How do producers of digital commons establish relations with the market, and how do they create economic value through their practices? An attempt to go beyond common misconceptions is done through looking at the phenomenon of “open movies” production within the 3D Blender and 2D Synfig animation communities.
Read more »
International Journal of Cultural Studies
Value Creation Through Digital Commons: Complicating the Discourse
Crowdfunding: Looking Beyond Kickstarter
Everybody knows about Kickstarter, which is considered to be world’s most popular crowdfunding platform; however, Kickstarter is only one of an estimated number of over 1,000 platforms worldwide. Patryk Galuszka and Blanka Brzozowska look at MegaTotal, a music-oriented platform implementing a significantly different model than Kickstarter.
Read more »
Out the Back: Race and Reinvention in Johannesburg’s Garden Cottages
The outdoor "maid’s room" was a common suburban feature of apartheid Johannesburg. In the 21st century many of these spaces have been reimagined as "garden cottages" and transformed into middle class assets, but traces of their segregated histories persist.
Read more »
Bracketing Home: The Asian Century
Given the complex realities of home and the persistent simplification in its imagination during what many have dubbed the "Asian Century," Yiu Fai Chow, Sonja van Wichelen, and Jeroen de Kloet want to bracket home just as we hyphenate identity.
Read more »
The Discursive Asianization of Hungary
Chris Moreh explains how the need to take up the challenge posed by rapid economic growth in Asia has aided the resurrection of national imaginaries of an Asian origin in the Central European country of Hungary.
Read more »
“A Torn and Wrinkled Page On a Dirt Road”: Memories of Pornography as Somatic Archives
Katariina Kyrölä on somatic archives, memories of porn use in Finland, and the notion of the archive in the context of queer theory, porn studies, and media studies.
Read more »
Ongoing 3.11 Disaster and Recovery and Japan’s Mediascape
Rayna Denison and Hiroko Furukawa analyze how Japan’s fiction media producers have responded to the Great East Japan Earthquake of 2011 with a discourse of trauma, healing, and recovery in media ranging from manga to anime and film.
Read more »
Thoughts on English Literacy and Popular Culture in South Korea
D. Elizabeth Cohen discusses how teaching with media from YouTube can be a force for literacy and internationalization in South Korea.
Read more »
“Faces of Hong Kong”: My City? My Home?
The Hong Kong government has been saying that local people have a strong sense of belonging in this so-called “Asia’s World City.” Believe it or not? A promotional video featuring an old district in Hong Kong will tell you more.
Read more »
The Gendered Politics of Digital Brand Labor
In the so-called “attention economy,” brands increasingly harness the immaterial labor of social media participants. To what extent can these digital activities by understood as gendered? This post draws on findings from a recently published International Journal of Cultural Studies article to explore the gendered politics of social media labor.
Read more »
Feminism and Anorexia: A Complex Alliance
Critical feminist approaches to anorexia have become increasingly visible as an area of academic study since the late 1970s. Such approaches have done much to question and critique the ideological nature of medical conceptions of the "eating disorder," but they continue to raise questions about how to "give voice" to those who suffer from...
Read more »
Experts, Dads, and Technology: Gendered Talk About Online Music
New experts are needed to find and listen to music online, and gender is key to what is considered expertise in the field of music and media technology.
Read more »
Roots and Routes of the Cuban Revolution: Transforming Ideology into Heritage
In the wake of the "normalization" of U.S. relations with Cuba, the transitional communist nation is struggling with its cultural heritage policies in what Pablo Alonso González calls "the transformation of ideology into heritage."
Read more »
Whose Media Is It, Anyway? Representation on the Caribbean International Network
How the network enacts its own hierarchies, and perpetuates the essentialization and commodification of peoples from the region.
Read more »
“Under the Vast Sky”: Cantopop Memories and Hong Kong’s Umbrella Movement
Against hegemonic memory-draining statist narratives and corporate projects, the Umbrella Movement is about remembering to struggle, and the struggle to remember.
Read more »