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)
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
Marked by warring aspect ratios, resolutions, and frame rates, HBO’s Winning Time: The Rise of the Lakers Dynasty (2022–2023) chronicles the L.A. Lakers basketball team in the 1980s. Max Borenstein and Jim Hecht’s series proves from the outset that much more than nostalgia is at stake in their television series, interrupting the opening by dissolving it into digital and analog static. Framed by technologic white noise, the opening sequence proposes it is not the Lakers, but the underlying clashes of film formats that lie at the show’s core. Grappling with the multitrack possibilities in film, it is in fluctuating image frames that the seam between visual technologies is articulated. While the inconstancy of the frame highlights the image’s ability to masquerade as historical footage, it also pulls focus away from the narrative and towards the material level of the show. The waning significance of the frame in the digital age, as discussed by Vivian Sobchack, thus enacts the flexibility and interactivity common in screens today, while also highlighting that the very material gap between the image and its border that refuses to align with digital cinema practices.
Copyright (c) 2025 Mansi Tiwari https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Framed Slowness and the Ecological Value of Multiperspectivity
Drawing on econarratological insights, this article examines the ecological potential of multiperspective narratives by proposing the concept of “framed slowness,” that is, a slow way of experiencing narrative elicited by the use of framing devices. By examining how framing strategies—such as segmentivity, paratextual framing, coordination of perspectives, and rereading—can decelerate the reading experience, this article challenges the typical association of multiperspective narratives with fast-paced, plot-driven storytelling. Such framing strategies can disrupt teleology and narrative progression, thus directing readers’ attention on the multilayered entanglement of character perspectives. I suggest that “character-driven” examples of multiperspectivity are more conducive to slowness, since the juxtaposition of perspectives is not motivated solely by the dynamics of the plot. In the final section, I turn to Mark Z. Danielewski’s Only Revolutions as an experimental multiperspective novel employing the four framing strategies for slowness I discuss throughout the article. Through the adoption of a complex interplay of material and internal framing strategies, Only Revolutions offers insights into the entanglement of a human love story and planetary, more-than-human temporalities. This framing of slowness positions multiperspectivity as a crucial narrative strategy vis-à-vis ecological issues.
Copyright (c) 2025 Gabriele D'Amato https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Media Framing and Stereotype Transformation
This _Article delves into the interplay between framing and stereotypes within Polish gender discourse, focusing specifically on the portrayal of Germans and LGBT people in Polish print and online media from 2008 to 2015. By examining both historical and contemporary stereotypes, the study reveals how entrenched anti-German sentiments are recontextualized within new political frameworks, intertwining with anti-LGBT rhetoric to shape public perception and perpetuate social biases. Through the application of framing theory and mechanisms identified by Snow et al.—including frame bridging, amplification, extension, and transformation—the research uncovers how stereotypes of Germans and LGBT people are strategically manipulated to evoke particular emotional responses and reinforce ideological narratives. The analysis highlights the media's and political discourse’s pivotal role in influencing societal attitudes and policies towards marginalized groups (LGBTQ+ community) and the transformation of stereotypes. By offering a comprehensive examination of Polish media content and political rhetoric, this paper contributes valuable insights into the dynamics of stereotype evolution and their broader impact on contemporary social and political landscapes.
Copyright (c) 2025 Ewelina Woźniak-Wrzesińska https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
“Within the Gates of the Master, Is There Any Such Thing as a Prime Minister?”
In chapter five of the Daoist classic Zhuangzi, we find the story of an altercation between Shen Tujia and Zichan in the halls of their master Bohun Wuren [engl. Uncle Dim Nobody/Non-Human]. Zichan, a famous prime minister, does not want to be seen quitting his master’s hall together with the ex-convict Tujia, so as not to have his reputation tainted by this acquaintance, and asks him not to leave at the same time as him. Shen Tujia responds that “within the gates of the master,” there is no such thing as a prime minister: By crossing the threshold of the hall of practice, they have entered a space where external, societal forms fall away. Starting from this exchange, and the paradoxical situation of a spatial frame where framings vanish, this article seeks to explore the Daoist practices of ‘forgetting’ and ‘emptying’ presented by the Zhuangzi. Building on sinologist Romain Graziani’s analysis of the complex relation between the spatial threshold and the difference between external, societal space, and internal, open and formless space in this scene, this paper sets out to question how the liberatory and equalizing promise of meditative emptying relates to existent framings of social space.
Copyright (c) 2025 Ludwig Drosch https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Reframing the Dove, the Rifle, and the Faces
Débora Arango is considered by critics to be an outstanding artist, both in her use of painting as political denunciation, and for being a woman who used her art to challenge gender roles and the conservative values of her time. However, before her death and during the office of Álvaro Uribe Vélez (2002–2010), Arango gifted the president a drawing he commissioned, which he made a symbol of his government by inserting a text between the sketch and its frame. From the vantage point of the image’s public archive, how should this be interpreted as part of Uribe’s political iconography? This _Article aesthetically and politically reframes the ex-president’s partial bracketing of the artist’s work by means of his discourse, by outlining a broader picture that considers first a contextualization of Uribe’s discursive appropriation of only half of the drawing for his propagandistic ends—currently the dominant discourse on it; and second, presents the artist’s political oeuvre as an interpretative repertoire, mapping the image’s critical potential by evoking its affectively charged visual tropes or Pathosformel.
