of everyday life research as well as the broader approaches within cultural studies.

Contemporary populist political rhetoric often makes use of a concept of a 'forgotten people' or a 'silent majority', who are constructed as a subset of population and often utilized as an electoral base by populist leaders, particularly in Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States of America. The concept emerged in the Twentieth Century and has undergone substantial re-configuration alongside other cultural emerges of the past fifty years. Among them is the re-configuration of the 'forgotten people' from being positioned to perceive themselves as a stoic, hard-working, domestic and normative middle-class to a group figured through a racial or ethnic 'authenticity' yet called upon to perceive themselves as vulnerable, precarious and at risk to both intellectual elites and marginalized groups including particularly migrants. Using cultural studies approaches, this paper examines some of those shifts in Australian and United States political discourse, how the concept of vulnerability is imputed for political ends, and the value of a more nuanced investigation of the affectively felt attachment to populist discourse among supporters as a form of identity practice. The paper aims to provide a more nuanced framework for scholarly understanding of, and intervention in, contemporary western populism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]