International Journal of Cultural Studies

04/02/2024

Responding to our ongoing "What is Cultural Studies?" series, Wen Jin argues for sociological and phenomenological approaches to studying reading’s impact in the digital age, drawing from Hoggart to Radaway to cognitive sciences to suggest reading as an embodied driver of change.

01/02/2024

January in review: 4 of the month's top 10 trending papers in (according to OOIR - Observatory of International Research), including #1 ( #8 for all humanities). This diverse selection has something for everyone—platform capitalism, the metaverse, incels & KPOP. Read them and other great articles now!

23/01/2024

Our first issue of 2024 is a superb special issue from Jennifer M. Kang & Amanda D. Lotz, which explores the transformative impact of streaming on global media landscapes with case studies from Brazil, Korea, Turkey, India, Nigeria, and Japan.

11/12/2023

from our upcoming special issue, Wolifson et al. explore the impact of on Sydney's diverse creative sectors, unveiling divergent tales of precarity, from adaptation to thriving.

How does the precarity of creative work iterate with the precarity of creative spaces? In answer, we examine Covid-19 pandemic experiences of workers across div...

09/11/2023

From our newest special issue on (im)mobile entanglements: Koen Leurs and Philipp Seuferling conduct a visual/textual analysis of 12 unstudied propaganda films (c. 1950) about Dutch colonial Suriname that serve to dissect the role of media operations in strategically reproducing representations of colonial (im-)mobility

This article analyses the communication activities of Filmstichting West Indië, which in the late 1940s and early 1950s produced 12 documentary propaganda films...

27/10/2023

New special issue release: Cultures of (im)mobile entanglements (edited by Earvin Cabalquinto & Koen Leurs) critically examines the macro, meso, and micro factors of digitally mediated , entrenched in structural inequities and newly illuminated by

Table of contents for International Journal of Cultural Studies, 26, 6, Nov 01, 2023

01/10/2023

Discover how the 'cinematic' shape Indian video cultures! Ish*ta Tiwary identifies how the availability of cassettes, followed by digital distribution, impacted India differently than more TV-based cultures, and explores key moments in the emergence of pan-Indian cinema.

In this article, I foreground the importance of the ‘cinematic’ as the most important vector of video cultures in India. The article identifies how the timeline...

27/09/2023

Read the intro to Relocating Video Cultures, our upcoming from editors Jennifer M. Kang & Amanda D. Lotz that goes beyond US streaming culture & foregrounds location in analyzing industrial practices across 6 countries. Now

This special issue ‘relocates’ video cultures by focusing on the specific industrial dynamics and practices of six different countries. It is in conversation wi...

15/09/2023

"Whereas ‘hot’ or hard nationalism involves the performance of a ‘we/they’ dyad, in which the Other is figured as enemy, soft nationalism is above all educative. It aims to enlighten the Other and, if possible, make them an ally." Xiao, Davis & D**g explore their novel theory of "soft nationalism" through the case study of US-Chinese rapper MC Jin

In this article we introduce the concept of soft nationalism through a case-study analysis of short videos by US-born rapper MC Jin (Jin Au-Yeung), who is of Ch...

10/09/2023

In his open access article, Yuval Katz ask, "How can popular culture help us reconfigure peace between Jews and Palestinians by examining media encounters between ordinary people?" Now available online first

Peace is usually studied by looking at nation-states. Recently, peace scholars have become interested in peace found in the everyday lives of ordinary people. F...

08/09/2023

In this open access, online first publication, Judith Fathallah explores symbolic & social capital in through the online persona of Taylor James, proprietor of the leading auction house CultCollectibles.org
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/13678779231191810

This article explores and clarifies the usage of social and symbolic capital as applied to fan studies. It illustrates the author's definitions with a case stud...

28/06/2023

By way of teasing our forthcoming special issue on (Im)mobile Entanglements, here is the newly published "Online gathering in times of physical (im)mobility: Facebook practices of Malagasy mothers in France" by Fortunat Miarintsoa Andrianimanana. Based on a thematic content analysis of 813 in-group posts, the article analyses first the implications of (social) immobility and lockdowns for vulnerable communities such as immigrants and mothers among them due to the Covid-19 pandemic, and then how Facebook groups helped these communities to cope with such challenges.