Copyright (c) 2025 Juan Camilo Brigard https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
The Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) in New Mexico, USA, the world’s first operational geological repository for transuranic waste, represents a planetary shift in human interaction with the natural environment. Mined 655 meters below the earth’s surface in ancient salt strata, the WIPP is designed to exploit ecological processes, unfolding over geological timescales, to contain the radioactive byproducts of the nuclear weapons development. Nuclear waste, especially that contaminated with plutonium-239, entraps human action for 241,000 years because of its lethal nature and long half-life, posing a temporal challenge beyond human comprehension. In addition to the New Materialist term entanglement and its derivative entrapment, I propose the term entrustment which I define as an attempt to re-situate the human within the natural realm by offloading its own entrapping/entrapped responsibilities onto ecology’s self-healing capacities. By anticipating that salt formations will shift over time to encapsulate radioactive waste, nature is being used as a reliable participant in solving a human-made problem. This _Article argues that the WIPP situates the human and its effort within geological timescales, entrusting the landscape with the responsibility of containing and mitigating its nuclear legacy.
Copyright (c) 2024 Taisuke Wakabayashi https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
This _Article explores the racial and geographic dimensions of disposability and extractive use to conceptualize the contemporary relationship among waste, plastics, and people, particularly in the U.S. South. In their essay, “Mapping Black Ecologies,” JT Roane and Justin Hosbey argue that the eco-social knowledges within Black Southern and other African diasporic communities must frame interventions in the face of environmental crises. As a discipline, Black Ecologies offers a lens to analyze eco-social hauntings across space, time, and matter, providing flight paths beyond ecocidal futurity. Environmental justice scholarship demonstrates that the materiality of waste definitively and disproportionately impacts Black health. What is considered trash today is undoubtedly tied to a historical continuum of disposed-of matters, animate and otherwise, that precedes and exceeds a myopic understanding of ‘trash’ as plastic or other material waste. We argue that contemporary pollution often ends up in majority-Black elsewheres in the U.S. South and exists in spatial-temporal relation to systems of conquest and captivity. Combating this form of ongoing racial enclosure, Southern Black folks challenge the rigged notions of value through quotidian negotiations: coalition building, political advocacy, protests, and more. To conclude, we illustrate the need for iterative, emergent strategies that resist wastelanding by wrestling not only with the materiality of pollution but also with the sociological and relational underpinnings of disposability itself.
Copyright (c) 2024 Christopher Lang, Breanna Byrd https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Despite the ongoing prevalence of homelessness throughout the world, the experience remains highly stigmatized. Presentations of homelessness in traditional media tend to render subjects faceless, nameless, static, and passive, dehumanizing them in the process. In response to this presentation, some homeless individuals are using social media to share their lives and experiences. This _Article examines the social media posts of two young homeless women. It explores their experience and presentation of homelessness in their daily videos on TikTok and YouTube. Acting as a confessional and relational diary online, posting on social media allows these women to challenge existing perceptions and narratives about homelessness by showing their authentic day-to-day experience of it. By sharing their lives online, these women offer their viewers a deeply intimate, vulnerable, and relational window into the experience of homelessness, which challenges the faceless, nameless and largely invisible experience depicted in traditional media. They achieve this by sharing their routines of self-care and care for others; by participating in public space and community; and by performing gratitude, selflessness, hard work, and humility. Sharing their experience of homelessness on social media enables these women to craft a self-presentation, framing themselves as more-than-homeless.
Copyright (c) 2025 Ümit Kennedy, Shima Sardarabady https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Obsolescence and Extinction in Mike Nelson’s Installation Artworks
Obsolescence presents an opportunity to reflect on the impermanence of human presence. The ontological unpredictability of the obsolete means that objects relegated to social peripheries can unexpectedly solicit attention. Building off of a personal encounter with a discarded shoe sole jutting out of sand on the beach, this perspective examines how the obsolete objects that appear in Mike Nelson’s installation artworks are changed by their reappearance in his 2023 survey at the Hayward Gallery, a brutalist art gallery at the Southbank Centre in Central London. Nelson is a contemporary British installation artist who constructs large-scale dreamlike environments out of the very real detritus of post-industrial ruins. By forcing an encounter between trashed objects and spectators passing through gallery space, Nelson troubles the ocular habit that keeps waste out of sight (and out of institutional site). This perspective traces Nelson’s practice of forming and later reforming trash into sculptural installations, and considers how the obsolescence of his chosen materials can frustrate fixed categorizations of site, spectator, and sculpture.
Copyright (c) 2024 Polly Bodgener https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Scholarship often regards theory as a passive object of human agents: composed by an author with an intention, assigned to a student by a teacher for a purpose, and used by a student to understand, explain, or predict something. And yet, at some point in the academy, depending on the disciplinary context, both students and researchers will encounter ‘difficult’ theory. Such theory is difficult on two levels, in that both its content and its form of expression resist straightforward understanding. Instead, such theory excels in the production of different forms of knowledge and the exploration of new ways of producing knowledge. Encounters with difficult theory frequently produce knowledge that either doesn’t meet the university’s quality standards, or that the author simply discards. From the vantage of institutional epistemology, there’s something ‘wrong’ with such theory because it doesn’t function, yet the university continues to engage with such theory, for its difficulty provides cultural capital by means of habitual distinction. Though the university coerces difficult theory to provide understanding and methodical knowledge, such theory doesn’t do what it should do but slows down knowledge production and/or produces unintelligible gibberish: theoretical trash.
Copyright (c) 2024 Paul Kaletsch https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
The _Essay explores affective and cultural legacies embedded in disposal architectures. Drawing on various theories of waste, it examines the material histories of domestic disposal and notions of affect and belonging. Central questions include how the design, function, and everyday use of disposal systems shape perceptions of waste; how these architectures relate to notions of citizenship; and how waste is perceived as either a social good or a mere trace of survival. In different literary and cultural contexts, the _Essay examines historically shaped distinctions between purity and pollution, necessity and excess, and structure and disorder through the lenses of Lauren Berlant's concept of intimate publics and cultural theories of waste
Copyright (c) 2024 Laura Moisi https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0