Showing papers in "Cultural Studies in 2017"
TL;DR: In this article, the concept of operations of capital is introduced to trace connections between the expansive logic of extraction and capitalist activity in the domains of logistics and finance, arguing that extractive operations are at large across these domains, and exploring their relevance for capital's relation with its multiple outsides.
Abstract: Understanding the intensification and expansion of extractive industries in contemporary capitalism requires an approach attentive not only to the literal forms of extraction prevalent in mining and agribusiness but also to new fronts of extraction emerging in activities such as data mining and biocapitalism. This article introduces the concept of operations of capital to trace connections between the expansive logic of extraction and capitalist activity in the domains of logistics and finance. Arguing that extractive operations are at large across these domains, we explore their relevance for capital’s relation with its multiple outsides. The resulting analysis provides a basis for mapping struggles against the changing forms of dispossession and exploitation enabled by extraction.
143 citations
TL;DR: The authors examined the Canadian nation-state's neoliberalisation and the white settler state's contemporary interrelationship to the transnational oil and gas industry in the Athabasca region of Canada, and argued that these reconfigured relationships represent a unique character transformation in the ways and means that both settler colonialism and white supre...
Abstract: Building on an analysis of the historical context of oil and gas extraction in the Athabasca region of Canada, and the white settler colonial policies, management, discourses and logics that enable it, this work examines the Canadian nation-state’s neoliberalisation, and the white settler state’s contemporary interrelationship to the transnational oil and gas industry in the region. This first point is addressed through a summary description of the emergence of neoliberalism in both the US and Canada – as these two contexts are deeply interrelated. The second half of the paper examines the contemporary context of the extractive oil and gas industry in the Athabasca region and its ties to contemporary white settler colonialism. Under the conditions of neoliberalism, I argue that these reconfigured relationships, while continuing trajectories of previous forms of white settler colonialism, represent a unique character transformation in the ways and means that both settler colonialism and white supre...
54 citations
TL;DR: In this article, the Double Eleven shopping festival is considered as a major discursive site where the hegemony of what we call patriarchal capitalism with Chinese characteristics is articulated, and the double eleven shopping festival has been used as a platform for the analysis of women's empowerment.
Abstract: In this article we consider the Double Eleven shopping festival as a major discursive site where the hegemony of what we call patriarchal capitalism with Chinese characteristics is articulated. The...
45 citations
TL;DR: A genealogy of extractivismo discourse in South America can be found in this paper, where the authors recover the source discourses from 14 months of archival and ethnographic research.
Abstract: This article provides a genealogy of extractivismo discourse. In South America, the critical discourse of extractivismo has shifted political horizons and fomented a protracted intraleft dispute. Decades of neoliberalism unified popular movements to resist austerity and recuperate national sovereignty, but the ascendency of leftist administrations across the continent fragmented the field of radical politics. Ecuador exemplifies this internecine conflict: environmental and indigenous activists and allied intellectuals crafted the discourse of extractivismo to resist President Rafael Correa’s ‘21st century socialism’. State actors assert that oil and mining revenues will trigger economic development. But anti-extractive activists contend that ‘the extractive model’ pollutes the environment, violates collective rights, reinforces dependency on foreign capital, and undermines democracy. Drawing on 14 months of archival and ethnographic research, I recover the source discourses of extractivismo and ou...
44 citations
TL;DR: The authors argue that some narratives of "affective revolution" may actually do more to obscure than to enrich our understanding of the material relations and routines though which "progressive" change might occur and endure in a given context.
Abstract: Compelling recent scholarly work has explored the crucial role affect, emotion and feeling might play in activating radical social and political change. I argue, however, that some narratives of ‘affective revolution’ may actually do more to obscure than to enrich our understanding of the material relations and routines though which ‘progressive’ change might occur and endure in a given context – while side-stepping the challenge of how to evaluate progress itself in the current socio-political and economic landscape. Drawing on the work of Eve Sedgwick, John Dewey, Felix Ravaisson and others, this article asks whether critical work on habit can provide different, and potentially generative, analytical tools for understanding the contemporary ethical and material complexities of social transformation. I suggest that it habit’s double nature – its enabling of both compulsive repetition and creative becoming – that makes it a rich concept for addressing the propensity of harmful socio-political patt...
