ABSTRACT Content creators of color on TikTok sit at the intersection of the growth in influence of the platform and its centrality to the global flows of racialized and gendered representations across the world. But how do content creators navigate between these two trends to monetize their content? I answer this by examining the experiences of a set of young Chinese and Filipino male TikTokers and analyze their use of four main strategies for monetization: 1) some content creators use the #Kpop hashtag to widen their audience, to attract followers and do paid product placements on TikTok; 2) others use their newly found social capital to access opportunities for professional photo creation off the app as professional photographers for K-pop adjacent companies; 3) still others use live streaming on TikTok to attract gifts directly from followers as a source of income; and 4) some, unhappy with the income from streaming on TikTok, instead used TikTok to redirect to other apps such as Amazon Wishlist and PayPal. I categorize these monetization strategies along to two key dimensions: social relations (based on visibility) and digitalization (monetizing on or offline).

ABSTRACT Major publishing companies, often called ‘blue publishers,’ dominate Indonesia’s publishing ecosystem, including Yogyakarta. This article examines the resistance strategies of Yogyakartan indie publishers from 2000 to 2022. The 1998 reformation marked the turning point of such resistance, which gained momentum between 2015 and 2020 with the Kampung Buku Jogja Festival, continuing until the Covid-19 pandemic (2020–2022). Indie publishers disrupted the hegemonic distribution chain by adopting social media, e-commerce and e-business, carving out alternative networks outside mainstream control. The study documents and analyzes these strategies through selected references, interviews and focus group discussions with publishing stakeholders in Yogyakarta, conducted over 4 months (May to August 2022). Using a qualitative-descriptive method and a cultural studies approach, the research explores the factors, reasons, forms and strategies behind indie publishers’ resistance. Findings reveal that Yogyakartan indie publishing has successfully occupied spaces neglected by major publishers, creating a dynamic ecosystem of cultural resistance within Indonesia’s book industry.

ABSTRACT We are eight Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal scholars collaborating across Country who, in this paper, examine how relational, place-based storying functions as an ethical site of resistance and anti-colonial practice. Grounded in our relationships with three rivers, we demonstrate how being in relation with place and each other challenges colonial overwriting of history and enables the reimagining of anti-colonial futures. We introduce ‘fire-making’ as an ethical and anti-colonial methodology grounded in relationality. Like tending a fire, we collect material to enable ignition, feed and stoke the flames, and maintain burn through yarning, moving and storying together. This practice guides our engagement with uncomfortable truths about the ecological impacts of colonial behaviour. We examine how fences, signs and weeds materially mark ongoing colonial violence, while also exploring the ethical negotiations required to sustain respectful relationships with Country and one another. Our storying centres Aboriginal knowledges and memories. We position storytelling as a deliberate act of resistance, an intentional modelling of how Aboriginal peoples have always made futures. Through iterative cycles of sharing, responding, and re-telling, we show how collaborative, place-based storying can inform Indigenist futures and offer a cultural studies praxis grounded in ethical accountability to place.

ABSTRACT This article investigates how selected media commentators in Aotearoa New Zealand framed the Treaty Principles Bill (TPB). Drawing on a discourse analysis of opinion pieces in The New Zealand Herald, Stuff and Newstalk ZB, this paper examines the rhetorical and ideological work in selected media commentaries by prominent media professionals in Aotearoa. The analysis identifies three dominant media frames – hegemony of logocentrism, spectacle of the indigenous other and weaponization of multiculturalism – that collectively manufactures a settler-colonial consensus around the TPB.

ABSTRACT In 2024, the Australian government introduced legislation requiring digital platforms to restrict Australian users under sixteen years from holding social media accounts to protect from digital harms such as abuse and disinformation. The first half of this paper analyses key discourses on the mandatory restriction, demonstrating an underlying assumption that young people’s use of digital platforms is about exposure to (sometimes problematic) content rather than participation, sharing, creativity, art, engagement and debate. The second half of the paper analyses the factors that condition widespread adult support for restriction. Drawing on survey data of Australian adults exposed to digital harms, we analyse how support for mandatory restriction may be shaped by (i) demographic factors, and (ii) experiencing or witnessing digital harms. We end by discussing how participants who gave a very high importance to free speech but sought to restrict young people from social media likewise ignores youth participatory culture online.

ABSTRACT This article investigates the deployment and wide circulation of military metaphors on social media during the early outbreak of COVID-19 in China, focusing on how the associated discursive and visual forms involve politics of emotion that shaped ‘responsible’ bodies for pandemic governance. Rather than treating these metaphors as simply ideological rhetoric intended to boost morale or evoke heroism, the study argues that they are embedded in an ‘in-the-now’ trauma structure as organizing principle which refers to the reassembling of past wounds, historical contingencies, and ethical imaginaries to organize the present. Trauma here does not remain a static wound of the past, but becomes a generative force entangled with multiple temporalities, constituting affective infrastructures that enable the politics of emotion to mobilize affective investments, reconfigure subjectivities, and enact forms of self-governance. This article reveals how affective infrastructures produce attunement and voluntary action, making possible the emergence of responsible subjects beyond simple top-down control. It opens up a space for rethinking how affect operates in times of crisis as a force that traverses and reconfigures the making of subjectivity, collectives, and politics through intricate entanglements of histories and governance.