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This paper examines how Italian visual artists are now structurally encouraged to be proficient in performing activities unrelated to field-specific criteria, or – to use the words of one respondent – why they are supposed to "be good at being incredibly good at doing stuff they don't know how to do." Drawing on qualitative data (N = 135), four dimensions of unartistic yet binding concerns are explored: networking relationality, bureaucratic "callification," systemic politics, and outward visibility. To analyze this dynamic, the concept of "Matryoshka roles" is introduced. Although uncharacteristic of artists' work and nested inside its surface depiction (Matryoshka), each dimension entails a set of injunctions and sanctioned behavior (roles) that reconfigure the reality of contemporary visual artists and vitiate the separation between internal vs. external principles of hierarchization. Reflecting on the autonomy of the field of visual art as a transitory historical phase, mechanisms of fields' heteronomization are addressed. By considering a series of factors (e.g., differences among early- and late-career artists, presence on social media, perception of heteronomous practices, most distinctive accomplishments, career junctions), the increasing pressure of meta-fields of economics, power, and state is detailed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research on cultural production has recognized that artistic creation, especially fandom subcultures, depends on social interaction within artworlds. Yet less research has examined how creative production functions when exogenous social forces disrupt key forms of interaction. This study leverages the case of Chinese fanfiction writers' response when state censorship interrupts and threatens fanfiction writing to better understand the vulnerability of creative communities. Based on interviews with Chinese fanfiction writers who experienced an unexpected intensification of online censorship in 2020, and following fandom studies in understanding fanfiction as rooted in a gift economy, I show how censorship discouraged writing by destabilizing interaction and interfering with gift exchanges. I find that censorship transformed cultural production by (1) reorganizing and fragmenting networks, (2) reshaping the meaning of visibility, and (3) opening up new opportunities in a disintegrated community. As this study argues, we need to go beyond asking whether censorship is effectively destructive or not. While creative communities are vulnerable to outside disruption, especially in online space, the pressure of censorship leads to new conventions, networks, and fields for artistic creation as censorship does not simply strangle creativity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

San Diego Comic-Con is North America's premiere fan convention and a key site for mediating between media industries and fandom. In 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic forced Comic-Con to abruptly move its programming onto an array of digital platforms in an apparent "platformization" of the con. Informed by research on fan conventions, media industries, and the platformization of cultural production, this analysis of the online convention argues that Comic-Con was primed for platformization because it is already platform-like. Conventions organize markets, infrastructures, and governance to bring together attendees, media industries, and other "complementors." Moreover, platform logics were already shaping the convention pre-pandemic in the form of experiential marketing and brand activations designed to capture attendee data. Rather than a radical break, the Comic-Con@Home online convention and in particular Amazon's Virtual-Con activation are part of a longer process of reconfiguring the relationships between fan conventions, cultural producers, and platforms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The COVID-19 pandemic created a period of social and economic crisis that introduced two distinct problems for social media influencers. At the same time that the pandemic made their work economically precarious, it also made their work morally hazardous, as large-scale human suffering made influencers' lifestyle promotions appear out of step with their audiences' day-to-day experiences. How did influencers and the personnel they work with organize their labour to navigate uncertainty and avoid moral criticism? Drawing on 40 in-depth interviews with fashion influencers as well as the industry personnel they work with, I explain how influencers and those close to them respond to and combat issues of uncertainty and change during a period of crisis. I pair this interview data with a year-long online observation of influencers' labour online. In a calibrated move from aspiration to authenticity, influencers stressed the 'ordinary' and 'everyday' qualities of their lives during the pandemic, evading moral sanctions against profit-making. Throughout, they leveraged their tentacular connections with audiences to refine content in step with shifting demand and desire online, maximizing their market reach and annual revenue. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article argues that in the turn towards the human-centric in Finnish welfare reform, the human is a flexible signifier which arises out of technical metaphor to stand for certain neoliberal fantasies regarding welfare citizenship, market society and the state. I situate my analysis in the preceding literature on the cultural production of the citizen in market-oriented welfare reform. Through a close reading of user representations in a governmental AI Programme seeking transform the welfare state towards human centricity, I identify three dominant articulations of the human : the machinic, the inadequate and the entrepreneurial. These articulations disambiguate the human-in-the-centre as a chimaeral fantasy representing a late-neoliberal policy regime and evince the role of the imagination of engineers in government technopolitics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As scholars such as Caroline Ritter have recently demonstrated, late colonial development policy exercised significant influence on the print culture infrastructures of decolonizing African nations. The history of the Margaret Wrong Memorial Fund (MWMF) and its literary prize (1950–62) renders visible the influence of the ideology of late colonial development on this emergent field: while the positioning of language in the field was bound up in the metropolitan conferral of literary legitimacy on European languages (and, conversely, in African struggles to confer the same legitimacy on African vernaculars), the positioning of language in the surrounding field of power formed the site of a different kind of struggle regarding late colonial development in British Africa. Those members of the MWMF administrative committee who advocated after 1949 and