43 citations
TL;DR: The authors explored a set of videos posted on YouTube under the title of "My anorexia story" which present narratives of recovery, or efforts to recover, from anorexia.
Abstract: The phenomenon of pro-anorexia (‘pro-ana’) communities has attracted extensive academic attention over the last 15 years, with feminist scholars fascinated by the political complexities of such cultures. But the internet has also enabled a range of eating disorder recovery cultures to emerge – whether organized around blogs, Facebook, Instagram or YouTube – and such spaces have been largely ignored by feminist scholarship which has fetishized the apparently more resistant and controversial discourses of pro-ana. As such, this article explores a set of videos posted on YouTube under the title of ‘My anorexia story’ which present narratives of recovery, or efforts to recover, from anorexia. Primarily produced by white, Western, teenage girls, these videos are effectively slide shows made up of written text and photographs, with selfies of the body sitting at their core. The conceptual and political significance of self-representation has been seen as central to the construction of subjectivity withi...
43 citations
TL;DR: In this article, the authors examine the political economy of mining and Indigenous interests in Australia, and the moral economy of Indigenous cultural difference within Cultural Studies and Anthropology, and question the empirical status of the ontologies circulating through academic discussions.
Abstract: In this special issue on ‘extraction’, we think critically about two urgent and entangled questions, examining the political economy of mining and Indigenous interests in Australia, and the moral economy of Indigenous cultural difference within Cultural Studies and Anthropology. In settler colonial states such as Australia, Indigenous cultural difference is now routinely presented as commensurate with, rather than obstructive of, extractive industry activity. Meanwhile, the renewed interest in ‘radical alterity’ across these disciplines has seen a movement away from regarding authoritative claims about ‘others’ as morally suspect – as only extracting from or mining Indigenous worlds for insights and academic prestige. The ‘ontological turn’, however, leads us to question the empirical status of the ontologies circulating through academic discussions. What happens when Indigenous people disappoint, in their embrace of environmentally destructive industries such as mining, for example? We argue that...
35 citations
TL;DR: In this article, the authors look at repair as an emergent focus of recent activism in affluent societies, where a number of groups are reclaiming practices of repair as a form of political and ecological action.
Abstract: In this article we look at repair as an emergent focus of recent activism in affluent societies, where a number of groups are reclaiming practices of repair as a form of political and ecological action. Ranging from those that fight for legislative change to those groups who are trying to support ecological and social change through everyday life practices, repair is beginning to surface tensions in everyday life and as such poses opportunities for its transformation. We survey a few of the practices that make up this movement in its various articulations, to take stock of their current political import.
While we suggest that these practices can be seen as an emergent lifestyle movement, they should not be seen as presenting a unified statement. Rather, we aim to show that they articulate a spectrum of political positions, particularly in relation to the three specific issues of property, pedagogy and sociality. These three dimensions are all facets of current internal discrepancies of repair practices and moreover express potential bifurcations as this movement evolves. Drawing on a diverse methodology that includes discourse analysis and participant observation, we suggest some of the ways in which this growing area of activity could play a significant role in resisting the commodification of the everyday and inventing postwork alternatives.
33 citations
TL;DR: This article used Laclau's articulation theory to analyse the public construction of contemporary populism in the Nordic countries of Sweden, Finland, Norway and Denmark, showing that mainstream media frame populism rather negatively, although examples of the term's positive identification with "the people" are available, especially in the tabloid media.
