This article examines the phenomenon of quitting cultural work. Drawing on biographical interviews conducted with Italian graduates in creative writing, it focuses on aspiring creative workers who dedicated significant time and resources to a creative education, attempted to find employment within the cultural industries, sought to establish a career, but ultimately quit. By investigating less visible areas in cultural work scholarship – quitting, creative education and creative writing schools – and by theorising quitting as an active choice, rather than as an individual failure or defeat, this article explores rarely discussed forms of agency among aspiring cultural workers. It argues that those who quit consciously challenge implicit expectations placed on creative workers, such as working for free, demonstrating unconditional flexibility and embracing self-entrepreneurship in the hope of future job opportunities. Through their acts of refusal, those who quit challenge structural features of work in the creative sector and contribute to reframing the negative connotations surrounding quitting. This study demonstrates that the research on quitting belongs to the scholarship on cultural work: by bringing aspirant creative workers’ biographies to the centre of the discussion, it contributes to a deeper understanding of cultural workers’ lives, agency, choices and values.

Drawing on empirical research conducted with 19 British travel bloggers, the article reveals how aesthetic labour is a crucial practice in travel bloggers’ digital work, helping them in navigating platform capitalism, audience expectations and digital visibility. The article explores how through a range of aesthetic labour practices, travel bloggers ultimately seek to embody or resist a distinctive travel blogger ‘dispositif’ (or identity). It is through the lens of the ‘travel blogger dispositif’ that the article highlights how the aesthetic logics and algorithmic biases of platforms perpetuate an idealised version of the travel blogger ‘dispositif’, with participants challenging these digital biases through their aesthetic labour practices. This research contributes to the literature on digital labour by illustrating the intersectional, resistant and strategic nature of aesthetic work in platformed spaces, offering insights into how travel bloggers perform, negotiate and reshape their ‘dispositif’ identities within algorithmically driven digital environments.

This article comparatively explores two distinct cases of children’s health communication on tuberculosis in the interwar period, and COVID-19, to trace the development of biopolitical governance in Turkey. Biopolitical visuality encompasses affective sensibilities and imaginations about the nation by conveying multilayered discourses. Public health discourse aims to ensure the health and optimal development of adult-to-be citizens and to provide strategies for improving parents’ and communities’ awareness of children’s health. Our critical multimodal discourse analysis, based on our TÜBİTAK 3005 (Scientific & Technological Research Council of Türkiye)-funded project, ‘Analysis of Public Health Visual Communication Methods’, demonstrates traits of biopolitical extension through contextual emphasis. We compare the imagery of children through a specific section of the Yaşamak Yolu journal to official visual health communication materials addressing child health during the COVID-19 pandemic in Turkey. We contend that visual discourse on the consideration of medical science, the relation of mental health to the physical and the gender roles of parents, progressively supports an individuation of biopolitics. We conclude that while early Republican visuals allowed some interpretive freedom through enabling a reformulative agency for the citizen subject in pursuit of well-being, the neoliberal era’s COVID-19 materials intensified pedagogical control and individualized responsibility, especially within the family, which expanded biopolitical governance into the routines of everyday life.

Death Café is a not-for-profit social franchise created in the United Kingdom in 2011. At a Death Café, people, usually strangers, gather to talk about death in an unstructured, informal manner over a cup of coffee and a slice of cake. This article, based on ethnographically informed research into Death Cafés across the United Kingdom, applies a neo-tribal lens to describe this social phenomenon. First, it demonstrates how the four neo-tribal features of shared sentiment, rituals and behaviours, fluidity in membership, and space manifest at a Death Café. Then it presents the demographics of this neo-tribe and shows that that public forum privileges certain middle-class norms and views relating to death, specifically of verbal communication, control and individualism in pursuit of ‘good death’. Furthermore, it examines an attitude encountered during fieldwork that organising Death Cafés dedicated to specific communities, such as LGBTQI+ or BAME, goes against the ethos of openness and accessibility of Death Café. This criticism is based on a perception, common among Death Café proponents, that shared mortality is an exceptionally strong bonding agent among individuals who are otherwise strangers. However, it presents a paradox for the self-identity of the Death Café neo-tribe: many claim that the appeal of Death Café is that anyone can attend the Death Café event, which results in the ability to hear diverse stories and encounter complete strangers. However, this narrative often overestimates the cultural and social diversity encountered in Death Café meetings, and the appeal that having such a conversation universally has. This article responds to a recent call to interrogate the power relations, conflict, and forms of distinction within neo-tribal sociations that have often been underplayed in favour of the emphasis on the inclusive and consensual aspects of neo-tribal lifestyles or occasions.