Based on a thematic content analysis of 813 in-group posts, the study presented in this article aimed to analyse first the implications of (social) immobility a...

27/06/2023

Hot off the electronic press: Suweon Kim's "Almost South–South solidarity: The frustration of K-pop fans (but not true fans) in South Africa" explores how K-pop fans in South Africa become holders of highbrow empathy trapped in the loop between digital connection and physical marginalization. In this hollow loop, South African audiences are distinctively invited to become fans yet prevented from advancing their own modes of cultural appropriation.

This article illuminates the contours of digitalization in a less studied light of emotion. Based primarily on interviews of South African audiences consuming K...

26/06/2023

Check out the newly published "The neoliberal perils of yoga and self-care on apps and platforms" by Constantine Gidaris. The article argues that the neoliberalization of digitally mediated self-care through Instagram, YouTube, Calm and Yoga-Go not only place the onus of health and wellbeing on individuals, they also endanger the physical health, mental health and digital privacy of their users.

This article situates the digital self-care industry within a neoliberal framework in which I critically analyze the effects of modern postural yoga through pla...

22/06/2023

Newly published: Sunny Yoon's "The memefication of Squid Game and mimicry of Asian images" investigates ideological influences involved in spreading Squid Game memes and the ambivalence of cultural dynamics at the global level and identity issues involved in consuming media and pop culture.

https://doi.org/10.1177/13678779231177724

17/06/2023

Luca Follis, Karolina Follis, and Nicola Burns' "Healthcare (im)mobilities and the Covid-19 pandemic: Notes on returning to the field" proposes a mobilities-informed approach to social science research on healthcare and migration. Now online, soon to be included in our special issue on (Im)mobile Entanglements:

https://doi.org/10.1177/13678779231173707

16/06/2023

Just published: Timothy Havens' "Hollywood on the Danube: Location Management and the Production of Place in Transnational Media Production" explores the role that location managers in Budapest play in creating a sense of place in the city's booming media production industry:

Budapest, Hungary, has become one of the largest media production centers in Europe, even though the country has little local domestic production and few export...

03/06/2023

Hot off the electronic presses: Daniel Kirby & Suay M. Özkula's "The dead pig's photo album: Affective visual rituals in collective identity formation" draws from ethnography of everyday visual practices and social experiences of visuality in the Save Movement's ‘Pig Save’ protest events to examine how they construct collective political identity through backstage visual emotion work.

https://doi.org/10.1177/13678779231172788

25/05/2023

Just published: Isha Malhotra, Eva Sharma, and Raj Thakur's "Bollywood Celebrities as Bioconsumers of Reproductive Technologies in Neoliberal Fertility Markets: A Study of Popular Public Discourse" examines commercial surrogacy in India through the case of Bollywood celebrities prioritizing bioengineered babies.

The article makes a biopolitical study of commercial surrogacy in India through the case studies of Bollywood celebrities prioritizing bioengineered babies thro...

23/05/2023

Recently published online, Hu Yunyi's "Why Do Women Write? Exploring Women's Empowerment Through Online Literature Creation in China" explores a booming, if oft-underlooked, part of China's cultural creative industries' surge in recent years. Drawing on digital ethnography and interviews, the article asks what this boom means for the women who have proven integral to it.

Read it here:

As a crucial part of the booming Chinese cultural creative industries, online literature has stood out for its great economic benefit and broad social influence...

10/05/2023

May is Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month in the United States and while this might be a particularly American designation, there's nothing stopping us from sharing some great work about Asians, Pacific Islanders, and diasporas that has been published in IJCS!

Just as Asian and Pacific Islander are diverse and sometimes contested categories, IJCS has published a wealth of work that could be on this list. Here are just 10 articles, in no particular order, that serve as a starting point for a deeper dive into what the journal and its authors have to offer.