through the 1950s for the inclusion of African vernaculars were appealing to the early twentieth-century ideology of Phelps-Stokeism, a theory of differentiated education for Africans that was based on a Social Darwinist assumption of racial inferiority. Associated with Wrong's interwar and wartime work for the International Committee on Christian Literature for Africa and particularly with the late colonial development impulses of this work, the Phelps-Stokeist rationale for legitimizing African languages does not always line up neatly with African nationalist and anticolonial motivations for supporting vernaculars. The influence of late colonial development on the emergence of the postcolonial field of cultural production matters: the history of this field must be tracked via the metropolitan (British) welfare state and the emergent postwar development paradigm, both of which shaped debates about language, for instance, that have long been attributed to the influence of metropolitan publishers and the African nationalisms of figures such as Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, among other forces. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In chapters 55-56 of Rabelais's Quart Livre, Pantagruel and his companions encounter a soundscape of inexplicable, disembodied voices and noises, which turn out to be sounds that have frozen into visible, tangible, sensory objects. This article uses the episode to think about words as objects in the world, with a physical presence and sensible properties. Considering first the widespread critical suspicion of the frozen words' materiality through the lens of the fetish, the article then turns to the material culture of textual production and focuses on the sixteenth-century printshop, where words, in the form of metal type, are also things. The article aims to take a new perspective on the materiality of the frozen words; to consider Rabelais's familiarity with the printing process; and to explore the impact of the technology of movable type on perceptions of meaning and error in Rabelais's work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Squid Game's phenomenal success calls attention to the local specificity of Netflix's global expansion as it commissions original K-dramas. This practice has rich implications, both positive and negative, for Netflix's production and distribution of Korean content. K-dramas classified as Netflix Originals have been riding its international market power to a wide range of transnational audiences, enabling national television creators to reimagine cultural spheres for both production and distribution that transgress the uneven circuit of transnational media. At the same time, the deterritorialisation of Netflix's K-dramas raises concerns about its deep interpenetration of the Korean TV industry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this essay, we focus on Zheng Shuang's surrogacy scandal to explore the moral and cultural logics of entertainment governance in China. The official media enacted moral discourses related to traditional cultural values and women's right to frame the regulatory measures, which resonated with people's sense of morality, emotions, and expectations about entertainment celebrities. Given the fact that the official discourses about the scandal gained popular support, we argue that banning celebrities with 'lapsed morals', rather than a regulatory move imposed from top-down, was constructed out of the consensus between the official and public discourses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Through a feminist lens, this article focuses on two projects developed by the filmmaker and author Josephine Landertinger Forero, in which women’s experiences and struggles in the context of COVID-19 become central to each narrative. Her book Cartas de cuarentena showcases a letter exchange between the filmmaker – residing in Barcelona – and the cultural journalist Lilian Contreras Fajardo – residing in Bogotá – sharing their experiences in confinement, whilst debating gender equity and feminist beliefs in response to the pandemic. Landertinger Forero's documentary project and work in progress, Ellas, yo, nosotras, emphasizes the existence and plurality of the female as the centre of the film. This film makes visible women from Spanish-speaking contexts that responded to Landertinger Forero’s call – i.e., to share photos or videos made at home during lockdown and answer questions about their experiences in confinement in different roles and conditions. Thus, this article analyses the (auto)biographic nature of both cultural productions, and how they can be understood as epistolary spaces for women’s agency and dialogic testimonies. In short, this article aims to evaluate how Landertinger Forero’s work provides mechanisms to re-read and recognize roles and (inter)subjectivities of women in the age of COVID-19. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The following considerations adopt a critical conservation approach to understanding scientific heritage, particularly its intangible aspects. This heritage includes the intellectual and research legacy, encompassing various forms of communication, with a focus on digital technologies. Conservation methods now play a crucial role in transmitting this intangible heritage, shifting from traditional substance-based care to communication systems and enhancement facilitated by digital humanities. These advancements enable novel experiences and foster new academic and social practices. Interestingly, sociology features prominently in this context. It appears twice: first as a discipline that produces intangible heritage worthy of preservation and communication, and second as a theory for communicating this heritage. Our exploration begins by recognizing the university's role as a cultural agent engaged in producing and transmitting knowledge. We then delve into the concept of scientific heritage, particularly how the Humanities and Social Sciences preserve their heritage compared to the so-called hard sciences. While we acknowledge the importance of the real impact of these disciplines, our focus is on the formal recognition of their scientific production as cultural heritage. Ultimately, we focus on specific heritage worth preserving and reflect on ways to enhance it in the future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses Turkish multi-instrumentalist and singer Fikret Kızılok’s protest songs in relation to the socio-political context of Türkiye from the 1960s to the 1990s. Kızılok’s music serves here as a crucial historical testimony, reflecting the evolving political landscape and cultural trends during a period marked by coups and social unrest. Despite the significance of his work, there is a notable lack of comprehensive academic research on Kızılok’s contributions. This study analyzes his albums, interviews, and discussions in various media, positioning his songs as vital objects of memory and protest. By examining Kızılok’s discography, the article emphasizes the intersections of music, society, and politics, arguing that understanding his music can enrich our comprehension of the broader dynamics at play in Turkish cultural production, social critique, and the commodification of music. The findings prompt further exploration of Kızılok’s impact on protest music. