This article considers how a recent wave of Latin American short fiction captures with immediate topicality new forms of transversal political subjectivity engendered by the international feminist reinvention of the strike in the 21st century. Drawing on Verónica Gago's theorization of the political cartography of feminist potencia (power), alongside the work of Silvia Federici, Rita Segato and Sayak Valencia, it considers how the short story form facilitates a strategic recognition of interconnected violences perpetrated against women and feminized bodies, “mapping forms of violence based on their organic connection, without losing sight of the singularity of the production of the nexus between them” (Gago, 2020, p. 58). In particular, the article examines two exemplary short story collections, Cars on Fire (2020) by Mónica Ramón Ríos and Things We Lost in the Fire (2017) by Mariana Enríquez, considering how these writers repurpose the potential for socio-criticism embedded in the fantastical short story by offering a multi-focal critique of how patriarchy and gender violence interact with the structural inequalities unleashed by neoliberal capitalism. The article also considers how these riotous collections mediate the transversal fabric of communitarian struggle in feminist imaginaries, drawing narrative energy from the localised proliferation of neighbourhood assemblies and solidarity networks, while speaking to transnational feminist movements more broadly.
International Journal of Cultural Studies, Ahead of Print. This article historicises and examines the implications of internet-distributed television for televisual culture and viewing in Japan. It challenges the simplistic media discourse of ‘terebi banare’ (i.e. the audiences’ departure from television), which overlooks the complexities of evolving viewing practices. It explains why, largely due to the dominance of major terrestrial broadcasters in the media ecosystem, online consumption of television was slower to take hold in Japan than in other developed countries. It also demonstrates how, while Netflix and Amazon Prime Video have popularised pay online viewing from the late 2010s, the content Japanese viewers consume online remains inclined towards local outputs from terrestrial broadcasters. By elaborating on how terrestrial broadcasters have continued to play an important role in shaping audience experiences with their evolving content, frames, and services, this article provides a critical account of the meaning of terebi banare in the age of streaming.
Convergence, Ahead of Print. This article explores the democratic implications of the wide adoption of XR (eXtended Reality) technologies, drawing on Hannah Arendt’s political theory and her concept of common reality. Arendt argues that the intersubjective construction of a common reality is what enables the establishment of factual truth and that both are prerequisites for a functional democracy. Without them, ideology can be established as truth by anti-democratic forces with power over media outlets, paving a path toward totalitarianism. This article argues that XR technologies can be used to inhibit the construction of a common reality through the same individualization of media experiences that has been shown to impede democratic processes in the social media context. The companies generating increased revenue through individualized micro-segmentation are now also vying for dominance in the XR media arena. It is argued in this article that such individualization can impede the co-construction of a common reality and a factual truth because XR media are hyper-persuasive and capable of altering an individual’s overall perception of reality. The viability of such platform-controlled individualization in XR is demonstrated through an Arendt-based critique of four properties related to XR technologies: Hypertargeted personalization, false memory creation, reality indistinguishability, and predictive processing theory. Based on these analyses, the article concludes that XR policy and regulation must consider how XR gives platforms unprecedented persuasive powers as they become capable of altering a user’s reality perception remotely and how, per Arendt, this may threaten democracy.
Convergence, Ahead of Print. Immersive storytelling (IST) is usually conceptualized within the framework of technologically immersive tools such as virtual, augmented, and mixed reality. While these tools offer some unique features (such as visual fidelity, interactivity, and embodied, first-person perspective), their level of technological immersion (based on the system’s objective qualities) might not directly translate to the psychological immersion experienced by the user. Such tools also tend to require access to digital or financial resources unavailable to many schools. We propose a low-tech alternative approach leveraging storytelling’s power for learning through affordable, accessible, and familiar classroom technology – Google Slides. We used the Participatory Learning framework to generate curricular design principles that aim to create a sense of psychological immersion through active participation in technology-mediated storytelling. In this design case study paper, we describe the design of a 10-day unit on Native American history implemented across nine teachers’ elementary school classrooms in the US. We examine the interplay between pedagogical and technological constraints in the design process, the role of the theoretical framework in the design, and conclude by detailing future directions for research on low-tech immersive storytelling environments.
