{"title":"On joining the editorial team of European Journal of Cultural Studies in its 25th year","authors":"J. Kay","doi":"10.1177/13675494231173502","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/13675494231173502","url":null,"abstract":"In this essay, I discuss my appointment as co-editor of this journal within the context of its history across its 25 years of life thus far, as well as within the field of cultural studies more broadly. I briefly consider the value and crucial importance of conjunctural analysis, cultural studies’ complex but crucial relationship to Marxism, and the generative feminist possibilities of engaging with, rather than ignoring or wholly disavowing, ‘classic’ theories of media and culture that may be problematic or limited. I also briefly identify some areas of inquiry that I see as important focal points for future cultural studies scholarship, particularly around contemporary mutations of popular and conservative feminisms, popular left politics, and the ‘culture wars’.","PeriodicalId":47482,"journal":{"name":"European Journal of Cultural Studies","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.4,"publicationDate":"2023-05-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43428464","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The mediated circulation of the United Kingdom’s YouthStrike4Climate movement’s discourses and actions","authors":"Bart Cammaerts","doi":"10.1177/13675494231165645","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/13675494231165645","url":null,"abstract":"The circulation of the discourse as well as the direct actions of the United Kingdom’s YouthStrike4Climate movement is analysed by considering the production of movement discourses in conjunction with the way in which the movement self-mediates those discourses and actions, the way the mainstream media represents them and how they were received by non-activist citizens as well as political elites. It was found that the movement discourse invokes crisis and a sense of emergency to act; the need for a green new deal is proposed with an emphasis on intersectional climate justice and more democracy and inclusion of youth voices. The Internet, social media and cloud-based platforms were used a lot, to communicate both outwards and inwards. However, the resonance of social media engagement was relatively low. Mainstream media resonance, on the contrary, was quite high and overall relatively positive, although there was also evidence of belittlement and misogyny. The movement has played its role, among others, to increase awareness of climate change and the need to act, but the direct actions of the movement were less supported and there is also still a gap in terms of class and race, which will require a more embodied rather than performative intersectionality with regard to environmental issues.","PeriodicalId":47482,"journal":{"name":"European Journal of Cultural Studies","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.4,"publicationDate":"2023-05-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44522534","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Identity construction and collusion in documentary of the Gaelic-speaking community: A filmmaker’s perspective","authors":"Diane Maclean","doi":"10.1177/13675494231159342","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/13675494231159342","url":null,"abstract":"If Gaelic has been symbolically appropriated to represent Scotland, then it follows that we need to look more closely at the part played by documentary film both of and from the Scottish Hebrides, in furthering the dissemination of what is an idealised and contested identity. As documentary is a negotiated contract between the producer and those they ‘represent’, the discussion needs to consider whether the representation of a Hebridean identity, and by extension a mythical Scottish identity, is constructed by the filmmaker, and if so, how filmic constraints and practices inform this representation. Within this framework is an acknowledgement of the extent to which Hebridean identity has been mediated by books, photographs and films for the past 300 years. This article will deliver the findings of a research project undertaken in the in the Outer Hebrides (also known as the Western Isles and Lewis & Harris). The research investigates the extent to which interviewees themselves collude with documentary makers in presenting a view of the Gael that reflects the Gaelic-speaker’s own self-assigned role as guardian of the land and traditions. As this research marries practice with research, it will present it in a semi-autobiographical style.","PeriodicalId":47482,"journal":{"name":"European Journal of Cultural Studies","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.4,"publicationDate":"2023-05-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43376985","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Book Review: Catherine McDermott, Feel-Bad Postfeminism: Impasse, Resilience and Female Subjectivity in Popular Culture","authors":"Xintong Jia","doi":"10.1177/13675494231166524","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/13675494231166524","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":47482,"journal":{"name":"European Journal of Cultural Studies","volume":"26 1","pages":"616 - 619"},"PeriodicalIF":2.4,"publicationDate":"2023-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44469826","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Post-racial politics, pre-emption and in/security","authors":"Sanjay Sharma, Jasbinder S. Nijjar","doi":"10.1177/13675494231168177","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/13675494231168177","url":null,"abstract":"Militarized policing strategies aiming to identify and nullify risks to national security in Western nations have become central to the biopolitical regulation of racialized populations. While the disproportionate impact of