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Increasing promotional imperatives have altered the balance between art and commerce, affecting the degree of musicians’ autonomy and control over their musical activities. To understand how promotional pressures affect independent grassroots musicians’ practices, this paper draws from the selling out debate and analyzes the pros and cons of online self-promotion. It argues that grassroots musicians rely on online platforms for promotion, but must do so according to conventions and expectations for self-promotion specific to the music worlds they operate in. Musicians who fail to do so risk being labeled show-offs, a criticism that carries negative connotations similar to accusations of selling out. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper contributes to the study of power imbalances in intercultural encounters by investigating the role of language differences in the construction and deconstruction of ‘cultural differences’. Adopting a Critical Discursive Psychological approach, it demonstrates how self- and other-perceived language proficiency differences can lead to the (re)production of cultural stereotypes. At the same time, evaluations of language proficiency differences might also be used to resist cultural explanations. Taking the example of international management higher education, the study shows how students with self-evaluated stronger English proficiency regularly draw on culture as explanatory factor when describing their perceptions of ‘weaker’ English speakers’ engagement in teaching and learning activities. The study, which is based on 46 student reflexivity papers, thus demonstrates that overlooking the role of language differences in intercultural encounters might lead to stereotyping processes. Language-related power asymmetries get therefore masked as ‘cultural differences’. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

AbstractWhile Western Europe’s visual cultural resistance to populism is often highlighted in both the media and academic studies, resistance to populism through artistic and cultural production is very seldom addressed in the academic studies dedicated to East-Central Europe. This does not mean that the cultural producers from the former East do not confront the surge of neo-populism in the region. How do artists understand and figure out cultural alternatives and resist right-wing populist politics and its culture in East-Central Europe? What are their strategies to react against ‘culturally popular’ formats and ethnoreligious nationalist culture in an age of generalised anxiety? This article focuses on alternative archives of visual art against populism, within which it addresses self-portraits, double-self-portraits, and multi-self-portraits understood as visual cultural productions that resist the pre-existing depictions of ‘the people’ – employed by the right-wing populist entrepreneurs – to polarise societies into friends versus enemies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article sets the development of urban cultural scenes in Palestine within a global frame of uneven development. It draws on field work in Haifa (in the 1948 Palestinian territories) and Ramallah (in central West Bank) to argue that the shift toward neoliberalism in 1985 and its sedimentation through the Oslo Accords in 1993 amount to a "transformed settler colonialism," one more intimately tied to flows of global capital. I use articulation as evoked by Stuart Hall and Gillian Hart to critically assess how historically embedded cultural practices conjoin and splinter around the political economic shifts toward neoliberalism in the post-Oslo conjuncture. The article foregrounds the urban cultural scenes as vantage points into a "relational comparison" that crosses the "Green Line" and remains attuned to the specific dynamics of urban spatial and cultural production in relation to settler colonialism and global capitalism. I situate the artists' responses as practices of articulation that elaborate conjunctural possibilities within the confines of capitalist and colonial structural limits. The article argues that despite their critique of the key processes of neoliberalization and colonialism, Palestinian artists remain subsumed by the processes' structuring logics. Thus, the article makes three contributions: (1) a centering of articulation and relational comparison as a method of understanding the constitutive relationship between colonial and global capitalist modes of accumulation; (2) an analysis of settler colonialism as a historically differentiated structure that changes and transforms in a given spatiohistorical conjuncture; and (3) a foregrounding of the role of Palestinian artists through a focus on conjunctural possibilities and practices of articulation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Unequal patterns of cultural exchange between the Global South and Global North are sometimes labeled "neo-colonial." What, if anything, is wrong with these patterns? Debates surrounding cultural globalization have traditionally divided proponents of free trade and cultural preservation. The article develops an alternative account grounded in a global application of the ideal of social equality. Citizens of privileged societies ought to regard and relate to citizens of disadvantaged societies as social equals. Patterns of cultural exchange play an important role in promoting these relationships. Historically, colonized peoples were often regarded as inferior based on perceived failures to produce cultural achievements. To the extent that unequal global cultural production and exchange persist, the colonial pattern remains. The duty to relate to foreigners as equals implies that Global North countries should stop pressing for cultural trade concessions and instead favor the import of cultural goods from the Global South. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While regarded as an exemplar of a successfully resolved conflict since the Belfast/Good Friday Agreement in 1998, Northern Ireland remains a deeply divided place. The discord between Republican and Loyalist nationalisms persist as a legacy of the structural and spatial segregation of the Partition of Ireland (1922) and the ethno-national conflict known as the Troubles (1968–1998). So how are people who live in the region encountering and performing peace and trust? Outside of state-sponsored approaches to peacebuilding, in what other ways are peaceful relations fostered? Guided by the concept of 'people's peace praxis', which calls for the study of how ordinary humans, not the state or politicians, generate peace, this paper explores the role of cultural peace work in contemporary Northern Ireland. Cultural peace work refers to the active role of creative cultural production in peacebuilding, examples of which will be examined in the city of Derry/Londonderry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores power relations in gathering Holocaust survivor life stories. Through the case study of Slovakian Jewish survivor, Vera Karoly, it asks whether her testimony was given or taken. Using Hank Greenspan's work as its inspiration, it contemplates the various forms of testimony and cultural production that were produced relating to Vera. The author himself is part of that process and it includes a reflexive approach to how he confronted the Holocaust. The ethical issues raised when a Holocaust survivor is reluctant to give testimony are to the fore, analyzing in this case how it led to a form of counter-memorial to the (im)possibility of speaking about the Shoah. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article investigates the phenomenon of the platformization of cultural production within social media entertainment, describing the peculiar interaction between creators and publishing groups. It relies on the case of the Italian video-making company The Jackal and their distinctive economic, organizational, and creative connection with the publishing group CiaoPeople. Starting from Bourdieu's definition of cultural intermediaries, the article interrogates the role of social media creators as new cultural intermediaries occupying spaces between creativity and economy, acting as co-producers, tastemakers, selectors, and managers of cultural goods and services. Through a longitudinal study, the article argues that social media entertainment enacts a "multilayer intermediation" between brands, creators, consumers, and digital platforms, where legacy media companies may provide creators with tools to resist the entrance of platforms into creative production. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Videogames are an increasingly prominent use case for blockchain technology (what has been termed 'cryptogaming'). Drawing on documents, such as industry presentations, social media posts, interviews and white papers, this article analyses discourses surrounding cryptogames, focusing on the claims made by cryptogame developers and investors. We ask two related research questions: What are the dominant visions of a cryptogaming future, imagined by and for various constituencies? And what sorts of values get realised in such an imagined future of game development and use? We argue that cryptogames imagine players and developers as financialised subjects, adopting attitudes and practices of risk and investment as salves to both microeconomic problems in the games industry as well as broader macroeconomic issues. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What if a new Masaccio were found? This article offers a 16th century ekphrasis of a "lost" Masaccio so ornate, funny, and lusty that it upends prior conceptions of the artist. I examine this description and two others, all by the comic writer Anton Francesco Grazzini ("Il Lasca," 1503‐1584), to see how art could be leveraged within Florence's literary and artistic culture as class commentary. I have located in Florence two of the works of art that clearly motivated Grazzini's literary portraits and, by analyzing Grazzini's texts in relation to these and other possible inspirations, I reveal his associative view of Florence, one that links upper‐class, humanist concerns with lower‐class stereotypes. What emerges is a Florence with boundaries removed: in Grazzini's words, the material and literary fabric of the city are knitted together in a new way, one that elides eras as it conjures the visions, sounds, and even tastes of Florence's carnival streets. My analysis suggests why Grazzini may have wanted such juxtapositions, and will show that while his vision is fantastic, it is grounded in identifiable, even material, cultural production. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Creative industries rely on workers who use sampling and remix to produce new content assembled from existing materials. In the process, remix cultures are commodified and reshaped by industrial logics. Rip-o-matic videos provide an example. These scissor reels are used as visual storyboards for television commercials. They are produced by video editors who cut and paste clips found on video sharing platforms. Interviews with rip-o-matic producers show the impact of the industrialization of remix on creative workers who face challenges to their ability to assert their creativity, content ownership, and reputation. Other examples, such as social media and fast fashion, nuance the picture. Industrialization also paves the way for automation by generative "AI." These software tools are based on processes of appropriation and remix that mirror those used by rip-o-matic producers. Remix is in sum at the center of today's corporate cultural production. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Digital machines, including artificial intelligence (AI), have long been held as potential agents of social change. From their binary role in cultural productions to the real-world implementation of such, digital machines have typically been considered within the Heideggerian "readiness-to-hand" category of Being. This paper seeks to alter conceptually this dynamic through the use of new materialism and Morton's concept of the "mesh" to provide a new understanding of the social and pragmatic roles advanced digital machines play in ecologies in which they dwell and continue to emerge. Through briefly tracing the complex intermingling of advanced digital machines in the realms of cardiovascular health, sexual desire, companionship, and creativity, the intermingling of flesh and code speaks to monumental future potentialities for enhanced forms of dwelling. This paper proposes that in the near future the necessity to view advanced digital machine technologies as co-agents dwelling together will alter the established paradigm and allow for emergent ecologies. (JN) [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Ain't I a Woman? This question was raised by activist and self-emancipated former slavewoman Sojourner Truth, who validly questioned the body politic of identity when contextualized to perceptions of female personhood. Essentially, what Truth challenged were presumptions about the standards set to revere female bodies through markers of genteel Whiteness, while the worth of embodied Blackness, precisely the beauty of Black women, is reviled. In this article, I seek to raise awareness about factors of patriarchy and societal ramifications. Patriarchy is a systematized phenomenology of norms privileging the male gaze. The White male gaze, particularly in strongholds of power, influences the body politic of communal identity. Black women tend to lean on their faith to embody strength, yet patriarchy also encumbers the gendered body politic in religious spheres. As a womanist scholar, my analysis considers the intricate roles that patriarchy holds in the cultural production of a genteel, pretty woman image, wherein the aura of Whiteness grounds a body politic that deems Blackness as other. Despite the influences of prevailing macrosystems, I propose a theoethic of self-love to push against negatively biased identity boundaries by affirming ways to embrace Black beauty with a subversive imperative to love oneself regardless. