On_Culture: The Open Journal for the Study of Culture is a biannual, peer-reviewed academic eJournal created and edited by doctoral researchers, postdocs and professors working at the GCSC (Justus-Liebig-Universität Gießen). It provides a platform and forum for pursuing and reflecting on the study of culture. It investigates, problematizes and develops key concepts and methods in the field. More often than not, developing such new approaches and emerging topics is a collaborative and collective process. On_Culture is dedicated to fostering such collective processes and the cultural dynamics at work in thinking about and reflecting on culture. The journal consists of three sections: academic _Articles (double-blind peer review), _Essays and _Perspectives such as video clips, interviews and visual statements, which can be submitted on a rolling basis. On_Culture is the result of collaborative processes and emergent structures in the field of e-publishing. On_Culture puts new approaches and emerging topics in the (trans)national study of culture ‘on the line’ and, in so doing, fills the gap____ between ‘on’ and ‘culture’. There are numerous ways of filling the gap, and the plurality of approaches is something for which we strive with each new issue. The journal offers numerous opportunities to contribute: calls for abstracts released biannually seek contributors of peer-reviewed academic _Articles and (review) _Essays, while ideas for our shorter _Perspectives (textual, visual, graphic… you name it!) pertaining to any and all issue topics are welcome at any time.
International Graduate Centre for the Study of Culture (GCSC)
Notes Towards an Aesthetics of Celebration
This _Essay explores how the notion of celebration can reveal some aspects of the social life of literature that are rarely considered in literary theory. Defining celebration as the production of a festive and appreciative event by gathering together, it is argued that literature can accordingly be seen as a locus of celebration where different peoples’ lives cross and a sense of ‘we’ is negotiated and experimented. To make this argument, focus is shifted from individual texts to literature as an infrastructure for producing, circulating, and using texts, assembling writers, editors and critics, libraries and bookshops, discourses about literature, and the teaching of and research into literature. This infrastructure, it is argued, can instantiate a celebrative being-together due to three qualities: 1) Because it allows writers and readers take a reflective stance toward language, it endows literary language with the power to describe the word differently and to conjure imaginary universes and beings. 2) It installs an aesthetic relation between writer and reader where the reader puts her own sensibility in the service of realizing the potential offered by the literary work, making the life of literature into an exercise in being together, being interdependent and premised on one another. 3) We not only interact with literature; we also interact with each other about literature. Each of us have different capacities and capabilities when we use the affordances for imagination provided by the text, and we will realize a text’s potential using our imaginative powers each in our own ways. These three characteristics of the modern infrastructure of literature are indispensable components in experiencing literature as a celebration: it gathers us into a public and creates a common for our interaction.
Copyright (c) 2026 Frederik Tygstrup https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
This _Essay challenges the taken-for-granted ‘celebratory paradigm’ that dominates scholarly understandings of national days. Drawing on comparative evidence from Central, Eastern, and Northern Europe, it argues that national days are frequently not occasions of unambiguous celebration but hybrid ritual formations that intertwine joy, commemoration, and mourning. To capture this ambivalence, the article advances the concept of commemobration, denoting national day rituals that blend celebratory performances of nationhood with solemn practices of remembrance and grief. The argument unfolds through a comparative analysis of national day ceremonies in Poland, Hungary, Finland, and the Baltic states. Particular attention is devoted to Poland’s Independence Day on 11 November, which exemplifies a conflicted commemobrative pattern shaped by historical trauma, political polarization, and the rise of illiberal populism. The analysis shows how state-centered commemorations coexist with, and are increasingly overshadowed by, nationalist counter-rituals such as the March of Independence, producing a ritual landscape marked by both heroic glorification and collective victimhood. By situating national days along a continuum ranging from celebration and commemoration to grief and mourning, the article reconceptualizes national days as complex ritual events. It concludes by arguing that national day studies should move beyond the sociology of celebration and nationalism studies to engage more systematically with memory studies and death studies.