1. Lori Kido Lopez's "Fan activists and the politics of race in The Last Airbender." Available here: https://doi.org/10.1177/13678779114228622.

2. "Indigeneity, media and cultural globalization: The Case of Mataku, or the Maori X-Files" by Kevin Glynn and A.F. Tyson. Find it here: https://doi.org/10.1177/1367877907076788.

3. WaiLing Seto and Fran Martin's "Transmigrant media: Mediating place, mobility, and subjectivity." Read it here: https://doi.org/10.1177/1367877918812470.

4. "Diasporic nationalism and the media: Asian women on the move" by Youna Kim. Check it out here: https://doi.org/10.1177/1367877910382184.

5. Aswin Punathambekar's "Bollywood in the Indian-American diaspora: Mediating a transitive logic of cultural citizenship." Access it here: https://doi.org/10.1177/1367877905052415.

6. "The imaginative dimension of digital disinformation: Fake news, political trolling, and the entwined crises of Covid-19 and inter-Asian racism in a postcolonial city" by Jason Vincent A. Cabañes. Available here: https://doi.org/10.1177/13678779211068533.

7. Ien Ang's "At home in Asia? Sydney’s Chinatown and Australia’s ‘Asian Century’." Find it here: https://doi.org/10.1177/1367877915573763.

8. "Transnational Tamil television and diasporic imaginings" by Chitra Sankaran and Shanthini Pillai. Read it here: https://doi.org/10.1177/1367877910391867.

9. Daniel P. S. Goh's "Imperialism and 'medieval' natives: The Malay image in Anglo-American travelogues and colonialism in Malaya and the Philippines." Check it out here: https://doi.org/10.1177/1367877907080147.

10. "Filipino migrants in Germany and their diasporic (irony) chronotopes in Facebook" by Audris Umel. Access it here: https://doi.org/10.1177/13678779221126538.

01/05/2023

New month, new issue! IJCS issue 26.3 is a great collection of articles covering a wide variety of topics and geographic locations. It has a ton to offer, especially for fan studies scholars! Many of the pieces are open access, too, making them easily accessible. We've got a sneak peek of what you can find when you check out the full issue here: https://journals.sagepub.com/toc/icsa/26/3

RashidaResario, Robin Steedman, and Thilde Langevang look at resilience as a practice in "Exploring everyday resilience in the creative industries through devised theatre: A case of performing arts students and recent graduates in Ghana." Read it here: https://doi.org/10.1177/13678779231163606

Marcel van den Haak, Liedeke Plate, and Selina Bick examine how fans negotiate problematic yet beloved texts in "‘I cringe at the slave portions’: How fans of Gone with the Wind negotiate anti-racist criticism." Available here, open access: https://doi.org/10.1177/13678779231163605

Tingting Hu, Liang Ge, Ziyao Chen, and Xu Xia explore the politics of Chinese masculinities in "Masculinity in crisis? Reticent / han-xu politics against danmei and male effeminacy." Find it, also open access, here: https://doi.org/10.1177/13678779231159424

Jack Lipei Tang develops the concept of "precarious shipping" in "Shipping on the edge: Negotiations of precariousness in a Chinese real-person shipping fandom community." Check it out here: https://doi.org/10.1177/13678779231159148

Ben Dibley analyzes how crowds have been imagined and governed in "A history of New Year’s Eve, Sydney: From ‘the crowd’ to ‘crowded places’". Read it here, open access: https://doi.org/10.1177/13678779231164430

Yasuhito Abe examines how regional promotion campaigns in Japan draw upon and reinforce the male gaze in "More than just the regional promotion in Japan: The case of Chita Musume." Find it here, also open access: https://doi.org/10.1177/13678779231160568

Sharon Lockyer and Sara De Benedictis explore how comedians perform pregnancy in "Performing pregnancy: Comic content, critique and ambivalence in pregnant stand-up comedy." Available here, also open access: https://doi.org/10.1177/13678779231166444

Stand-up comedy has recently become a primary site where representations of pregnancy are increasingly prevalent. Yet little academic work focuses on pregnant s...