Abstract: Populism as a concept is elusive and has been connected to very different political movements. Generally, populism’s connotations are rather negative and the term is often used pejoratively in the academic field as well. However, Ernesto Laclau has approached populism by arguing that populist reason is a manifestation of political logic in which group identification – formed through various signifiers such as ‘the people’, which are articulated as part of an ‘equivalence chain’ – eventually establishes political agency as a totality. This paper uses Laclau’s articulation theory to analyse the public construction of contemporary populism in the Nordic countries of Sweden, Finland, Norway and Denmark. The analysis demonstrates that mainstream media frame populism rather negatively, although examples of the term’s positive identification with ‘the people’ are available, especially in the tabloid media. Thus, the positive identification behind the forming of populist movements clashes with the media d...
28 citations
TL;DR: This paper argued that colonialism and capitalism are based on extracting and assimilating, and that "my land is seen as a resource. My relatives in the plant and animal worlds are seen as resources".
Abstract: Colonialism and capitalism are based on extracting and assimilating. My land is seen as a resource. My relatives in the plant and animal worlds are seen as resources. My culture and knowledge is a ...
22 citations
TL;DR: The special double issue as discussed by the authors offers Cultural Studies engagements with extractivism and the myriad of conflicts, struggles and other processes and phenomena that have risen together with the on-going intensification and expansion of extractivist industries and exploitation.
Abstract: The special double issue at hand offers Cultural Studies engagements with extractivism and the myriad of conflicts, struggles and other processes and phenomena that have risen together with the on-going intensification and expansion of extractivist industries and exploitation In this article, we examine the political and epistemological stakes of these engagements, and introduce the different perspectives from which the notions of extractivism and extraction are approached within this issue We argue that as a conceptual framework loaded with political meaning and potential, and able to address the on-going moment of dwindling resources, environmental degradation and heightened social and economic inequality, extractivism and studies of extraction are crucial for the discipline’s efforts to engage contemporary culture politically, and to examine on-going processes of exploitation and subjectification through specific context and cases Many of the articles included in this issue expand understand
TL;DR: The concept of emotional extraction is defined in two ways as discussed by the authors : one iteration involves the transfer of emotional resources from one individual or group to another, such as that which occurs in the work of caring for others, but which also increasingly occurs in producing new technology such as emotionally aware computers.
Abstract: Surveying recent developments in management and work culture, computing and social media, and science and psychology, this article speculates on the concept of emotional extraction. Emotional extraction is defined in two ways. One iteration involves the transfer of emotional resources from one individual or group to another, such as that which occurs in the work of caring for others, but which also increasingly occurs in the work of producing new technology, such as emotionally aware computers. A second instance of emotional extraction entails the use of emotion knowledge – or theories about emotions, such as emotional intelligence – to generate conclusions or predictions about human behaviour. Emotional extraction in service work, management, marketing, social media, artificial intelligence, and neuroscience are discussed. ‘Mining the mind’ focuses in particular on emotional extraction that enhances both productivity and predictability, in turn tracing how emotionally extractive sites are implica...
TL;DR: In spite of not even being officially registered three months before the European Parliament Elections of 2014, the Spanish upstart party Podemos captured almost 8 percent of the vote, while barely
Abstract: In spite of not even being officially registered three months before the European Parliament Elections of 2014, the Spanish upstart party Podemos captured almost 8 percent of the vote, while barely
TL;DR: In this article, the authors dig into the dirtiness of cultural studies to prioritize praxis, or as the way my mountain folks collect summer lotus: putting our feet in the muddy water, and finding ways to get the stems underneath the smooth leaves.
Abstract: This essay digs into the ‘dirtiness’ of cultural studies to prioritize praxis, or as the way my mountain folks collect summer lotus: putting our feet in the muddy water, and finding ways to get the stems underneath the smooth leaves. Using Cantoneseness as a case to locate such ‘dirtiness’, I draw on personal/familial histories as well as research projects to tell how conjunctures of Cantoneseness are politically and unevenly lived. This complex journey travels roughly from my childhood in the Yuebei mountains of northern Guangdong through my teenage and early adult years in the Pearl River Delta (PRD) to my current location as a temporary resident in the East Pacific port of Vancouver. I selectively emphasize and speak on three different locations: first, the rural inland Cantonese location of Yuebei mountains – the borderland and hinterland experiences of my family and myself living what the mountains would offer and how these have changed; second, the industrial superior Cantonese location of P...