Copyright (c) 2026 Mihai S. Rusu https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Copyright (c) 2026 The Editorial Team https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Absolutist Celebration in Late Ancien Régimes
This _Essay aims to flesh out and systematize a series of reflections on the inversely proportional relationship between the eroding conceptual basis, in terms of legitimacy and sovereignty, of absolute rulership in the mid- to late eighteenth century, on the one hand, and the proliferation and growth of public celebrations thereof, on the other. The analysis is based on the life circumstances and ceremonial trajectories of empress Catherine II of Russia (r. 1762–1796) and king Gustav III of Sweden (r. 1771–1792). By offering an overarching typology of ruler celebrations and their attendant principles and patterns, the _Essay serves as a stepping stone towards a) systematic exploration of other eighteenth-century ruler-ruled equations in Europe and beyond, and b) connecting this burgeoning framework to an already existing apparatus for studying ‘ruler visibility’ and ‘popular belonging’ in nineteenth-century and later contexts globally.
Copyright (c) 2026 Darin Stephanov https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
The question of appropriate clothing becomes especially significant on special occasions—particularly during rites of passage such as weddings. That the choice of a bridal gown is consistently at the center of attention is also reflected in diverse (social) media portrayals. The various levels of meaning and attributions of bridal fashion are expressed not only in the acquisition of a bridal outfit (including bridal insignia such as the veil, flower bouquet, etc.), but also on the wedding day itself. Furthermore, the elements of wedding fashion often function as objects of embodied memory, even years after the wedding. What kind of ritualized practices surrounding Westernized bridalwear can be currently observed? Which attributions of meaning—individual as well as medial—are recognizable, and what role does the bridal dress play as a vestimentary object within the broader context of the wedding? These research questions will be addressed through a multi-sited ethnographic approach. Augsburg in Germany lends itself as a focal point for research, not least due to its transnational ‘bridal fashion mile’ and its historical significance as a former center of the textile industry. The aim of this article is to highlight the specific value of bridal fashion as a (vestimentary) ritual practice. By interweaving empirically collected data with approaches from ritual and fashion theory, I will argue that ritual fashion practices are clearly distinct from those of everyday fashion.
Copyright (c) 2026 Ina Hagen-Jeske https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Ancient Roman Columns, Eagles, Sciences, and Other Representations
During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in Europe, the iconography and apparatus of dining on festive occasions—particularly the numerous elaborate centerpieces—served to narrate, enhance, and reiterate the occasion or aspects thereof. These functions, integral in shaping the participants’ understanding and experience of the celebration, were made possible through the ‘representational’ character of those objects. This paper aims to bring forward and discuss the reasoning behind the use of diverse iconographical elements in the centerpieces of the time for the purposes of meaning creation and the communication of ideas. Four cases of centerpieces from around Europe are discussed extensively towards this aim, as used in four distinctive but equally important spheres of the contemporaneous European societies: the celebration of a military victory at Versailles in 1674; an ecclesiastical jubilee of an abbot at the Zwettl Monastery in 1768; a secular wedding of a noble couple in the Kingdom of Naples in 1687; finally, a queen’s diplomatic visit to Venice in 1768.
Copyright (c) 2026 Panagiotis Doudesis https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
In Colombia, where histories of colonial dispossession, civil war, and narco terror resist resolution, the theme park has emerged as an unlikely instrument of national memory-making. At two of Colombia’s most visited theme parks, Parque del Café in Quindío and Hacienda Nápoles in Antioquia, this _Article traces what happens when Colombia’s contested histories and mythologies are given gates, entrance fees, and roller coasters. At these parks, I argue that celebration works as a technology of historical resolution, producing and selling a coherent narrative scrubbed clean of complexity. Parque del Café freezes time, embalming a cafetero heritage built on colonial dispossession and celebrating a lifestyle it claims to honor even as it hastens its disappearance. Hacienda Nápoles, built from the ruins of infamous narcotrafficker Pablo Escobar’s estate, accelerates time, declaring narco terror transcended and the state triumphant. But in practice, buried violence and histories resurface through the very practices of celebration as visitors project their own desires, griefs, and fantasies onto curated space. Through historical analysis and participant observation in the parks and surrounding communities of Montenegro and Puerto Triunfo, combined with semi-structured interviews with visitors, workers, residents, and local experts, this _Article traces how celebration becomes not only the mode through which history is tamed, but the very arena in which the impossibility of its taming is revealed.
