Cultural Agency Research Articles

Lanka Mahila Samiti, Mary Rutnam and girls’ education

This article engages with the maternal education politics in late colonial Sri Lanka by looking at the implementation of maternal health in the gendered syllabus of middle-class girls’ schools. After...

The data acquisition methodology to build the source information base for personnel monitoring (technological approach)

The All-Russia monitoring of the staffing needs in librarianship is an efficient way to get valuable current and prospective data through using the latest technological solutions and efficient interaction between public libraries affiliated with regional/municipal agencies of culture of the Russian Federation constituents.The authors discuss the technology and results of data acquisition, as well as the obtained staff monitoring database. For the first time, the tested method of data acquisition enabled the Russian State Library to monitor the staff needs in librarianship in the multitasking mode and to apply the cloud technology with the professional application designed for online operation on the national scope. The authors explore the differences between national and foreign software providers in rendering specific services to online users. The professional application enabled to conduct monitoring in the shortest term, to optimize expenses and to save resources in complex environment. Among methodological solutions, the Center of Educational Programs Monitoring of the Research Educationa Activities Department of the Russian State Library, have designed the standardized data collection forms for every level of libraries.The effectiveness of this methodology enabled to launch the system of data acquisition for the All-Russian monitoring of staff needs in the library sphere, to systematize data by the RF constituents and as a data set, and to build the source database for staff monitoring in librarianship.

“We Are Living in Fear”: Transnational Repression, Regime Type, and Double Precarity in the Uyghur Diaspora

Since 1997, the Chinese Party-state has engaged in a campaign of transnational repression against the Uyghur diaspora. This campaign has grown in severity since the 2014 declaration of the People's War on Terror and Strike Hard campaigns, which, taken together, involved a program of mass incarceration for the Turkic peoples of the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR). This article examines the everyday impacts of extraterritorial persecution on the Uyghur diaspora and their ability to successfully integrate into their new host societies and exercise their political and cultural agency. The article draws from nineteen in-depth interviews with Uyghurs living around the world and a dataset of over 7,000 incidents of China's targeting of Uyghurs globally since 1997. We examine how Chinese practices and the everyday effects of transnational repression vary between different regime types. We argue that Uyghurs experience both marginalization in their host country and the threat of transnational repression from China, a particularly precarious situation that we term double precarity. This double precarity is felt most acutely in more authoritarian contexts.

Coast Salish Women and Cultural Continuity in the Early Salmon Canning Industry

Coast Salish women's participation in the salmon canning industry of the 20th century is well documented. However, most of the historical data focuses on the exploitation of these women in the context of the canning industry while the extent to which they were able to exercise cultural agency in that context has been largely ignored. This essay provides an overview of the importance of salmon in pre-contact Coast Salish cultures from the economic to the political and spiritual realms. Given this background, the essay examines what parts of this pre-contact culture were able to survive the colonial institution of capitalist labour and why, to the extent they were able to exercise agency, Coast Salish women chose to work in the canneries over other forms of employment.

Cultural transfer and literary culture in eighteenth-century Brussels. French journalists as cultural mediators

ABSTRACT The eighteenth-century Southern Low Countries have long been considered a no man’s land, as a result of the continuous import of exotic flavors and foreign texts. But is a no man’s land also a wasteland? What if we looked at it differently and started focusing on the literary culture that was slowly taking shape, already during this long-neglected period, through cultural transfer and translation? This article focuses on the cultural agency and discursive self-shaping of three French journalists who took an interest in the literary culture of this somewhat obscure region – of Brussels more particularly – and contributed to its cultural scene by publishing literary periodicals: the Littérateur Belgique (1755) by Alexandre Des Essarts (1728–1803), the Journal de Bruxelles, ou Le Penseur (1766) by Jean-François Bastide (1724–1798) and finally the Journal de Bruxelles and Alexandre Robineau (1746–1823) as one of its driving forces. Beyond the micro-level of individual agency, these periodicals helped create a productive intertwinement between a focus on local literary culture on the one hand and a continuous search for inspiration in foreign models on the other.