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cheap amateur videodiscs are a common household object in Buyi (Bouyei) villages in Guizhou, southwest China. Buyi videographers are hired to record and edit footage of local life-cycle rituals and household banquets, and copied videodiscs are distributed informally to, and repeatedly viewed by, relatives, neighbours, and fellow villagers—mostly middle-aged women. Attentive to on-demand, vernacular video products as such that are underexplored in media anthropology, I examine the Buyi domestic videos as straddling the private and public realms of cultural production. While playing a significant role in the construction of 'home' as mediated spaces and bodily practices, these domestic videos thrive on an intimate public, which emerges out of an on-demand economy based on kinship-based and place-based networks. This video sociality involves a milieu of relationality for those that enter into its sphere, binding shared objects, aesthetics, emotions, and experiences together. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In today's fluid culture, fluid economy and fluid tourism, arts festivals fulfil various and sometimes conflicting functions, but surprisingly little scholarly attention has been paid to this issue. The concern of this note is consequently to fill in this void by specifically providing, exploring and critically examining the multifaceted culture of festivalisation in the urban context. In so doing, the current study draws on two case studies namely Mawazine Festival Rhythms of the World (MFRW) and Marrakech International Film Festival (MIFF). Accordingly, while this research note brings into focus how the concept of polysystem is useful for understanding the complex interactions between different cultural systems, it also argues that a polysystemic approach can help shed light on the complex dynamic interactions between systems and subsystems; and identify the various actors and forces that shape the production and reception of cultural events in the urban milieu. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on an ethnography of gamemaking in the Toronto game development scene, I introduce the concept of the everyday gamemaker to reveal how the everyday turn of game production work has transformed the identities of gameworkers. Whereas, previous research has documented the extensive self-exploitation and willingness of creative workers to accept difficult and precarious working conditions, I uncover how everyday gamemakers "make-do" with these modes of cultural production by their desires to going it alone as independent gamemakers, establish second careers through employment and craft work, and find professional development opportunities to make games. I argue these desires shape the nuanced work and leisure identities of everyday gamemakers and evoke their widespread struggle to achieve creative autonomy in the circuits of game production. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores how contemporary feminism has become increasingly platformized, focusing on how Scandinavian feminist opinion leaders negotiate Instagram as an integral part of their everyday lives. Drawing on 3 years of digital observations and interviews with activists with over 12,000 followers each, the article investigates the meeting between Instagram's script and feminist users who might not utilize the technology in line with the platform's intentions. The analysis takes cues from domestication studies and underlines the morality and materiality involved in the appropriation of technology, pointing at the tensions arising when doing feminism and making culture is intertwined through the everyday use of social media platforms. Building on recent scholarship on the platformization of culture, the article offers novel contributions into how platformization affects non-profit countercultural projects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This research was conducted with the aim of formulating and explaining a model for national production prosperity based on an integrated approach. The research was both practically oriented and a combination of exploratory nature, employing a mixed-method sequential approach (qualitative-quantitative) to investigate the research topic. Initially, through exploratory interviews with experts and their coding using three coding techniques (open, axial, and selective), the factors and components influencing the formation of the production prosperity pattern were identified. Subsequently, based on the identified factors and components, a research questionnaire was developed. After confirming its validity and reliability, the questionnaire was utilized to gather quantitative data for testing and validating the research model. Research participants in the qualitative phase included university experts familiar with the research subject, selected through snowball sampling, while in the quantitative phase, senior managers, supervisors, production managers, and sales managers of selected active companies in Yazd province were included, utilizing convenience sampling. Given the mixed nature of the current research, data analysis methods in the qualitative section involved using coding techniques (open, axial, and selective) with the aid of MAXQDA software. In the quantitative section, data collected through the questionnaire were analyzed using SMARTPLS and SPSS software at a 95% confidence level. The research findings indicated that six factors (dimensions) and 18 associated components play a role in shaping the production prosperity pattern. These dimensions encompass economic production indicators (3 components), social production indicators (3 components), technological production indicators (3 components), environmental production indicators (3 components), political production indicators (3 components), and cultural production indicators (3 components). After forming the research model in the qualitative phase, the model underwent testing and validation in the quantitative phase. The results indicated its validity, considering the significant values obtained (with a significance level below 0.05). The research model's paths were found to be significant at the mentioned confidence level, indicating that all proposed paths in the suggested model are confirmed. Moreover, model fit indices, including NFI, SRMR, and RMS THETA, also suggested the adequacy of the research model fit. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