Copyright (c) 2026 Sydney Coldren https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
This _Perspective explores Black Joy as a mode of cultural resistance and collective self-representation through a critical engagement with the 2024 exhibition When We See Us: A Century of Black Figuration in Painting, held at the Kunstmuseum Basel. Framing celebration not as a passive emotion but as a political method, the piece moves through five thematic reflections: visual sovereignty, spatial presence, sensorial engagement, everyday vitality, and shared empowerment. Drawing on bell hooks’ “The Oppositional Gaze,” Saidiya Hartman’s Wayward Lives, Stuart Hall’s writing on cultural identity, and Tina Campt’s Listening to Images, the essay situates joy as a curatorial strategy and relational force that exceeds representation. Through a blend of theoretical analysis and autoethnographic reflection, this _Perspectiveconsiders how the exhibition mobilizes joy not only through visual representation, but by crafting an immersive environment—through color palettes, spatial layout, soundscapes, and moments of embodied encounter—which invites visitors to feel, dwell in, and move with joy as a shared affective force. The result is a counter-archive of Black life that refuses trauma as its only frame. When We See Us offers a radically intimate vision of Black presence, where quiet pleasure, softness, and collectivity emerge as acts of aesthetic and political power.
Copyright (c) 2026 Serafina Andrew https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Re-enactments and the Politics of Remembrance
Forty years ago, on September 8th, 1985, Cuban-American artist Ana Mendieta died after falling from the window of the 34th-floor Manhattan apartment she shared with her husband, the Minimalist artist Carl Andre. Andre was accused of murder but later acquitted in a highly publicized trial that split the art world. Born in Havana in 1948 and exiled to the United States at the age of twelve, Mendieta became a prominent voice of the 1970s feminist art movement. Her ‘earth-body art’ combined elements of ‘land art’ and ‘body art,’ transforming her experience as a woman into the central theme of her work. At the same time, she challenged Western conceptions of both ‘nature’ and ‘culture,’ drawing on pre-Hispanic cultures in Mexico and Cuba and asserting her identity as Other. For all these reasons, recent major exhibitions and scholarly debates on feminism and decoloniality have returned to Mendieta’s work with renewed attention. I take the fortieth anniversary of Mendieta’s death as an occasion to investigate the intersection of performance and remembrance. One way of considering this is by examining how various artists engage in reenactments of Mendieta’s work as acts of cultural memory and collective remembrance. My goal is to understand how these reenactments open up possibilities for affective, embodied modes of celebration.
Copyright (c) 2026 Fabrício Belsoff https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Perrear hasta el piso or How to Dance Reggaetón in Germany
This auto-ethnographic _Perspective reflects on reggaetón music, its festive experience, and the cultural changes it has undergone in the Latin migrant context. Two years ago, a collective of Latin American DJs founded La Casa del Perreo in Germany. Since then, they have hosted reggaetón parties in various European cities. The _Perspective traces the cultural meanings behind this music scene in the context of migration. These festive events become a space of socialization and celebration of Latin American culture. At the disco, reggaetón music and culture are showcased not only as a mainstream product, but also as a landscape within which the Latin American experience is performed and celebrated. Through my personal experience of attending various reggaetón parties in Germany, I explore the cultural significance of the reggaetón scene.
Copyright (c) 2026 Miguel Ángel Castro Caballero https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
The region of Cholula, comprising the municipalities of San Andrés Cholula and San Pedro Cholula in Puebla, Mexico, has experienced rapid urban expansion and increased real estate development in recent decades. This transformation has led to an intensification of processes of commodification and demographic change. However, indigenous communities in San Andrés Cholula have persisted in their organization and sustenance of religious festivities that are deeply rooted in neighborhood-based structures, such as mayordomías. This _Article explores the function of these celebrations as forms of spatial appropriation and everyday resistance within the context of urban restructuring, emphasizing their role beyond mere expressions of cultural continuity. The study draws on long-term ethnographic research to analyze three key celebrations—Christmas Day, Candlemas, and the Feast of Santiago Xicotenco—in order to explore how ritual practices reinforce social networks, reproduce local authority, and sustain territorial belonging. The _Article’s argument is supported by theories of ritual, the production of space, and urban indigeneity. The institutionalization of social and cultural capital enables Indigenous residents to maintain their material presence and collective visibility in an increasingly commodified urban context. In this manner, they assert their right to remain and to define the social and spatial meaning of their city.