TL;DR: The authors investigates how resources that are perceived as common are turned into property through different interventions of extractivism, and how this provokes counter-activism from groups and actors who see their rights and living conditions threatened by the practices of extraction.
Abstract: This article investigates how resources that are perceived as common are turned into property through different interventions of extractivism, and how this provokes counter-activism from groups and actors who see their rights and living conditions threatened by the practices of extraction. The article looks at how extraction is enacted through three distinct practices: prospecting, enclosure and unbundling, studied through three different cases. The cases involve resources that are material and immaterial, renewable as well as non-renewable, ‘natural’ as well as man-made. Prospecting is exemplified by patenting of genetic resources and traditional knowledge, enclosure is exemplified by debates over copyright expansionism and information commons, and unbundling through conflicts over mining and gas extraction. The article draws on fieldwork involving interviews and participant observation with protesters at contested mining sites in Australia and with digital rights activists from across the world ...
TL;DR: The Colombian conjuncture encompasses social, economic, political and cultural aspects, whose related rationalities are yet to be mapped out and understood in their complex and multi-layered dimensions and registers as discussed by the authors.
Abstract: Contemporary Colombian conjuncture encompasses two dynamics. These incorporate social, economic, political and cultural aspects, whose related rationalities are yet to be mapped out and understood in their complex and multi-layered dimensions and registers. On the one hand, as I will explain throughout the text, we have been witness to on-going peace talks between the government and the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia guerrilla group, a whole set of practices of forgiveness, inaugurations of memory museums, the passing of the victims and land restitution law, as well as the recognition of victims and the effervescence of their movements and organizations. These factors have spiralled victims’ demonstrations and fuelled marches all over the country. On the other hand, there are increased rates of foreign investment in those regions that, until as little as a decade ago, were subject to appalling rates of internal displacement, massacres and disappearances, and which now constitute new b...
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors explore the domestication of a financial instrument that is much used in contemporary Finland, but that most of its users do not primarily think about in terms of being a financial instruments: the private health insurance for children.
Abstract: This article explores the domestication of a financial instrument that is much used in contemporary Finland, but that most of its users do not primarily think about in terms of being a financial instrument: the private health insurance for children In Finland, all children are covered by social insurance and are entitled to free public health service with very low costs, if any Yet, some 40 percent of families want to supplement this service with private products Many fear that the popularity of the private health insurance for children contributes to a vicious circle that ends up weakening the legitimacy of, and the service given by, the public health sector; inequality in the face of health risks threatens to be aggravated, as well Therefore, this financial instrument has become an object of political controversy The main question of the article is: how do economic, political and moral valuations become intertwined in the domestication of insurance? The concept of ‘domestication’ is found h
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors track traces of the past as they emerge and the day-to-day practices that sustained them noting intensities and flashpoints as they arise in daily life.
Abstract: What stories do ruins tell? What is the legacy of the extractive coal industry? When is extraction complete in a single-industry area? Tied to global capital, fuelling the Industrial Revolution on the labour immigrants, the legacy of extraction in the Anthracite Coal-Mining Region in Northeastern Pennsylvania extends into local notions of heritage, memory, community welfare, and place. Tracking (de)industrial life scenes in the Anthracite Coal-Mining Region, this ethnographic work follows traces of the past as they emerge and the day-to-day practices that sustained them noting intensities and flashpoints as they arise in daily life. As a particular flashpoint, Coal Region residents processed the demolition of the ruins of Saint Nicholas Coal Breaker, the last anthracite coal breaker built before 1960 and once the largest coal breaker in the world. Residents rapidly produced and shared digital media of the Breaker with and through a large public digital humanities collaboratory that I created and m...