pre-emptive counter-terrorism policing on ‘Muslim’ populations has been highlighted, the post-racial techno-politics of predictive policing as a mode of securitization remain overlooked. This article argues that the ‘war on terror’ is governed by a state of crisis that conditions a pre-emptive biopolitics of containment against (unknown) future threats. We examine how predictive policing is progressively dependent on the computational production of risk to avert impending terror. As such, extant forms of counter-terrorism algorithmic profiling are shown to mobilize post-racial calculative logics that renew racial oppression while appearing race-neutral. These predictive systems and pre-emptive actions, while seeking to securitize the future by identifying and nullifying suspects, evasively remake race as risky, thus rendering security indistinguishable from insecurity. Hence, we assert that state securitization is haunted by a profound sense of racialized dread over terrorism, for it can only resort to containing, rather than resolving, the perceived threat of race.","PeriodicalId":47482,"journal":{"name":"European Journal of Cultural Studies","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.4,"publicationDate":"2023-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42070921","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Beyond door policies: Cultural production as a form of spatial regulation in Amsterdam nightclubs","authors":"Timo Koren","doi":"10.1177/13675494231165923","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/13675494231165923","url":null,"abstract":"Understanding regulation is key to identifying and understanding the mechanisms and patterns that (re)produce social inequalities in nightclub production. Roughly speaking, researchers have focused on two forms of regulation: governmental regulation and club-led regulation. First, city councils regulate nightlife through licensing, zoning laws, nightlife districts and urban redevelopment. Second, clubs have their own incentives to regulate spaces of consumption: to ensure safety, to increase middle-class audiences’ spending power and to attract audiences with high subcultural capital. Research in this vein has so far mainly focused on door policies. However, in analysing club-led regulation, a more nuanced, intricate understanding of cultural production is key. Using David Hesmondhalgh’s cultural industries framework, this research argues that existing work on regulation presupposes pre-existing demand, neglecting that nightclubs also actively create demand. First, it highlights that clubs employ other, less visible but nonetheless exclusionary, production practices that are in effect before audiences even reach the door: hiring external organisations, genre-based formatting, locational strategies and guest lists. Second, it decentralises the role of door policies. Understood in relation to other nightclub cultural production practices, door policy research does not account for nightclubs’ assessments of door policies, venues’ financial precarity, social networks and the need to constantly attract new audiences. By doing so, I examine the workings of power in urban cultural economies by understanding cultural production as a form of spatial regulation. The research is based on 29 interviews with 36 Amsterdam-based nightlife promoters and 111 hours of short-term ethnographies in clubs and at industry events.","PeriodicalId":47482,"journal":{"name":"European Journal of Cultural Studies","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.4,"publicationDate":"2023-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42939960","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The menopause moment: The rising visibility of ‘the change’ in UK news coverage","authors":"Shani Orgad, C. Rottenberg","doi":"10.1177/13675494231159562","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/13675494231159562","url":null,"abstract":"Drawing on feminist scholarship that interrogates cultural representations of ageing women, this article examines UK news coverage of menopause from 2001 to 2021. We show that not only has there been a dramatic rise in menopause’s visibility since 2015, and especially since 2021, but that the coverage is concentrated in the conservative right-wing press. We also document six peaks in coverage, which are driven by celebrity stories, news about menopause-related medical guidelines, national hormone replacement therapy shortages and menopause-related governmental interventions, as well as the use of menopause as a metaphor for the economy. Based on these findings, we discuss some key social, cultural and economic forces that may help explain menopause’s heightened visibility. These include the rise of popular neoliberal feminism, celebrity culture, changing demographics and changes to UK work policy, ideological notions of biological womanhood and the influence of Big Pharma. We conclude by highlighting how menopause’s new luminosity contributes to challenging its traditional invisibility and negative framing, and gendered ageism more broadly. Yet, at the same time, in its current iteration, menopause’s increased visibility may reinforce a neoliberal feminist framework that deflects attention away from understanding menopause as a social and cultural issue, while also buttressing narrow conceptions of femininity and supporting neoliberal policies that aim to keep older women in the workforce for longer.","PeriodicalId":47482,"journal":{"name":"European Journal of Cultural Studies","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.4,"publicationDate":"2023-04-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45962288","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Selling feminist stories: Popular feminism, authenticity and happiness","authors":"Johanna Lauri, M. Lauri","doi":"10.1177/13675494221137371","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/13675494221137371","url":null,"abstract":"By