Copyright (c) 2026 Adriana Armenta-Ramírez https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Copyright (c) 2025 Farouk El Maarouf, Anastasiia Marsheva, Justus Grebe https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
For a recent issue of the journal Dialogues in Human Geography, I was asked to write a response to an article that examined the use of the word ‘post’ as a heuristic to better understand places associated with ‘post’ ascriptions—in the case of the original article, post-apartheid (Houssay-Holzschuch, 2021). The post anchors a present-day entity to the past; it does so by opening and holding open a space of hope. This hopeful space is cruelly optimistic (cf. Berlant, 2011); it tethers identities to places and events of the past, while also carrying the promise of unattachment (Anderson et al., 2023). I concluded my response with a provocation drawn from Doreen Massey’s (1999) scholarship on the space-time regime, by asking: “Who uses that vocabulary most powerfully and to what effect?” (Drozdzewski, 2021: 5) Thoughts on that question comprise the subject matter of this _Essay—what can the ‘post’ do? To think-with the power and effect of the ‘post,’ I draw from a range of examples: (post)conflict, (post)war, (post)Socialist, (post)national, and (post)disaster. Then, using case study examples from Poland, Germany, and Australia, I explore the politics of identity, place, and memory across spatial and temporal contexts to show how the post functions powerfully as a lexicon, while being simultaneously sanguine and banal in its application.
Copyright (c) 2025 Danielle Drozdzewski https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Copyright (c) 2025 The Editorial Team https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
This _Perspective in the form of a photo essay introduces Reframe, a documentary photography project that sought to challenge Western stereotypes and colonial narratives surrounding Namibia. Prompted by a viral image from 2016 and the problematic media responses it generated, the _Perspective traces how dominant representations of Namibia have historically erased its people in favor of empty, romanticized landscapes. Reframe responds by empowering Namibian photographers to document everyday life from the inside, culminating in exhibitions in Windhoek and Berlin. Through this exchange, the project constructed a decolonial visual practice and promoted a more complex and self-determined view of Namibia’s social realities.
Copyright (c) 2025 Lisa Ossenbrink, Julia Runge https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
This _Essay explores digital disruptions at the intersections of awakening narratives and historical revivals in the postdigital era. Characterized by the normalization of technology, the postdigital (as opposed to the hyphenated post-digital) invites critical reflection on the political, social, and cultural implications of digital infrastructures. While optimism surrounding digital advancements is often framed through the lens of apolitical affordances, this _Essay challenges that perspective by foregrounding the concept of cyclical time. The so-called ‘Arab Spring’ exemplifies that this temporal framework is used politically: the 2010–2011 uprisings in North Africa initially sparked hopes for liberation through technology (Spring/Awakening) only to be followed by disillusionment and despair (Winter/Sleep). These cycles highlight an apparent duality of digital affordances to both empower and constrain. Through the metaphor of biphasic pre-industrial sleeping patterns, this _Essay delves into the ideological underpinnings of digital disruptions and how they animate a contemporary return to imagined medieval fantasies. This resurgence reveals troubling overlaps between alt-right ideologies and digital culture. Ultimately, this analysis contends that the postdigital has become a fertile ground for rewriting and reimagining history, one that calls for selected knowledge seeking, and where the struggle for democratic rights continues amidst the spectre of reactionary forces.
Copyright (c) 2025 Cristina Moreno-Almeida https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
The Kazakhstan project at the 60th Venice Biennale (20 April 2024–24 November 2024) was titled Jerūiyq: Journey Beyond the Horizon. According to the curators, Anvar Musrepov and Danagul Tolepbay, it aimed to stimulate Kazakh decolonial futurism: “We wanted to create our own Wakanda, our post-nomadic essence, our ‘Kazakhness.’ Technology and the future are present in it, but they are not the primary focus. There is something beyond language, a spirituality, perhaps something connected to space and the landscape, our identity, which largely determines our way of thinking.” In these words we see how decolonial futurism functions as a creative disruptive fiction that mediates between forging spatial identity, geographical imagination, and decolonial indigeneity.
