Abstract
This essay analyzes the understudied practice of collecting, marketing, and displaying colonial plant commodities as garden ornaments in nineteenth-century Britain. From the early modern period onward, British garden writers discussed tobacco, sugarcane, coffee, tea, and other colonial crops in their books and magazines, often citing colonial agriculture as a point of interest to curious gardeners. As I will argue, this mode of collecting and aestheticizing plants discloses the deep ambivalence of the British horticultural press toward the realities of plantation agriculture. Building on previous analyses of plants and empire, I show how the cultivation of tobacco in nineteenth-century flower gardens contributed to a broader mediation of Britain's colonial past in horticultural literature. Paying attention to this collecting trend will not only recover an overlooked chapter in the history of British horticulture, but also show how nineteenth-century garden writing operated as a space for transmitting (and manipulating) narratives about colonial agriculture.
International Journal of Cultural Studies,
Volume 26, Issue 6, Page 636-654, November 2023.
In this article we discuss the entanglement of apps, mobilities, and migration – and the way that apps work as migrant infrastructure in a Covid context. We develop our analysis through a case study of Singapore's response to the pandemic during 2020–22, centred on the control of migrant workers through the use of Covid apps. We argue that Covid apps enact ‘managed inequality’ in blatant as well as subtle ways for migrants and the societies in which they live and belong.
International Journal of Cultural Studies,
Volume 26, Issue 6, Page 802-821, November 2023.
This article foregrounds the benefits and challenges of deploying remote interviews to investigate the digital practices of older adults from Culturally and Linguistically Diverse (CALD) backgrounds during a series of stay-at-home orders in in 2020 and 2021 in Victoria, Australia. By critically examining the employment of technologically mediated data collection (via video and phone call), we reconceptualize remote fieldwork as a collection of ethnographically significant field events. We draw on the socio material approach to map the impact of human–digital assemblage on the processes, possibilities and limits of collecting data remotely. The study reveals the ways participants' differing digital access, competencies, and social relations engender and undermine methodological interventions. Indeed, it offers a nuanced perspective on deploying remote fieldwork especially among older migrants in an increasingly digital world.
International Journal of Cultural Studies, Ahead of Print.
Discourse &Society, Ahead of Print.
Discourse &Society,
Volume 34, Issue 6, Page 791-793, November 2023.
Discourse &Society, Ahead of Print.
International Journal of Cultural Studies,
Volume 26, Issue 6, Page 732-749, November 2023.
This article reflects on how offline and online everyday life coexists for encamped, young Karen living in protracted displacement. As part of the special issue ‘Cultures of (im)mobile entanglements’, edited by Earvin Cabalquinto and Koen Leurs, I centre the voices of young Karen living in Mae La refugee camp in Thailand and unpack how personal and social relationships are built and maintained physically in the camp, as well as in digitally mediated spaces. I focus on the tensions of (im)mobility and how life and presence were mediated before and during the Covid-19 pandemic. I emphasise the influence of culture, society, and infrastructure on my participants’ living trajectories and find how social media expands their lived reality far beyond the confinement of the camp.
Convergence, Ahead of Print.
In this article, we focused on data drawn from two Brazilian Facebook groups that discuss on-demand driving (Uber and 99Pop). We focus particularly on the use of humour in the stories that on-demand drivers (ride-hailing) share, as it was identified that humour is widely used within these groups. This article has three objectives: (1) to detect the types of stories shared by on-demand drivers in the Facebook groups; (2) to determine the relationships these stories have with the work of on-demand driving; and (3) to understand the dimensions of professional identity and negotiation of platform labour conditions. Therefore, three dimensions of the stories shared by on-demand drivers were identified: the relationships they establish with their clients, their relationships with the platforms (the affordances and limitations the platforms provide and represent), and the everyday work relationships among the drivers developed by establishing Facebook as a digital workspace. These dimensions lead to the formation and negotiation of their professional identity and reveal how they deal with precarity through humour.
Convergence, Ahead of Print.
This article analyzes the mental health discourse on the most popular Russian-language channels on YouTube. The main research focus is depression representations. In total 345 videos were examined, issued since 2015 and till 2021. Using theoretical thematic analysis, the content creator types are identified, and these types are compared in terms of their portrayals of depression. The findings demonstrate that the most popular Russian-language content was made by (1) specialists on mental health, (2) influencers and celebrities, (3) documentalists, and (4) experientialists. The channels of popular science, those with TV recordings, religious, esoteric, and artistic channels were found to be watched less, despite also featuring mental health. The results regarding depression representations showed that most content creators describe depression as an illness. Additionally, the depression portrayals from the contemporary, popular Russian-language YouTube channels generally correspond with contemporary medical perspectives on depression, and the authors discussed depression using words and collocations from the medical discourse. Therefore, it could be assumed that the Russian-language representations of depression on this platform are based on the medical explanatory model of depression and are highly medicalized. The paper contributes to studies of mental health discourse reception across cultures and media, as well as the literature on depression representations.