Critics of recent developments in music culture have often claimed, or accepted, that ‘functional’ or utilitarian experiences of music (using music to achieve goals such as exercise, relaxation, sleep or work concentration) have become more prevalent as a result of the widespread use of music streaming platforms, and these experiences are often contrasted with more aesthetically-oriented ones. Relatedly, such critics often also claim that streaming is leading to a greater prevalence of distracted, inattentive musical experience. After situating our research in a discussion of research on the sociology and psychology of music in everyday life, and of research on music consumption in the digital era, we draw on a diary and interview study conducted in England to show that people’s musical lives are more complex and varied than such accounts suggest. We explore musical consumption in the digital age by discussing material from these diaries and interviews related to two of the different ‘functions’ or ‘uses’ of music that have appeared prominently in recent critiques of music streaming – one based on providing ‘energy’ and ‘focus’, the other on recovery and restoration, in the form of ‘relaxing’, ‘chilling’ and so on. We show that while individuals may indeed engage in such functional and distracted music experiences, they also engage in aesthetically oriented, emotionally charged and attentive ones. We consider the implications of our findings, challenging on one hand views of musical consumption as a resource transparently available for well-being (apparent in sociological and psychological research on music in everyday life), and on the other as a ‘tactic’ for resisting power (apparent in some cultural studies of consumption). Instead, we advocate a sympathetic but critical understanding of music as a way of coping with the challenges of everyday life, shaped by powerful systemic forces.

Twenty years on from its mainstream breakthrough, the popularity of emo music has resurged, offering new opportunities to appraise its cultural legacy. While acknowledging the creative and cathartic qualities of emo as fans, we reflect on how the intersections of race and gender have (not) been thoroughly engaged with in prior research on the genre. We also demonstrate how improvements concerning representation in emo are still constrained, with people of colour (POC) – particularly Black women – carrying heavy self-advocating responsibilities. Through a two-part case study – first, the marketing and booking of When We Were Young festival and second, a reflexive first-person analysis of music journalism surrounding emo’s ‘new wave’ acts – we explore how emo has been (re)branded for old(er) and new(er) generations in the 2020s, how musical belonging and expertise is negotiated within the culture, and how nostalgia narratives can serve to romanticize emo’s exclusionary past at the expense of its more inclusive future.

The assessment of credibility plays a central role in the process of determining the refugee status of queer asylum seekers and deeply affects both how they narrate their stories and how decision-makers interpret them. In this article, I take up Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s notion of paranoid and reparative practices to show how credibility assessment operates as a paranoid narrative practice which aims to expose fraud, and as such has a bearing on the outcome of the process. As a reparative practice, I draw from narrative hermeneutics and contemporary fiction to study credibility in queer asylum narratives as a narrative phenomenon, a dialogically constructed (un)reliability. As a case study, I analyse two novels by a Finnish Kosovan writer Pajtim Statovci, My Cat Yugoslavia (2018) and Crossing (2020). My analysis of the novels explores the complexity of narrating violent and traumatising experiences and the accountability of interlocutors in interpreting them.

Despite extensive research on inequalities in music, it remains unclear how power is conceptualised and analysed within musical contexts. The purpose of this study is to explore contemporary academic research on power in musical practices and institutions. Through a scoping literature review of peer-reviewed articles published between 2013 and 2023, the study examines how inequalities in music are framed and explored. Our findings reveal a strong emphasis on gender, race and social justice, with music education emerging as the most studied context. Despite frequent references to power, the concept is often left undefined, and research primarily highlights marginalised groups’ experiences rather than the mechanisms through which power operates, limiting the ability to address structural inequities. We suggest that future research should further engage with how power operates, is maintained and contested in musical institutions and practices, with particular attention to dominant groups, material power and institutional mechanisms shaping inequalities.