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 »
Tags: animation, Blender Institute, copyleft, Cosmos Laundromat, Creative Commons, digital commons, Google, Google Summer of Code, Gooseberry, IJCS, International Journal of Cultural Studies, media labor, Morevna Project, open source, software, The Beautiful Queen Marya Morevna, unpaid labor
Posted in Columns, International Journal of Cultural Studies | Comments Off on Value Creation Through Digital Commons: Complicating the Discourse
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 »
Tags: Crowdfunding, entrepreneurialism, fandom, IJCS, International Journal of C, Kickstarter, MegaTotal, music
Posted in Columns, International Journal of Cultural Studies | Comments Off on Crowdfunding: Looking Beyond Kickstarter
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 »
Tags: apartheid, domestic work, garden cottages, globalization, IJCS, Johannesburg, maid's room, racism, South Africa
Posted in Columns, International Journal of Cultural Studies | Comments Off on Out the Back: Race and Reinvention in Johannesburg’s Garden Cottages
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 »
Tags: András Zsolt Bíró, Asia, cultural studies, Discourse, Eurasian, György Matolcsy, Hungary, IJCS, International Journal of Cultural Studies, Jobbik, Kurultáj, National Identity, Turan, Viktor Orbán
Posted in Columns, International Journal of Cultural Studies | Comments Off on The Discursive Asianization of Hungary
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 »
Tags: Finland, IJCS, International Journal of Cultural Studies, memory, pornography, somatic archives
Posted in Columns, International Journal of Cultural Studies | Comments Off on “A Torn and Wrinkled Page On a Dirt Road”: Memories of Pornography as Somatic Archives
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 »
Tags: 3.11 Disaster, anime, film, From Up on Poppy Hill, Fukushima, Great East Japan Earthquake, Himizu, IJCS, International Journal of Cultural Studies, Japan, manga, Reunion, Ryoichi Kimizuka, Sion Sono, Stories from 311, Studio Ghibli, Weekly Shōnen Jump
Posted in Columns, International Journal of Cultural Studies | Comments Off on Ongoing 3.11 Disaster and Recovery and Japan’s Mediascape
D. Elizabeth Cohen discusses how teaching with media from YouTube can be a force for literacy and internationalization in South Korea.
Read more »
Tags: bilingualism, creative cluster, creative economy, creative industries, cultural studies, Digital Media City, DMC, globalization, ICT, IJCS, information and communication technology, International Journal of Cultural Studies, language, South Korea, urban geography, YouTube
Posted in Columns, International Journal of Cultural Studies | Comments Off on Thoughts on English Literacy and Popular Culture in South Korea
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 »
Tags: Asia, BrandHK, China, Chow Yun-Fat, cultural geography, cultural studies, everyday life, gentrification, globalization, Hong Kong, IJCS, International Journal of Cultural Studies, Kowloon City, localism, Neoliberalism, urban renewal, urbanism
Posted in Columns, International Journal of Cultural Studies | Comments Off on “Faces of Hong Kong”: My City? My Home?
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 »
Tags: branding, consumer culture, digital labor, digital media, fashion blogs, gender, IJCS, International Journal of Cultural Studies, social media
Posted in Columns, International Journal of Cultural Studies | 3 Comments »
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 »
Tags: anorexia, feminism, ideology, IJCS, International Journal of Cultural Studies
Posted in Columns, International Journal of Cultural Studies | Comments Off on Feminism and Anorexia: A Complex Alliance
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 »
Tags: expertise, feminism, gender, IJCS, International Journal of Cultural Studies, masculinity, popular music, streaming music, technology
Posted in Columns, International Journal of Cultural Studies | Comments Off on Experts, Dads, and Technology: Gendered Talk About Online Music
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 »
Tags: commoditization, Cuba, Cuban Revolution, cultural heritage, cultural memory, foreign policy, ideology, IJCS, imagined community, International Journal of Cultural Studies, museums, National Identity, post-communism, socialism, Soviet Union
Posted in Columns, International Journal of Cultural Studies | Comments Off on Roots and Routes of the Cuban Revolution: Transforming Ideology into Heritage
How the network enacts its own hierarchies, and perpetuates the essentialization and commodification of peoples from the region.
Read more »
Tags: IJCS, immigrant media, International Journal of Cultural Studies, West Indians
Posted in Columns, International Journal of Cultural Studies | Comments Off on Whose Media Is It, Anyway? Representation on the Caribbean International Network
Against hegemonic memory-draining statist narratives and corporate projects, the Umbrella Movement is about remembering to struggle, and the struggle to remember.
Read more »
Tags: Beyond, Canto-pop, cultural memory, Hong Kong, IJCS, International Journal of Cultural Studies, KT Wong, Little Cheung, Singapore, Umbrella Movement, Under the Vast Sky, Wong Kar Kui
Posted in Columns, International Journal of Cultural Studies | Comments Off on “Under the Vast Sky”: Cantopop Memories and Hong Kong’s Umbrella Movement