interviewing Swedish feminist activists who sell commodities to serve feminist purposes, this study focuses on how they articulate their engagement and make it intelligible. To untangle how articulations about feminist businesses may stabilise, reshape and challenge feminist values and engagement, we use theories of popular feminism alongside discourse theory to capture its contingencies. The analysis shows that, rather than enhancing sales by the use of feminism, the interviewees articulate an interest in spreading feminism through the sale of commodities. They understand their commodities to be ‘authentic’ and ‘truly’ feminist, thereby distancing themselves from corporations that use feminism to brand their products. However, this aligns precisely with the dominant contemporary corporate branding discourse of authenticity, understood as untainted by capitalism. The interviewees want to provide their customers with confidence, a dominant trait of popular feminism, through the display of feminist expression. A quest for visibility tends to absorb political aspects, which is further illustrated in the expressed wish to avoid an aggressive, provocative or explicitly political address. Understanding popular feminism as a discursive struggle, we conclude that the domination of a happy, confidence-building feminism will render more confrontational and radical versions of feminism less visible.","PeriodicalId":47482,"journal":{"name":"European Journal of Cultural Studies","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.4,"publicationDate":"2023-04-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48763170","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The body as theme and tool of artivism in young people","authors":"João Carlos Figueira Martins, R. Campos","doi":"10.1177/13675494231163647","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/13675494231163647","url":null,"abstract":"The body occupies a prominent place in the social sciences literature, where it is understood to be an important social marker. The body is either used to classify and supervise individuals and certain social groups, or as a tool for individual agency. The body might, for this reason, be conceived as a political device in the sense that the structures of power and dominant groups have always applied methods or control, surveillance and regulation over it. Thus, several social groups have, throughout history, been stigmatised, diminished or supervised based on their skin colour, gender or sexual orientation. Equally, the body also functions as a tool of resistance, disruption and afront to the ruling norms and the status quo. In this article, we base our arguments on research developed in Portugal on young people’s activism and citizenhood. Our project focussed on creative forms of engaged citizenship and political participation encompassing a range of practices, particularly in the context of artivism. This article is based on interviews conducted with young artivists, focussing on the way in which the body assumes a central role in their political efforts and artistic practices. We have concluded that it occupies a prominent place in their discourses, becoming either a source of inspiration or a tool for their artivist endeavours.","PeriodicalId":47482,"journal":{"name":"European Journal of Cultural Studies","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.4,"publicationDate":"2023-04-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48039703","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"ECS-Ecrea Early Career Scholar Prize winner - An astrological genealogy of artificial intelligence: From ‘pseudo-sciences’ of divination to sciences of prediction","authors":"Leona Nikolić","doi":"10.1177/13675494231164874","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/13675494231164874","url":null,"abstract":"Algorithmic media have adopted and adapted divinatory practices and vernaculars of prediction, prophecy, probability, fortune-telling and forecasting – suggesting a possible link between artificial intelligence and pre-scientific modes of speculation. Statistical thinking and magical thinking, too, can be recognised as closely correlated epistemological systems for governing societies and ways of life. In fact, primitive astrological practices of looking up at the stars may represent one of the earliest statistical projects involving sophisticated calculations and data sets. Such pattern-making techniques could even be considered precursory to machine learning. As a point of departure for exploring these eclectic relationships between stars and data, magic and machines, I use a media archaeological methodology to question the historical roles of both astrological and computational divination in mediating methods of control, surveillance and knowledge production across transforming societal contexts. This methodology is especially relevant for examining historical narratives in the field of cultural studies as it makes apparent the hyper-connectedness between objects, cultural representation and sites of hegemonic contention. My findings reveal relationships between celestial pattern recognition and efforts to exert control over and manipulate the natural environment and its populations, the historical impact of meteorological and climatological practices for predicting and influencing future events with artificial intelligence, and links between statistics and algorithmic data biases. This article suggests a speculative genealogy of astrology and artificial intelligence, as well as a genealogy of the theological, scientific and machinic unconscious.","PeriodicalId":47482,"journal":{"name":"European Journal of Cultural Studies","volume":"26 1","pages":"131 - 146"},"PeriodicalIF":2.4,"publicationDate":"2023-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43246003","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}