24/04/2023

In case you missed it, IJCS released issue 26.2 in March! There's something for everyone -- Jewish streaming services, the music of activism, anime fan-dubbing, Brazilian film festivals, and frameworks of fake news. You can find all the pieces here: https://journals.sagepub.com/toc/icsa/26/2

Matt Sienkiewicz and Michael L. Wayne expand minority screen studies in "Minority representation in the streaming era: An analysis of Jewish identity in competing subscription video on-demand platforms." Read it here: https://doi.org/10.1177/13678779231155507

Daniele Salerno and Marit van de Warenburg explore how music and memory operate in activist movements in "‘Bella ciao’: A portable monument for transnational activism." Find it here: https://doi.org/10.1177/13678779221145374

Jacob Mertens examines how fan parodies affect understandings of the original text in "Abridged anime and the distance in fan-dubbing: Interpreting culture through parody and fan appropriation." Available here: https://doi.org/10.1177/13678779221145439

Débora Póvoa analyzes the ways that power dynamics at play in organizing film festivals affects local communities in "‘The festival is ours’: Power dynamics of community participation in the Alter do Chão Film Festival." Read it here: https://doi.org/10.1177/13678779231154288

Rob Cover, Ashleigh Haw, and Jay Daniel Thompson explore discourses around fake news in "Remedying disinformation and fake news? The cultural frameworks of fake news crisis responses and solution-seeking." Find it here: https://doi.org/10.1177/13678779221136881

A great crop of articles just waiting to be read! Keep an eye out for what else is coming from IJCS in the next few months, including our special issue on mediation and the environment!

03/04/2023

Want a new read for your SCMS travels? Try our newest article, "Performing pregnancy: Comic content, critique and ambivalence in pregnant stand-up comedy" by Sharon Lockyer and Sara De Benedictis.

Read it, open access, here: https://doi.org/10.1177/13678779231166444

This piece analyzes the ambivalence of pregnant stand-up comedy. While comedy by and about pregnant people provides new representations of pregnancy in stand-up and critiques the barriers pregnant people face in comedy, it also reifies other inequalities in the comedy industry.

Here's a sneak peek: "Despite the comic criticism, pregnant stand-up comedians reify that which they critique, as all performers maintain white middle-class norms of labouring and delaying motherhood, as well as embodying the unequal working conditions that some performers raise in their performances as they perform pregnant in such conditions. These critical, ambivalent positions that pregnant stand-up comedy offers can be a privileged position too, raising questions about what such comic critique masks."

Stand-up comedy has recently become a primary site where representations of pregnancy are increasingly prevalent. Yet little academic work focuses on pregnant s...

27/03/2023

New week, new article! "More than just the regional promotion in Japan: The case of Chita Musume" by Yasuhito Abe is now available through OnlineFirst.

You can find it here: https://doi.org/10.1177/13678779231160568

This piece looks at Chita Musume, a "moe" character created for a tourism promotion project. Abe analyzes the gendered dynamics of Chita Musume and shows how she portrays the Chita Peninsula as a woman designed to be gazed upon by an ideal heteronormative, masculine tourist.

Here's a sneak peek: "its moe-okoshi practice essentially reduces each area's rich history to a simplistic narrative for domestic and foreign audiences...As such, moe-okoshi practice may contribute to the colonization of each area through the embedded male gaze thus turning local spots into dating spots and constraining the scope of regional promotion to a matter of visibility for particular audiences."

This article investigates a Japanese transmedia regional promotion project known as Chita Musume Jikkō Iinkai (or the Executive Committee of Daughters of Chita)...

24/03/2023

It's been a week full of new articles! Today we're highlighting Ben Dibley's "A history of New Year’s Eve, Sydney: From ‘the crowd’ to ‘crowded places’."

You can find it here, open access: https://doi.org/10.1177/13678779231164430

This article examines the history of Sydney, Australia's New Year's Eve event from 1897 to the present with an eye toward crowd management. How have crowds and the bodies that make them up been imagined and governed across time?