Copyright (c) 2025 Nikolay Smirnov https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Following the death of my close friend and artistic mentor Justin in 2021, my friends and I, connected by grief, embarked on a collective stickering project using Justin’s graffiti tag. This initiative, spanning across North America and Europe, was conceived as a tribute to honour Justin’s memory by occupying space and mapping our collective loss. The act of stickering emerged as a powerful medium for expressing collective grief, offering a form of affective mapping and anti-temporal mourning. This paper analyzes the stickering project to reveal how creative practices can function as a form of witnessing and transformation. It highlights the ways in which graffiti's autobiographical nature can evolve into a communal practice outside of its common subculture, pushing against the conventional cultural contexts within which graffiti typically operates. My analysis of this project draws on theoretical frameworks such as affective mapping, relationality, and testimony as developed by scholars including Dominick LaCapra, Kelly Oliver, Judith Butler, Leigh Gilmore, and Shelley Hornstein. Through this lens, the paper examines how the stickering project navigates the dynamic interplay between past and present, space and time, embodied experiences, and empirical knowledge. I attempt to further explore this anti-temporal dimension through the notion of ‘grief-time,’ modelled after ‘queer-time,’ as articulated by Jack Halberstam and Carolyn Dinshaw. This paper considers the transient nature of both graffiti and grief, underscoring the stickering project’s role in confronting and negotiating the temporal aspects of mourning. It demonstrates how artistic and communal expressions can offer new insights into the processes of memory-making, creating an active practice of remembrance. This exploration of our collective endeavor underscores the transformative potential of creative practices in the face of loss and the complex ways in which they interact with the cultural and temporal dimensions of human experience.
Copyright (c) 2025 Rachelle Sabourin https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
The paper attempts a preliminary framing of what we can understand by the work of ‘framing’ in the context of borders and migration and its inherent tensions. These are articulated in current biopolitics which are committed to life, care and humanitarian reason (Frame 1: Life). At the same time however, current biopolitics produce death zones. Therefore, the current politics in the Mediterranean are framed by what, following Foucault’s concept of biopolitics, Roberto Esposito calls thanapolitics and Achille Mbembe necropolitics (Frame 2: Death). These tense, overlapping and intertwined framings of migration and the discursive networks also refer to legal norms and norm-setting, the law and its violence, the right to life and the limits of current humanitarian law and Human Rights (Frame 3: Law).
Copyright (c) 2025 Heidrun Friese https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
In the _Essay, the author offers a reflective analysis and tracking of the needs, obstacles, and challenges of global solidarity for Ukraine, based on his work from 2022 to 2025 on building a popular rolling community “influencer feed” on the Twitter/X platform. At its height in July 2023, the digital coverage and data counter-disinformation project had nearly 35 million impressions per month, in over a hundred countries. As a resistance effort for the defense of literacy, education, and the integrity of expertise in Ukrainian culture, language, politics and policy, the ongoing February 24th Archive connects six main groups: (1) professionally trained field experts in Ukrainian Studies; (2) interested nonspecialists in and beyond European and North American academia; (3) leading journalists worldwide in over thirty languages; (4) OSINT amateurs and mapmakers cataloging war crimes to build evidentiary cases for international criminal prosecution; (5) diplomats and policymakers; and (6) most crucially, a voting protest citizenry that crosses ideological lines, hoping to ensure and raise literacy in their regional, national, and broader communities.
Copyright (c) 2025 Steven Seegel https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Throughout art history, disruption has been a deliberate tool for conveying meaning. In architecture, deviations from norms provoke reflection and challenge principles like Vitruvius’ firmitas, utilitas, and venustas. From the 1980s on, deconstructivist architects systematically used disruption to express Jacques Derrida’s concept of deconstruction through form, space, and perspective. Though buildings are not texts, this movement questioned architectural and societal norms. This article explores how deconstructivist architecture functions as a reflective medium, radically challenging political, social, and aesthetic structures. Disruption, as theorized among others by Lars Koch and Tobias Nanz, acts as both a destructive and productive force. Architects like Peter Eisenman, Bernard Tschumi, and Daniel Libeskind integrated Derrida’s philosophy into their work, exposing architecture as the “last fortress of metaphysics”—an illusion of stability masking its own constructed nature. Their buildings reveal hidden structures and produce an ambiguity of many possible orders and norms without referring to one of them. By employing disruption as a subversive tool, deconstructivism bridged architecture and philosophy, provoking critical reflection on the built environment.
