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.

ABSTRACT This paper responds to Indigenous futures’ intersection with reading and reception practices. Indigenous futurisms have always been storied and cultural. We contribute to existing research by considering Grace Dillon’s Indigenous Futurisms paradigm in conversation Mary Graham’s relationality, bringing both in proximity to literary form and reception. ‘Indigenous relationality’ as proposed by Mary Graham, Elder Scholar of the Kombumerri clan of the Yugambeh Nation (2014) is a core principle in moving from an excavating close reading of Indigenous cultural texts. We interrogate sometraces of coloniality in reception of Indigenous cultural artefacts, practices that fail to recognize the energizing realities of Indigenous futurism as fundamentally relational. Finally, we offer some emergent modes of reading practice, with a particular focus on Lystra Rose’s young adult speculative novel Upwelling (2022). We reflect on the place of Country and generative reading in literary and cultural studies and critical Indigenous studies.

ABSTRACT In this paper, I outline some of Ross Gibson’s early work before using his 2018 book, Basalt, as the basis for imagining a particular ‘return to country’, focusing on its poetic language as a means of opening out the experience of landscape. This then allows for links to be made to a range of recent creative projects by First Nations artists and to work done in Western Victoria by the Gunditj Mirring Traditional Owners Aboriginal Corporation and Engineering Heritage Australia (Newcastle) to seek (and to later achieve) UNESCO World Heritage for Gunditjmara Engineering works at Tae Rak/Lake Condah and Tyrendarra. I then return to a lengthy speculation by Ross in another artistic conversation with Alana Hunt that proposes a way of imagining the fullness of a land thought to be empty.

ABSTRACT This paper argues that Everymind’s Mindframe guidelines for depicting lived experience of mental ill health require review. This is based on an analysis of the literature surrounding the efficacy of such programmes and the ways in which the guidelines play out in a televisual example, SBS’ two-part series How ‘Mad’ Are You? (2018). While the Mindframe goals of attempting to reduce the stigma associated with mental ill health are well-intentioned, their recommendations are not always aligned with achieving such a goal. Mindframe’s approach primarily addresses stigma in terms of public attitudes rather than the more nuanced, multifaceted approach seen as crucial to engaging with such a complex problem. The Mindframe guidelines also do not sufficiently account for how representations can have potentially differential impacts on public-stigma and self-stigma. The specific aspects of the guidelines analysed in terms of How Mad Are You? are the focus on mental health literacy, the emphasis on recovery, and the avoidance of ‘myths.’ This article not only questions whether the Mindframe guidelines represent best practice in terms of anti-stigma media interventions but also argues that systematically applying the guidelines can potentially cause harm by increasing self-stigma.

ABSTRACT Ross Gibson describes his ideal museum as an ‘aesthetically designed environment [in which] an urge seems to flow through and from each object because of an energy generated within the sense of the people encountering the objects’ (2015, 69). The vivacious energy of a museum sparks in the push and pull between an engaged viewer and systems of display. How might a curator orchestrate ‘vivacity’ in an exhibition? How did Gibson design such spaces himself? By turning to his writings on art and museology alongside conversations held with the curatorial team at the Art Gallery of New South Wales (AGNSW), this article offers a set of notes towards the contemporary museum. Our essay explores Gibson’s call for liveliness in museums and seeks to unravel his distinctively animist reception aesthetics.

ABSTRACT This article examines the intersection of digital media spaces and cultural transformation in post-Arab Spring Tunisia, exploring how emerging mediascapes shape youth political participation and identity formation. Through Foucault’s ‘heterotopia’ and Bourdieu’s youth as a ‘social construct’, this study investigates how young Tunisians use the physical and digital mediascapes to create their political and social identities. As they move from conventional physical locations to digital platforms, the research reveals a profound cultural shift that gives rise to new forms of mediated citizenship. The global and local influences pull Tunisian youth in different directions, adding more complexity to their attitudes and behaviours. The study demonstrates how digital media spaces function as sites for political expression and cultural production while reconfiguring traditional civic engagement. Tunisian youth use digital platforms for everyday activities but avoid them for serious political involvement. Their acquired ‘glocal’ culture emanates from both the ‘global’ and the ‘local’, which creates spaces where the physical, digital, or mental overlap. The findings contribute to debates about digital media’s role in shaping public discourse and cultural identity. By examining the interplay between online and offline political participation, this research advances our understanding of how digital mediascapes influence cultural formations in contemporary societies.

ABSTRACT This article presents findings from an Australian Research Council Linkage Project investigating LGBTQ+ memory, migration and collecting institution practices. One component of the study interviewed people living in South Australia who had migrated (internally within the country) to Adelaide. Interviews were analysed to understand the community, cultural and interdependency conditions that made mobility towards a smaller Australian city feasible, in contrast to the everyday myth that LGBTQ+ persons were more likely to gather in the major East Coast urban areas. This paper discusses and analyses the ways in which participants described their experience of feeling ‘welcome’ and the reasons why they found Adelaide a ‘welcoming’ environment in which to settle. Several key reasons for ‘feeling’ welcome were discerned, including the progressive socio-political environment and law reform of the 1970’s and 1980’s and the sense of inclusivity in public life, the arts and urban space of a smaller city. We analyse these findings from a perspective attentive to the ethics of interdependency, and demonstrate the ways in which an ethics of ‘welcome’ operates outside interpersonal behaviours and can be performed through the infrastructural and cultural setting of the place of arrival.