Sneak peek: "social contagion establishes the crowd as a paradoxical object of government. It provides predictability with regard to the conduct of crowds, but demands constant vigilance, since patterns of orderly following can switch to chaotic, ungovernable following at any moment. As an object of government the crowd, then, is an entity on the edge of chaos."

This article presents a history of Sydney's New Year's Eve event. First established when a crowd gathered outside Sydney's General Post Office in 1897 to celebr...

23/03/2023

Newly available, open access: "‘I cringe at the slave portions’: How fans of Gone with the Wind negotiate anti-racist criticism" by Marcel van den Haak, Liedeke Plate (), and Selina Bick!

Find it here: https://doi.org/10.1177/13678779231163605

How do fans negotiate their love of texts that have offensive content? This article examines how fans of Gone with the Wind handle the film's portrayal of the Antebellum South and slavery. Audience and fan studies scholars will definitely want to check this one out!

Sneak peek: "Respondents who only recently encountered anti-racist criticism that challenges the doxa of their fandom use discursive mantras to defend their favourite film. Fans who are more critical of GWTW must come to terms with what they see as their former ignorance while simultaneously finding a way to continue loving the aspects they have always adored. This negotiation of appreciation and opposition leads them to hold contradictory opinions while underplaying the White privilege that allows them to do so."

In recent years an increasing number of cultural products have come under fire for moral or political reasons, such as racist or sexist content, in the mainstre...

21/03/2023

Today's new article: "Exploring everyday resilience in the creative industries through devised theatre: A case of performing arts students and recent graduates in Ghana" by Rashida Resario, Robin Steedman, and Thilde Langevang!

Find it here: https://doi.org/10.1177/13678779231163606

Resilience is commonly critiqued in cultural studies, but this article asks us to look at how resilience is practiced in daily life. The resilience practices of theatre students and graduates in Ghana show us how resilience can be collective and resisitive rather than neoliberal.

Here's a sneak peek: "Through coping our participants could get by, despite the significant challenges they were facing, and while coping strategies did not change the status quo, they did give students and graduates the foundation to pursue the more agentic practices of reworking and resisting. Without this foundation, these other practices would not have been possible."

Anyone whose work involves resilience will want to consider the theoretical and methodological contributions this piece offers.

The concept of resilience has become widely used to account for how people respond both to acute crisis and, increasingly, to protracted precarity. Yet, cultura...

20/03/2023

New week, new articles! Patrick McCurdy's () article "The rise and fall of the Synthetic: The mediatization of Canada's oil sands" is now ready to read. It's open access!

Find it here: https://doi.org/10.1177/13678779231159697

This piece examines three moments in the mediated history of Alberta, Canada's oil sand industry and culture. It develops the Synthetic as a lens through which to analyze how Alberta's oil sands were represented and understood during these moments.

Sneak peek: "the concept of the Synthetic acknowledges that oil is ever-present across all domains of the social world yet, in the spirit of media and communications, also seeks to foreground the role of media – as both institutions and logics – in mediating the natural environment, oil, and the related political issues and impacts."

This article is part up of an upcoming special issue on mediation and the environment, so keep an eye out for that!

The concept of the Synthetic is developed to trace and trouble the prevailing popular mythology of Alberta's oil sands and place the omnipresence of petro-hegem...

17/03/2023

New article altert! Gerard Goggin's and Kuansong Victor Zhuang's piece "Apps, mobilities, and migration in the Covid-19 pandemic: Covid technology and the control of migrant workers in Singapore" is ready to read.

Find it here, open access: https://doi.org/10.1177/13678779231160802

The article analyzes how Covid apps were used in Singapore to track and control migrant workers. While apps and other forms of mobile communication often help migrants negotiate their transnational lives, Singapore's Covid apps form "infrastructures of injustice" and constraint.

Here's a sneak peek: "What is conspicuous in how the government marshalled and presented these apps is the focus on the male migrant workers, specifically low-paid work permit holders...This would presumably also be the case for female temporary migrant workers in factory...and other settings in Singapore, an understudied group...however this group does not appear to have been a priority in Covid app efforts compared to male counterparts."

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 dev...