Copyright (c) 2025 Jennifer Konrad https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
The question ‘Whose heritage?’ is a central denominator when it comes to cultural heritage and the representation of the past in the present. It invites us to rethink who shapes heritage for whom, while simultaneously opening spaces for diverse actors to (re)-appropriate heritage and to disrupt its discourses and performances on different scales and scopes. Unsettled and governed by dissonances and controversies, the heritage pluriverse is a hugely diverse as well as competitive arena, that affects and is itself affected by disruptions and the positioning of alternative (counter-)narratives. This _Article argues that disruptions can hint at crucial issues in heritage spaces, such as the plurality of vested interests, as well as multivocality and individual affective responses. Through the example of St Paul’s Church in Frankfurt and the discourse surrounding sites of democratic history in Germany, it examines how different stakeholders in the heritage pluriverse put forward very different positionalities and argumentative patterns in order to narrate their version of a heritage site and draw associations with particular memories and identities. The _Article traces how counter-narratives form a substantial part of the heritage process and demonstrates how disruptions can become a productive lens for mediating and doing heritage in a diverse and complex world.
Copyright (c) 2025 Sandra Engels https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
This _Article examines the role of disruption in two pivotal instances of subject formation in the late 1960s and 1970s Atlantic World: Operaismo (Workerism) and radical feminism in Italy and the United States. To do so, it traces the history of the self-creation of workers and women as political subjects. It underscores how this becoming-subject emerged, both conceptually and tactically, through the disruption of their assigned role, place, and function within society. It describes the autonomous, unruly, and unexpected subjectivities that emerged from this disavowal and the new forms of politics, praxis, history, being-with, and against that women and workers created. The conclusion discusses the fortunes of disruptive politics and subjectivity since the 1970s and what these historical struggles can say to the liberation struggles of our present.
Copyright (c) 2025 Mehmet Dosemeci https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
The (In)Visible Man film is an artistic extension of my ongoing doctoral project: “Submission Is Power: Remasculinization in Contemporary Asian American Literature.” Through a blend of abstract dance and fragmented diaristic dialogues, the film explores the complex struggles faced by Asian American men, whose masculinities have long been obscured by historical stereotypes that render them effeminate and submissive. It also visually captures Asian American men’s process of resistance to make visible and redefine their gender identities, challenging the pervasive invisibility of their masculinities. The film poses critical questions about certain aspects of the Asian American male identity such as power dynamics, body image, queerness and sexualities, as well as the relationship between masculinities and nature. Through an intersectional lens, the film delves into the intricate intersections of race, gender, sexuality, and power within Asian American masculinities, calling for a more nuanced understanding of gender dynamics and cultural identities.
Copyright (c) 2022 Nhi Thao Do https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
This _Article explores the centrality of argumentative frames in shaping the abortion debate in Poland, focusing on their intersection with aesthetics and emotions. Drawing on framing theory, it examines how visual and rhetorical strategies are used to construct narratives, mobilize emotions, and influence public discourse. The analysis centers on three aesthetic framing techniques—grotesque, absurdity, and cuteness—as employed by anti-abortion and pro-abortion movements. Grotesque frames, characterized by graphic depictions of fetal remains and dystopian imagery, amplify moral shock to evoke fear and reinforce binary narratives of 'good versus evil.' In contrast, absurdity disrupts such frames through humor and incongruity, as seen in feminist parody campaigns which critique the artificiality of anti-abortion propaganda. Cuteness leverages the disarming and subversive qualities of pastel hues, glitter, and playful motifs to destigmatize abortion and promote resilience and solidarity. By exploring their cognitive, aesthetic, and emotional dimensions, this study highlights the transformative potential of frames in reproductive politics. It reveals how movements construct powerful narratives to challenge entrenched ideologies while navigating the risks of polarization and trivialization. This analysis thereby contributes to an understanding of the dynamic interplay between visual culture, emotional resonance, and political activism in shaping cultural and political contestations.
