International Journal of Cultural Studies最新文献

Notions of 'race' and disease are deeply imbricated across the globe. This article explores the historical, complex entanglements between 'race', disease, and dirtiness in the multicultural Chilean context of Covid-19. We conducted a quantitative content analysis and a discourse analysis of online readers' comments (n = 1233) in a digital news platform surrounding a controversial news event to examine Chileans' cultural representations of Haitian migrants and explore online racism and anti-immigrant discourse. Drawing on a decolonial approach, we argue that Covid-19 as a crisis has been fabricated at the expense of a constructed 'other'. We show how colonial racist logics not only endure in digital spaces, but are made viral in new ways by representing Haitian migrants as 'filthy' and 'disease carriers'. We identified two contemporary forms of racism - online cultural racism and online aggressive racism - through which people construct imaginaries of racial superiority in digital spaces.

In this article, we examine publicness during the pandemic, with a particular focus on the conditions it creates or constricts for engagement, solidarity and collective action. We interrogate the intensive publicness of the crisis to reflect on its assumed and established equation with progressive political possibility - transparency, accountability and democratic procedure. Theoretically, we cut into the contemporary ambiguity of publicness by putting it into conceptual dialogue with the idea of commoning, a notion that speaks to the resources and political consequences of coming together, and publicness not as coexistence and speech acts but as a domain of struggle. By considering the intersection of publicness and commoning, we aim to provide one way of thinking about how and when public revelation can be oriented towards material and political change. We propose three lines of examination: publicness without commoning; publicness with contingent commoning; and commoning without publicness.

This article compares the conjunctions of emergency resilience and ecological resilience that underpin the creative cultural industry (CCI) crisis. It first introduces three characteristics that socially construct the CCI crisis and its hegemonic practice of emergency resilience (time, disaster discourse, and the adaptation of aesthetic digitalization) and exposes multiple discourses - from the technologies of cultural statistics to corporate financial modelling - that construct an ideology of 'resilience-as-deficit'. In contrast to this approach, the article develops three characteristics of ecological resilience: a focus on transition and the long term; resilience as a decentred strategy and networked resource; and aesthetic digitization as a radical praxis of adaptability. Examining arts impact and cultural policy reports, drawing on ecological, feminist and cultural resilience studies, and analysing a digital cultural event in Asia (the Singapore LGBT cultural festival, Pink Dot), the article argues that ecological resilience offers new capacities towards a cultural ecology that can nurture fair work, artistic innovation, economic growth and cultural vitality.

This is the Introduction to the special issue on Covid-19 and the cultural constructions of a global crisis. Contextualizing understandings of the pandemic in relation to the concepts of 'event' and 'crisis', especially to the idea that modernity is itself a condition of perpetual crisis, it proposes that the pandemic is a crisis-event that catalyses new possibilities for making visible endemic inequalities and injustices across highly variable cultural and social domains, from the personal to the global. Always open to containment and appropriation, this crisis of visibility and invisibility is discussed as it pertains to the body, to space and social proximity, and to media and mediation. The individual contributions to the special issue are introduced in relation to these topics.

National governments have played a key role in constructing the Covid-19 pandemic through their communications. Drawing on thematic, discursive and visual analyses of Covid-19 campaigns from 12 national contexts, we show how the pandemic has presented governments with unique conditions for articulating and reinforcing nationalism and neoliberalism. The campaigns frame the pandemic as a force that brings the nation together and conjure up notions of national 'solidarity lite' while relentlessly authorizing the crisis-ready responsible citizen. In so doing, they reproduce neoliberal rationality by shifting the locus of responsibility from the state and social structures to the individual and re-inscribing gendered and classed notions of responsibility, care and citizenship. Mobilizing national neoliberal narratives enables governments to render the pandemic legible as a crisis while obscuring both the structural injustices that exacerbate the crisis and the structural changes required to address it.