St. John's wort (Hypericum perforatum L.) is a medicinal and aromatic plant of rapidly increasing importance. The cultural production of this species, which is of economic importance due to its medicinal properties, is limited. One of the main ways to increase production is to develop cultivars. Thus, the homogeneous raw material required for a standard product will be provided. This study aimed to determine the characteristics of natural populations to obtain productive cultivars with high hypericin and hyperforin that can meet market demands. In addition to yield and quality values, other characteristic features of the plant such as flower diameter, petal length and petal width, which directly affect productivity, were revealed in the study. The study was conducted under field conditions for two years with three replications. Fresh flower weight among the populations varied between 30.15 and 240.28 g/plant, while the hypericin ratio varied between 51.32 and 105.31 (mg/100 g). The study determined a wide variation among the populations, and the populations with superior characteristics were included in the breeding program. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The First Intermediate Period was a time of cultural innovation and social competition. The collapse of the monarchy and the cultural productions it sponsored paved the way for the emergence of new artistic and cultural expressions, better adapted to a context of fragile authorities and competing local powers. Warfare between rival regional polities became frequent, so tomb scenes and funerary stelae from Middle and Upper Egypt began depicting military actions and men posing as archers. Moreover, local authorities sought the support of local levies and fellow citizens to strengthen and legitimate their fragile rule. Therefore, many monuments and inscriptions celebrate successful command, effective leadership, and caring about one's city and its inhabitants. These conditions favoured the emergence of cultural innovations and social values aiming to express new identities. Depicting weapons, mainly bows, was crucial in this respect in some areas of Southern Egypt and echoed comparable phenomena occurring in neighbour regions like Nubia and the Levant. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Contestation among traditional art performances, in the technology and information era, creates complex and diverse challenge to the dance of Reog Bulkiyo. In 1999, the dance had to be stopped following the regeneration and economical problem. Although Reog Bulkiyo has been performed again since 2009, the conditions which makes this dance can be produced is still inexplicable. This article attempts to explain why dance experiencing production and activity stagnation. Pierre Bourdieu’s cultural production theory is used to analyze this problem, while ethnographic qualitative is used as the method. This study found that Reog Bulkiyo dance is in the arena of traditional dance art which has a double-tiered structure. The first structure leads to popular culture, while the second structure leads to art culture. In the first structure, Reog Bulkiyo dance group uses relational capital with relatives, social and Islamic groups to survive in the midst of competition with other popular arts. The dance then gains a relationship with the academy and the state which provides relational, cultural, and symbolic capital in the form of granting intangible cultural heritage status. These two relations give Reog Bulkiyo dance group the opportunity to maintain its cultural production.

This article explores the meaning of two acts of cultural production: the writing of novels and the acid house and dance music scenes as represented in Alan Warner’s 1995 novel Morvern Callar. Reading the novel against its 2002 adaptation by Lynne Ramsay, it historicizes the representation of working-class pleasure in relation to the developing discourses of the creative industries propounded by Tony Blair’s New Labour. Drawing a link between the concept of the creative industries and the well-established conversation linking “cultural independence” and devolution in Scotland, it argues that Warner’s novel represents acid house as a moment in which working-class pleasure and cultural production was a significant threat to establishment cultural values. By contrast, Ramsay’s film presents Morvern’s desire to party as indicative of a traumatized subjectivity which can be healed by the rejection of her working-class background and the embracing of a middle-class lifestyle informed by literature and travel. In this respect, Ramsay’s film is unable to metabolize the transcendent potential of partying and pleasure, instead mobilizing well-worn tropes of acid house’s meaningless hedonism to represent Morvern as an exceptional individual whose inborn distinction allows her to escape her background. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines the revolutionary role of MCNs (multi-channel networks) in China's influencer market, focusing on their impact on cultural production. While existing scholarship has explored influencer precarity and platform dependency, the role of MCNs receives little attention. Drawing from platform studies, cultural production literature, and media industry research, this study maps out the development of the MCN industry and reveals the ways they shape cultural production. Our findings demonstrate that MCNs not only assist influencers in producing content and managing risk but also standardize cultural products and play a key role in restricting influencers' creative autonomy. Moreover, MCNs provide the infrastructure and support for content creation and thus act as pivotal gatekeepers, directing influencers' careers. We conceptualize this process as 'manufacturing influencers' which involves three overarching approaches: talent incubation, content optimization, and platform monetization. We argue that MCNs have moved beyond mere intermediation toward gatekeeping cultural production and consumption. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay reviews three recent monographs that focus on Asian diasporas in Latin America. Diego Javier Luis studies the mobility of free and enslaved Asians to and throughout the Americas from the seventeenth century to the beginning of the nineteenth century. Ignacio López-Calvo analyzes literary works, autobiographies, and performances by Japanese Mexicans in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Koichi Hagimoto turns to the vision of Argentine elites at the turn of the twentieth century in regard to what he denominates "transpacific modernity", the comparably smooth assimilation of Japanese immigrants in Argentina, and works by contemporary Nikkei Argentine writers. Altogether these studies emphasize the importance of recovering archives of forgotten histories (as well as acknowledging the limitations of these archives) and pay attention to the self-fashioning (at times strategic essentialism) employed by Asian subjects in Latin America. The wide range of archival materials and cultural productions these scholars analyse make it possible and necessary to rethink how Latin American and Asian diasporic studies are being taught. