International Journal of Cultural Studies最新文献

This article defines 'carewashing' as commercial branding strategies which commodify care and attempt to increase corporate profit, and provides the first theorisation and historicisation of the term. The first section of the article situates 'carewashing' in relation to longer-term strategies of corporate 'social responsibility' and cause-related marketing. The second shows how established corporate practices are being reinvented in an era of Covid-19 and amidst profound neoliberal instability. The third section focuses on specific examples of contemporary carewashing, showing their variation and pinpointing three tendencies: 'opportunistic branding'; 'community resourcing'; and 'reputational steamrolling'. The concluding section argues that carewashing also needs to be understood as a political act which is involved in wider social struggles. It argues that, in the Gramscian sense, carewashing is part of a 'passive revolution' in that it is attempting to claim and demarcate the realm of care for corporate capitalism and against social democracy.

This article charts the pandemic-engendered configurations of moviegoing cultures, leisure, and collective spectatorship in the Indian subcontinent and locates it within the discourses of personal risk, public anxiety, and industrial exclusion that have historically permeated the cinema hall. The pandemic marks a significant moment in the remaking of collective spectatorship and must be contextualized within the two-decades-long transition from single screens to multiplexes already under way in the Indian exhibition landscape. Through an account of the industrial developments in film exhibition in the last year and a half of pandemic time across two catastrophic waves of Covid-19, I offer some preliminary insights into the ways in which these shifts signal towards the cultural production of a new spectatorial body amenable to novel forms of bio-surveillance and datafication of self.

Traffic accidents cause considerable economic losses and injuries. Although the adverse effects of a change in ambient temperatures on human health have been widely documented, its effects on road traffic safety are still debated. This systematic review and meta-analysis was performed to synthesize available data on the association between ambient temperature and the risks of road traffic accidents (RTAs) and traffic accident injuries (TAIs). We searched 7 different databases to locate studies. The subgroup analyses were stratified by temperature type, temperature exposure, region, mean temperature, mortality, study period, statistical model, and source of injury data. This study was registered with PROSPERO under the number CRD42021264660. This is the first meta-analysis to investigate the association between ambient temperature and road traffic safety. A total of 34 high-temperature effect estimates were reported, and two additional studies reported the relationship between low temperatures and TAI risk. The meta-analysis results found a significant association between the high temperature and RTAs, and the pooled RR was 1.025 (95%CI 1.014, 1.035). The risk of TAI was also significantly associated with temperature increases. Subgroup analyses found that using daily mean temperatures, the RR value of road traffic accidents was 1.024 (95%CI 0.939, 1.116), and the RR value of road traffic injuries was 1.052 (95%CI 1.024, 1.080). Hourly temperatures significantly increased the risk of RTA, while the risk of TAI was not significantly increased by hourly temperature. The sensitivity analysis indicated that the results were stable, and no obvious publication bias was detected. The results of this systematic review and meta-analysis suggest that increases in ambient temperature are associated with an increased risk of RTAs and TAIs. These findings add to the evidence of the impact of ambient temperature on road traffic safety.

Posthuman is a social condition of humans losing control, especially to technological forces, and a cultural framing beyond Enlightenment modernity. Building on the posthuman critique, this article examines digital labour and food delivery platforms during Covid-19 in Asian contexts. The main argument is that, while reinforcing inequalities through algorithm-based discrimination and control, the pandemic also creates openings for progressive change towards the humanizing of the posthuman, through human-non-human assemblage as well as 'sticky labour'. As such, Covid-19 is more than a crisis that signifies the end of the 'old normal'. It is, more importantly, another moment when existential crisis triggers innovation in working-class network society, leading to novel discourses, practices, and networks. How and why did this happen? What are the implications for pandemic-era cultural shaping of the digital? These questions will be discussed.

In the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic, images of the virus molecule and 'flatten-the-curve' line charts were inescapable. There is now a vast visual repertoire of vaccines, people wearing face masks in everyday settings, choropleth maps and both bar and line charts. These 'generic visuals' circulate widely in the news media and, however unremarkable, play an important role in representing the crisis in particular ways. We argue that these generic visuals promote banal nationalism, localism and cosmopolitanism in the face of the crisis, and that they do so through the symbolic reiteration of a range of visual resources across news stories. Through an analysis of three major news outlets in the UK, we examine how generic visuals of Covid-19 contribute to these banal visions and versions of belonging and, in doing so, also to foregrounding the role of the state in responding to the crisis.

This article uses the concept of the 'imaginative dimension of digital disinformation' to explore how inter-Asian racism in a postcolonial city matters to the way people engage with racially tinged Covid-19 digital disinformation. It pays attention to two key socialities that fake news and political trolling online seek to weaponise: people's existing social narratives as well as their relationally embedded practices of media consumption. Drawing on 15 life story interviews with locals from the Philippines capital of Manila, this article characterises their interpretations of online disinformation campaigns that aim to amplify their shared social narrative of resentment towards China and bank on their communicative practices surrounding this. It also aims to show the value of empirical research that possesses a transnational sensibility in assessing the interpretive and social dynamics surrounding such racist Covid-19 digital disinformation.