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors describe the process of financial subjectification by observing a private educational program on financial self-management in South Korea, which is a popular Korean term for technology.
Abstract: This article describes the process of financial subjectification by observing a private educational programme on financial self-management in South Korea. ‘Wealth-tech’ is a popular Korean term tha...
TL;DR: The authors reflect on the lives of two people whose publications, pedagogy, lectures, and experiences helped set the terms of the debate about so-called high culture in Cultural S...
Abstract: This essay reflects on the lives of two people whose publications, pedagogy, lectures, and crucially, whose experiences helped set the terms of the debate about so-called high culture in Cultural S...
TL;DR: Glamour is often understood as a capitalist technology of allure and as a device with which women are objectified as discussed by the authors, and it has also been theorized as representing a refusal to be imprisoned by the norms of gender, class, and race, as well as a form of escape from everyday life.
Abstract: Glamour is often understood as a capitalist technology of allure and as a device with which women are objectified. The consumption glamour has also been theorized as representing a refusal to be imprisoned by the norms of gender, class, and race, as well as a form of escape from everyday life. In this article, I explore the attractiveness of glamour both as a technique of feminine performance and as a technique of capitalism. By defining and historicizing the aesthetic, I consider if, and how, glamour could be utilized to strengthen a feminist politics. I argue that glamour has become more salient in a contemporary context in which the myth of natural beauty has generally been debunked, and in which the performance of femininity constantly refers to its own artifice. Through analysis of examples of the material practices of glamour, such as putting on lipstick, wearing high-heel shoes, and drinking cocktails, I suggest that glamour works as an imaginative resource by both triggering a sense of the...
TL;DR: In this article, Toni Morrison's ideas are being critiqued and expanded to reflect contemporary 'African' attitudes and perspectives within the contemporary Afrodiasporic writing of critically acclaimed emergent author, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.
Abstract: Deploying the call-and-response mode as the artistic premise of her fiction, foremost African-American author, Toni Morrison, has persistently called in her criticism for a participatory, intellectual and political, engagement with her position on and concerns around blackness. Morrison’s ideas are being critiqued and expanded to reflect contemporary ‘African’ attitudes and perspectives within the contemporary Afrodiasporic writing of critically acclaimed emergent author, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. In particular, Adichie has, in conversation and in her most recent fiction, suggested that Africans (in the diaspora) articulate themselves differently from African-Americans. Problematized and politicized thus as contested, rather than universally accepted, subjective terrain, blackness more significantly points to the diversity and dynamism of black culture and testifies, in the current socio-political/-historical moment, to recognition of the enduring complexity of black subjectivity. In a close, comp...
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors introduce a collection of essays on cultural studies in mainland China and the Chinese-speaking societies, which relates the emergence and development of Chinese cultural studies to changes in society.
Abstract: This brief essay, introducing the collection of essays on cultural studies in mainland China and the Chinese-speaking societies, relates the emergence and development of Chinese cultural studies to changes in society. It documents the twin pulls in cultural studies between analyzing what is happening and intervening into society with idealistic possibilities for the future. It lays out how ‘the Chinese modern legacy’ and the Chinese Revolution provide resources for cultural studies and offers some analysis of the social changes that currently confront cultural studies.
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TL;DR: Culture in-colour is a concept that recognizes that culture is always imbricated in relations of colour as form, structure, or system and in relation of colours.
Abstract: Culture in-colour is a concept that recognizes that culture is always imbricated in relations of colour as form, structure, or system and in relations of colours. These two regimes – colour and colours – fold back onto and interpenetrate one another to constitute culture in complex, multiple, contradictory, constitutive relations that are potentially open to change. Theorizing culture in-colour draws on and beyond the image of the cyborg to insist on in-colour as neither a thing, a property of an object, nor a neurological process, but an active verb, a lived event: of interminglings and articulations, of repetitions, struggles, rearticulations, and becomings. The Dress, a 2015 controversy over the colour of a dress in an image circulated over the Internet, reveals how colour is typically thought of – as surface, artifice, and ornament; as a scientific fact; and as a neurological phenomenon – and how it is lived affectively. The anxieties produced by The Dress suggest a tension between the typical...