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines how and why water privatization has been in place for nearly three decades in Mozambique, expanding from cities to towns despite a lack of conclusive evidence of its merits. Drawing on primary data and secondary sources, the article argues that powerful actors driving water privatization in Mozambique 'produced success' out of what has been a messy and problematic process of implementing water privatization in cities in the 2000s. This strategy is cultural, in that actors constructed and mobilized a success narrative to legitimize the retention of water privatization in cities and to widen its spatial scope to towns. Yet, because water privatization in cities was not actually successful — quite the contrary — the retention and expansion of water privatization necessarily relied on a political economic process that buttressed this cultural production of success. That is, proponents expended power and resources in critical decision‐making moments to ensure water privatization and its underlying neoliberal water imaginary would be sustained, at the expense of alternative (post‐neoliberal) modes of water supply. As such, this article concludes that water privatization in Mozambique represents an exemplary case of neoliberal resilience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Every day, we hear or see many different words, terms and events such as hoard, hoard hunter, hoard hunting, detector, expert, intermediary, illegal excavation, smuggling of antiquities, plundering past cultures, being registered and selling products at home, from people through the press and publications, from time to time. time is read and heard in the field (archaeological excavation sites). Unfortunately, these acts or actions, which have the same purpose, are increasing day by day in the Anatolian geography and the precautions are insufficient. For identification purposes, plundering and transferring the Anatolian cultural program is considered a normal and necessary person to sell throughout the country. The equipment used is religion, and the people who perform these actions include religious symbols and prayers by people who believe in God and the Prophet, and even some men are included in these events. This amount of rainfall has never been seen in the history of Anatolia. Neither the Romans attacked the Hellenes of the Classical Age nor the Christians attacked the pagan Romans' past that much. In this article, the definition that was previously mentioned in a different way is summarized and then it is stated why this disease should be avoided. Because unnecessary, unconscious and illegal excavations 'under the name of describing' cause loss of life and financial savings of those who describe nature while there is no cultural production. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the progressive potential of commercial industry-oriented channels (IoCs), an emerging form of media produced by and addressed to workers of specific industries, on China's digital platforms. Juxtaposing textual analysis with worker-audience interviews and participant observation, I found that despite the collusion of state surveillance and platform governance, IoCs prove instrumental in fostering resistive labour subjects and collectives among ordinary workers. This is due to IoCs' genre convention and discourses, but more importantly, to worker-audience's bitter and precarious structure of feeling that mediates their collective reception processes. The findings complicate our understanding of the potential of media/cultural production for labour resistance, highlighting the role of worker-audience in the circuit of progressive labour culture and the potential of commercial media in fostering radical class subjects. Drawing on the analysis, I further advance a model of worker media as double articulation, to open up more hermeneutic and action space for cultural labour activism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article draws from an ethnographic investigation of YouTube to argue the significant and specific role of advertising in the governance of platformised cultural production. We pursue this investigation in a critical dialog with theoretical approaches drawn from platform governance, platformisation and political economy communications, foregrounding the concept of the audience commodity. In our analysis of official and unofficial YouTube content, the role and desires of advertisers were discussed in depth. Community commentary videos publicly argued that YouTube cared about advertisers more than a content creating community; marketing-orientated entrepreneurial growth content advised creators to pursue a 'buying audience'; and YouTube's official communications painstakingly reminded creators to 'put themselves in advertisers' shoes'. Each of these perspectives contributes an understanding of the ways advertising structurally shapes the governance of cultural production in practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Life-writing by punks has grown at a remarkable rate and constitutes a significant new addition to the canon of punk cultural production that deserves an equal place alongside music, fashion, and zines. Punk has always sought to document itself in the form of recordings, film, photography, fanzines, and video. It is time to add memoirs to these archival impulses and examine how punk culture is now mediated and sustained by autobiography. Whereas punk life writing might be dismissed as so many nostalgic trips down memory lane, this article begins from the premise that writing about a life involves more than nostalgia. Considering punk memoirs as works that offer new ways of thinking about a life attached to punk, this article surveys a broad range of punk memoirs and asks questions that reframe some punk scholarship by emphasizing how individuals live within and outside of punk simultaneously. What are some of the dominant features of punk memoirs? What kinds of interventions do they make? How do they introduce and develop particular ways of documenting and thinking about punk culture and its legacies? How does life writing about the past transform punk in the present? What ways of thinking, lines of inquiry, understanding, and feelings do memoirs establish and examine as central to the thought of punk, in particular, and the study of culture more broadly? The article seeks to demonstrate how these trajectories might shift and renovate work undertaken by scholars of punk. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Masha Shpolberg introduces and interviews Ukrainian filmmaker Iryna Tsilyk. They discuss the overall arc of Tsilyk's career: her early films, her breakthrough documentary, The Earth Is Blue as an Orange (2020), her first fiction feature, Rock. Paper. Grenade (2022), and her current project—an animated documentary about her own family's experience of Russia's war against Ukraine. Tsilyk reflects on what it means to her to be both a writer and a filmmaker, the capabilities of the two mediums, and her growing role as a cultural ambassador for Ukraine. The conversation concludes with reflections on the state of cultural production in Ukraine today and what the postwar future might look like. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this essay, we conceptualize a rasquache resistance for Chicanx elementary-aged youth. Rasquache resistance are the various performances, comportamientos, estilos, ways of being, manners of speaking, dress, and types of humor that Chicanx youth express and perform that resist white supremacy. Drawing from Chicanx and Black feminisms and Chicanx cultural studies, we conceptualize rasquache resistance through rasquachismo, a concept theorized by Tomás Ybarra-Frausto that identifies the working-class sensibilities of Chicanx communities as an aesthetic rooted in survival, creativity, and cultural production. Our aim is to provide insights for educators who are working alongside students, specifically critical educators who seek to build on the sensibilities that Chicanx youth bring to classroom spaces and schools. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In any post-conflict society, the work of creating an effective framework for truth and reconciliation is fraught with challenges that those in power will often seek to manage and manipulate. In this article we explore the critical role of the arts within the discourse of political reconciliation in contemporary Northern Ireland. Taking contemporary theatre and screen culture as our case-studies, we assess the extent to which these modes of cultural production create alternative spaces for dialogue and reconciliation in a dysfunctional post-conflict democracy, where the responsibility of political institutions and elites is failing to adequately address the rights of victims and survivors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Land for the Nagas in Northeastern India reflects the local, culturally shaped concepts of physical space, ethnic relations, and social identity. It embodies the political security and the symbolic universe that determine the interpersonal relations and distribution system between various regional groups. Based on an ethnographic exploration, the paper traces how land once imbued in traditions such as sacred lands, monolithic spaces, and ancestral properties are expropriated into state highways. It argues how these new roads become a kind of contact space where the interface between cultural differences, historical memories, and notions of modernity and traditions are conflated and negotiated. The paper seeks to document the issues pertaining to the (re)shaping and (re)configuration of ethnic landscapes through the intrusion of the roadscape. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay explores Alain Locke's value theory in relation to his defense of beauty in the 1920's "beauty vs. propaganda" debate. Animated by a pragmatic commitment to resolving real-life value conflicts many theories of valuation—including those proposed by Ralph Barton Perry and John Dewey—explored the question of whether values can be formed beyond interest and whether they can be arranged in a single hierarchy and compared. Locke turned to transvaluation—changes in value category—as a potential resolution for real-life value conflicts. This essay examines how Locke's philosophical work as a value theorist can be brought in relation to his other forays into African American cultural politics: mainly his unremitting defense of beauty and cultural production even in the face of more urgent imperatives like civil and political rights. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This research article addresses the concept of "postcolonial aesthetic" against the backdrop of theoretical assumptions presented by Bill Ashcroft in his article "Towards a Postcolonial Aesthetics." He claims that postcolonial text in any form, whether written, visual, or auditory, gives birth to "aesthetic engagement" that causes a transformation in both "producer" and "consumer." The aesthetic contact takes place in a contact zone of postcolonial text that Ashcroft calls "a space of negotiation," where both writer and reader form a "constitutive collusion." In this theoretical context, the article critically analyzes two short stories, My Son the Fanatic (1994) and We Are Not Jews (1995), written by a British-Pakistani writer, Hanif Kureishi. The selected short stories revolve around the theme of mixed identity, thus highlighting the significance of postcolonial fiction as a site to merge transcultural elements and trace aesthetic concerns in the transcultural contact zone of these literary texts, which, according to Ashcroft, is a transformational interaction of two cultures. The life events, situations, feelings, and the subsequent outcome of the inner and outer states of the protagonists are analyzed to figure out the aesthetic engagement of the texts. Following Ashcroft's claim, the results show that the two selected short stories provide a constructive site for merging transcultural elements in the cultural contact zone, where both writer and reader contribute to postcolonial cultural production. Moreover, it argues that this transformative space allows the political and aesthetic qualities to develop side by side. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Hollywood has been instrumental in the construction of Blackness on screen, often perpetuating myths, stereotypes, and negative images about the Black experience, showcasing Black people as aggressive, unloving, and incapable of maintaining a healthy romantic relationship. With more diversity efforts in Hollywood, Black women have become more empowered to reshape those narratives. So, what happens when these women intentionally provide a diverse representation of Blackness? What depictions of Blackness and love are prevalent when Black women drive the story? Using Black Feminist Thought as a theoretical framework, this essay examines the narratives surrounding love in the films The Photograph and Really Love (2020), both written and directed by Black women. Using thematic analysis of the film's narratives, cinematography, casting, sound design, and character development, this study found the films Really Love (2020) and The Photograph (2020) offer a new conception of Black Love in Hollywood. These deliberate considerations demonstrate the intention Black women film writers take in depicting a full expression of Blackness, including romantic and intimate relationships. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]