Since true crime podcasts emerged in the 2010s, short-form podcasts that post single episodes on discrete topics have become a popular style of true crime podcast. These episodes draw upon publicly available information or interviews with police, victims and criminalised people. As police appear routinely as guests, this article explores the role of contemporary short-form true crime podcasts in shaping the police image. Drawing from five Australian short-form true crime podcast episodes with police guests, this article examines how the podcasts’ aesthetic and technical qualities can shape and circulate police narratives. It outlines how the host’s role as facilitator, first-person perspectives and selective reflection can play a role in maintaining the position of police as primary definers of crime in the symbolic economy of policing and intervene in the conditions of new visibility. This article argues that these conventions indicate that short-form TCPs should become an important site for examining contemporary police image work.

With the rapid expansion of livestreaming platforms in China and the growing participation of creators from marginalised backgrounds, some formerly incarcerated individuals have entered the digital labour market as self-described ‘special university graduates’, sharing lived experiences of crime, imprisonment, and reentry with online audiences. Drawing on narrative identity and relational desistance scholarship, particularly the concept of belonging, this study examines how lived-experience streamers navigate stigma, platform governance, and the demands of digital labour while performing prison and post-release narratives. Over 6 months, 42 ex-prisoner creators on Kuaishou were observed, with sustained attention to 13 of them, and in-depth online interviews were conducted with five participants. The findings show that livestreaming operates as a negotiated relational space in which creators engage in moral meaning-making, shape pro-social narrative selves, and cultivate audience recognition. Through ongoing interaction, livestream rooms can generate reciprocal emotional investment and a sense of community, enabling conditional forms of belonging. At the same time, these practices unfold within tightly regulated platform environments and broader structures of moral governance that constrain what can be said, how prison experiences are framed, and which identities are deemed legitimate.

At demonstrations and uprisings throughout the world, police and military mete out punishment via a particular form of violence that is designed not to kill, but rather to maim. This paper examines this understudied dimension of the police power in the phenomena of blinding those who stare back at police, including journalists and civilians. While visuality, the relationship between power, knowledge, and seeing, proscribes or prohibits what visual theorist Nicholas Mirzoeff terms the right to look, maiming functions as a means of pacification against staring, debilitating individuals with often permanent injuries and scars as well as populations through having to suffer distorted versions of life, what queer theorist Jasbir Puar refers to as the sovereign right to maim. Subsequently, the state and its police tell us how to look. When we deviate from its visuality and commands of “Move along, nothing to see here,” we expose ourselves to potential debilitation, often through “less lethal” means. However, when police tell us there is nothing to see, we must not avert our attention but continue to embody the right to look. Otherwise, we lose the possibility of staring quite literally and with it, the power of the (counter-)visual.

This article examines ‘Gore Content’—online photos and videos of wounded, mutilated and dead bodies—through the lens of a refigured ethics that emerges between modern moral order and postmodern ambivalence. Drawing on an ongoing digital ethnography, it traces how smartphone capture, platform architectures and algorithmic circulation have normalised the availability of lethal imagery while fragmenting moral authority across fields such as journalism, law, activism, and vernacular online publics. Building on Bauman’s account of postmodern ethics and sociological notions of refiguration, the article argues that contemporary moral evaluations of gore oscillate between two tendencies: a politics of visibility that mobilises violent images as evidence and critique and a normalisation of suffering that shifts spectatorship towards shock, provocation, or affective play. Case vignettes—from cartel execution videos and ‘Narco blogs’ to platform moderation workarounds and algorithmic misfires—show how ethical frames are no longer centrally imposed but situationally negotiated, producing unresolved tensions around authenticity, legitimacy and responsibility. The article thus reframes Gore Content as a privileged site to observe how moral logics are overlaid, contested, and pragmatically coordinated in networked media.

In the immediate aftermath of the independence, Sri Lanka experienced the emergence of a considerable number of youth militant groups. Amongst them, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) maintained a “de facto” state authority in two provinces since 1990s to 2009, when it was militarily defeated by the government of Sri Lanka. Women’s participation in the LTTE since 1990s challenged the male hegemony of the postcolonial Sinhala Buddhist state, leading to their criminalization through gendered stereotypes such as “bad mothers,” “prostitutes” and “deviant women” lacking moral conscience. The state disregarded the agency embedded in women’s deathly acts of resistance for citizenship. Despite the male dominance in the two competing state-building attempts and the projection of the politically active women through cultural stereotypes, women in the LTTE continuously asserted their political subjectivity, particularly in the post-war context against a repressive state. Based on 42 qualitative interviews from Jaffna, Kilinochchi, and Mannar along with archival research, this paper examines the genealogical evolution of the state’s construction of terrorist “subject” and women’s epistemic resistance against labeling. This paper contends that listening to the voices of subaltern women is essential to understanding their lived experiences under state violence and militarization.

A decade after the misogynistic GamerGate harassment campaign, the emergence of the ‘Sweet Baby Inc Detected’ (SBID) community, self-branded as #GamerGate2, raises questions about the evolution of digital hate in gaming. This study employs a digital ethnography to analyze the SBID movement, which coordinates via Discord, Steam, and X to campaign against Sweet Baby Inc., a diversity consultancy. Through non-participant observation, we compare SBID’s strategies and narratives to its predecessor. Findings reveal SBID as an evolved, more centralized movement that weaponizes review-bombing, memes, and conspiracy theories to frame diversity initiatives as an ideological ‘infiltration’. Crucially, the community functions as a conduit for manosphere narratives, constructing its identity around externalizing blame onto feminism, objectifying women, legitimizing symbolic violence, and internalizing male victimhood. While SBID’s overt anti-feminist stance marks a strategic shift from GamerGate’s dissimulation, it perpetuates the same core dynamics of harassment and exclusion. The study concludes that gaming spaces primarily serve as resonant refuges for pre-existing radicalized discourses, demonstrating the persistence and adaptability of misogyny. SBID exemplifies the evolution of anti-DEI movements into sophisticated, politically articulated forms of digital activism, reflecting the ongoing polarization within gaming culture.