TL;DR: The authors addressed the current political predicament in Hong Kong and provided a political commentary on the current state of identity politics of Hong Kong, rather than offering a casual political commentary, it o...
Abstract: This paper addresses the current political predicament in Hong Kong. However, rather than offering a casual political commentary on the current state of identity politics of Hong Kong, it o...
TL;DR: In this article, the history of the industrial and biotechnological development of large-scale corn agriculture, from a new materialist perspective, is discussed, with the focus on the Anthropocene and its advocacy for human accountability in regards to the exploitation of nonhuman matters.
Abstract: This article tells the history of the industrial and biotechnological development of large-scale corn agriculture, from a new materialist perspective. Addressing the large-scale economy of industrial food production as a form of more-than-human configuration, it demonstrates how corn has been made into a quintessential commodity and factor of production for a consumption-based economy. Set within discourses around the climate crisis, this account critically assesses the Anthropocene and its advocacy for human accountability in regards to the exploitation of nonhuman matters. I ask: who is the Anthropos? How does it/he/she meet with its domesticated subjects, or rather makes them into domesticable materials? Telling the history of corn monoculture from a new materialist standpoint exposes this industry’s distribution of agency, power and control across a diversity of human and nonhuman actors. This is at the centre of this article’s three sections: (1) an argument for inscribing extractivism within...
TL;DR: In this article, life conditions and resistance strategies developed by the indigenous kolla communities, victims of the exploitation performed by the owners of the San Martin de Tabacal Sugar Mill, located in Salta, northwestern Argentina, throughout the twentieth century.
Abstract: During the national consolidation process in Argentina, throughout the nineteenth century, a new map of local power was designed based on appropriated territories and the consolidation of ‘internal frontiers’ denominated ‘desert’ by hegemonic discourses. The indigenous presence was denied discursively, yet military crusades of extermination, and a very massive process of labour incorporation of these groups was forced in order to develop the incipient agribusiness activity in certain areas of the country. This article explores life conditions and resistance strategies developed by the indigenous kolla communities, victims of the exploitation performed by the owners of the San Martin de Tabacal Sugar Mill, located in Salta, northwestern Argentina, throughout the twentieth century.
TL;DR: New Workers Home (Beijing, China) has been the most important site of activism and organizing of New Workers culture in Mainland China over the past 15 years as mentioned in this paper. But it is not the most popular site for political discussion.
Abstract: New Workers Home (Beijing, China) has been the most important site of activism and organizing of New Workers culture in Mainland China over the past 15 years. Beyond today’s intellectual atmosphere...
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors listen to the sounds of energy extraction in Appalachian Ohio in the United States, focusing on the extraction-made disaster from the nineteenth century to the early 1970s.
Abstract: This article critically listens to the sounds of energy extraction in Appalachian Ohio in the United States. It focuses on the sounds of extraction-made disaster from the nineteenth century to the ...
TL;DR: In this paper, the peculiar state of cultural studies from Taiwan by reflecting on its moments of emergence and the projects it strives to accomplish with recent updates is discussed, while it is inevitable that a survey of this nature is doomed to be cursory and selective, as it strives not only to get its voices heard, but also to chart a critical path towards the decolonization of our consciousness.
Abstract: This essay introduces the peculiar state of cultural studies from Taiwan by reflecting on its moments of emergence and the projects it strives to accomplish with recent updates. While it is inevitable that a survey of this nature is doomed to be cursory and selective, it hopes to delineate and address the predicaments of cultural studies in and from Taiwan and the struggles therein, as it strives not only to get its voices heard, but also to chart a critical path towards the decolonization of our consciousness.