Copyright (c) 2025 Agnieszka Balcerzak https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
This _Article examines the intersection of disruption, disability, and ‘post-’ concepts in the aftermath of Hong Kong’s 2019–2020 protests. Sparked by opposition to the Fugitive Offenders Ordinance amendment, these protests escalated into a broader resistance movement against the erosion of civil liberties, which was eventually suppressed by the National Security Law, a lasting disruption to Hong Kong’s sociopolitical landscape. The _Article investigates how disability metaphors have been co-opted to uphold enforced optimism for Hong Kong’s neoliberal developmentalism under this new regime. A curative logic that positions health and stability as prerequisites for progress is used to justify the NSL, producing a ‘post-disruption’ identity marked by compulsory able-bodiedness and conformity to state norms. Turning to the surrealist short stories of Hong Kong writer Hon Lai-chu, the _Article explores how narratives of disabled lives critique and disrupt the affective politics of neoliberalism. Interpreted through the lens of crip critique, these stories expose the violent disruptions that challenge the neoliberal promise of progress. Drawing on Lauren Berlant’s concept of ‘cruel optimism,’ the _Articleargues that post-2019 optimism not only disrupts the lives it seeks to improve but also creates a fractured identity landscape where stability is illusory. This analysis deepens understanding of the ongoing effects of the 2019–2020 protests on Hong Kong’s identity and futurity.
Copyright (c) 2025 Carissa Ma https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
From Imagined Communities to Cultures of Collectivization
This _Essay contributes to the issue of On Culture by asking how concepts like frame or schema could be used to analyze collectivity. It takes on a praxeological perspective which does not presuppose collectivities as given entities but as something that emerges from what we do: doing group, family, gender, nation. Part of these practices is an implicit and incorporated understanding or knowledge (i.e., culture) what it is that we are doing, how to collectivize and what for. These collectivization cultures—a conceptual extension of Benedict Anderson’s imagined communities—can be analyzed as consisting of frames or schemata. The _Essay draws on cognitive theories to distinguish collectivization scripts (e.g., frames of assembling, having dinner together) and collectivization themes (e.g., stereotypes, models of families, enterprises, nations). These again are interrelated, as are practices and practitioners, who carry collectivization experiences from one practice to another and frame nations as extended families or work teams as friendship circles.
Copyright (c) 2025 Jan-Christoph Marschelke https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Copyright (c) 2024 Tobias Schädel, Juliane Saupe, Marco Presago https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
This _Perspective portrays the challenges and needs of the queer population in Serbian public discourse. Since the first Belgrade Pride in 2001, members of the LGBT+ community have encountered rejection from different sources. Although it is generally acknowledged that politics and mass media play an important role in the way that societies come to terms with queerness, there is little empirical knowledge about whether and how mass media actually contribute to the process of raising awareness and legitimation and increasing visibility. The study aims to assess changes in the online framing of the Serbian newspaper blic by analyzing the Belgrade Pride of each year from 2014 to 2024. The concept of media framing analysis is employed to elucidate the structural and dynamic interactions between the LGBT+ community and the (in)tolerant segment of the Serbian society. Furthermore, the aim of the analysis is to identify the various frames utilized in the media coverage, with a particular focus on the reporting and the actors that shape the discourse surrounding queerness. The primary argument is that, although the reporting has not resulted in significant shifts in framing, it provides a lens through which discussions about LGBT+ visibility and representation in Serbia can be conducted.
Copyright (c) 2025 Ana Marija Spasojevic https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
This contribution understands frames as tools of structuring information visually and aesthetically. Premodern flows of information and markets of news and intelligence were organized around multiple mechanisms in which the setting of frames and boundaries was a tool to sort and register knowledge. Building on archival material, this article connects printed issues of newspapers, discussions around advertising public sale, subscription, or censorship with the capacities of business or menu cards to enfold histories of expressing social interaction to highlight gate-keeping practices and to examine the communicative conditions of contact zones. I argue that enclosures of such kinds, put in frames and bound together by lines, edges, and borders, transferred premodern conditions of media into processes that shape the modern information society. Frames provided text with boundaries, helped packaging goods, and made news a serial commodity. Moreover, this started happening between 1770 and 1850 and had its ramifications in posting and collecting cards of all sorts in the late 19th century.
Copyright (c) 2025 Heiner Stahl https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0