International Journal of Cultural Studies, Volume 26, Issue 6, Page 623-635, November 2023. What does the increased reliance on digital communication technologies by migrants, refugees, asylum seekers, migrant communities, governments and researchers reveal about the benefits, limits and politics of everyday mobile and immobile experiences during the pandemic? This introduction to the special issue on cultures of (im)mobile entanglements addresses this inquiry, alongside ten articles covering themes of governance and surveillance, agency and negotiated subjectivities, translocal and transnational solidarity, as well as doing research in pandemic times. Critically engaging with both mobility and immobility in the intersecting field of mobilities and migration research, the special issue centres a multidimensional and multi-scalar perspective on the deep interlinking of various modes of mobilities and stasis in and beyond spatial and temporal conditions mediated by politically and culturally structured digitalization. It endeavours to create a vantage point to critically examine the mobility–immobility continuum as informed by power relations, hierarchies and inequalities in a networked and global society.
International Journal of Cultural Studies, Volume 26, Issue 6, Page 672-696, November 2023. This article analyses the communication activities of Filmstichting West Indië, which in the late 1940s and early 1950s produced 12 documentary propaganda films about Dutch colonial Suriname, and the resistance against these reductive representations in zines of the Surinamese migrant organization Vereniging Ons Suriname. We draw on hence unstudied archival material to dissect the role of media operations, as persuasive, strategic media productions, in constructing and challenging differential relations between colonizers and colonial subjects, and symbolically negotiating how different territories and bodies relate to each other. A visual and textual analysis of the cases unpacks historical struggles over the regimes of (post)colonial (im)mobilities, as they are produced and articulated within regimes of representation. We ultimately argue that, in order to understand the historical constitution of mobility regimes (and, in order to be able to critique them), we need to study the co-production of mobility regimes within regimes of mediated representation.
Convergence, Ahead of Print. This paper conceptualises platformed solidarity, describing how platforms change their affordances to support particular social justice causes, sometimes temporarily, and often in response to current events. Such actions allow platforms to perform their support of different interests in response to issues such as racial and gender equality or pro-democratic aims, among other examples. In each case, a specific feature of the platform is modified to visibly promote support, altering how their users experience these spaces. In doing so, these interventions highlight how major platforms demonstrate their politics, raising questions about the differences between the politics that they publicly portray and policies they enact. This paper explores platformed solidarity through an extended examination of Twitter hashflags, typically temporary visuals attached to hashtags of particular commercial, social, and political interests and offering affective emphasis to selected content. While the bulk of hashflags are commercial products, created in partnership with brands to encourage engagement and promotion of a campaign or product, there have been a number of hashflags for major events and causes, from elections to selected social justice campaigns. We suggest that examples of platformed solidarity can elucidate what global platforms see as their role and influence in public communication. However, this raises important questions about what causes, events, and groups are deemed worthy of platformed solidarity? What values do they represent and how – if at all – are these supported by platforms’ policy decisions regarding the same issues? We suggest that, whether cynical or well-intentioned, these surface-level interventions do not always necessarily align with higher-order corporate priorities and decision-making. As such, we suggest that platformed solidarity is a corporate tactic that can have overlap with considerations of ‘woke capitalism’, where visible gestures towards causes and issues are made but underpinned by platforms’ missions to maintain high user numbers, grow engagement, and profit.
International Journal of Cultural Studies, Ahead of Print. Major multi-territory streaming services such as Netflix, Prime Video, and Disney+ dominate this new sector of video distribution, but the economic features of internet-distributed video enable a diverse sector. This article examines 16 non-US-based multi-territory services and 10 national/regional markets to investigate the other types of transnational streaming businesses emerging. The analysis assesses the ownership of the 16 services, as all but one emerge from existing corporations with activities in the audiovisual or distribution sector, to identify the implications of different ownership priorities. It then pairs the ownership analysis with data on the size and country of origin of the services’ content libraries. The findings identify subcategories of multi-territory streamers and, by considering an array of national markets, reveal the counter-strategies available to non-US-based services.
Recent decades have seen an increase in white supremacist appropriations of the Middle Ages. While many medievalists have sought to distance medieval studies from racist appropriations, these appropriations echo positions advanced and legitimized by philologists especially during the nineteenth century. Medieval studies as a discipline developed in the nineteenth century during the rise of nationalist movements, which often manifested as racial nationalism in Europe and the United States, and philologists actively participated in these movements by projecting contemporary national identity unto a constructed medieval past. These philologists often conflated language and race, and their nationalist scholarship helped justify imperialism. Although the ideas of these philologists are considered outdated, they set the foundation for racist appropriations of the Middle Ages and established nationalist frameworks that continue to influence the academy.