KETERKAITAN DIKLAT DAN KOMPETENSI SUMBER DAYA MANUSIA TERHADAP KINERJA PEGAWAI (Studi Pada Dinas Pendidikan dan Kebudayaan Kabupaten Sumbawa)

This study aims to examine the effect of training and competency on employee performance at the Education and Culture Agency of Sumbawa District, either partially or simultaneously. The type of this study was associative. The type of data used in this study is quantitative data in the form of scores from respondents' answers to questions given through a questionnaire. The population in this study was all employees at the Sumbawa Regency Education and Culture Service, totaling 50 people. Seeing that the population in this study is relatively small, less than 100 people, this study used a census sampling technique (saturated sample), which is a sampling technique when all members of the population are used as samples. Statistical tests in this research were carried out using the Stata application (Statistics and Data) to assist with data processing. The Stata output will then be studied using multiple linear regression analysis techniques, partial hypothesis testing (t test), simultaneous hypothesis testing (F test), and determinant coefficient test (R2). The results of this study showed that the training and competency had a positive and significant effect on employee performance at the the Education and Culture Agency of Sumbawa District, either partially and simultaneously. The training and competency had quite a large ability to effect on employee performance variables at the Education and Culture Agency of Sumbawa District, namely 40%, while the remaining 60% was effected by other variables outside this study model, such as the work motivation, incentives, and organizational culture.

Archaeologiques of sight: The visual world fosters the engagement between doing, seeing, and thinking

The paper examines how materializations of human practices relate to human cognition and to socio-cultural contexts. By combining evidence on the relationship between material culture and perceptual behaviour, we aim to understand the interactions between the mind, objects, and the world. The research is based on data regarding the visual perception of prehistoric pottery that was analyzed using Eye-Tracking techniques in a way that has not been applied previously to archaeological material culture. The datasets come from Galicia (NW Iberian Peninsula) and range from the Middle Neolithic until the end of the Iron Age (6000–200 BP). They belong to very different contexts that comprise a long-term history through diverse socio-cultural formations. A rigorous methodology makes it possible to unveil cross- and intra-cultural patterns of visual response to materiality, while avoiding presentism and subjective bias. The results provide new insights into the agency of material culture, which contribute to our understanding of the relationship between the mind and the material world, and account for the transitive engagement between the way of thinking, seeing, and making things.

Dialectics of impairment: historical anxieties in late-colonial Bengali fictional narratives on disability

ABSTRACT This article examines a body of early twentieth-century Bengali fiction foregrounding persons marked as disabled (including people experiencing physical disability, learning disability and chronic illness). A number of Bengali short stories and novels offer embodied narratives, which consider the human body as a productive site of contest between the colonial social order, the attempt to impose Western modernity and indigenous consciousness. An emergent sense of cultural agency can be found to be claimed by people, whose physical and mental states deviate from codes of ‘normalcy’. These works unearth social discrimination based on the binary of ‘fit’ and ‘unfit’ under the converging rules of native feudalism and foreign colonialism. The treatment of corporeality in Bengali texts of the period from the 1930s to the 1950s cannot be fully grasped by applying the disability theories of the Global North. Rather these texts conflate multiple forms of marginalization of subject bodies to explore several socio-historical cross-sections and address the question of identity formation. This article rereads selected fiction on disability by Manik Bandyopadhyay (1908–1956) and Tarashankar Bandyopadhyay (1898–1971).

Entangled Memories: representations of Crimea in literature, poetry and art

The United Nations' cultural agency, UNESCO, has recently added the Historic Centre of Odesa (Ukraine) to its World Heritage List. Odesa is part of the Crimean Peninsula and it is a legendary port that has left its mark on the cinema, literature and the arts. Crimea has always attracted a large number of cultural figures including Alexandr Pushkin, Maxim Gorky, Anna Akhmatova, Ivan Bunin, Marina Tsvetaeva, Isaac Babel, Boris Pasternak, etc. Like the Russian-born Anton Chekhov, Ukrainian authors who have written about the peninsula were, historically, not native Crimeans. Crimea is not only the focus of geopolitical conflict, but also the source of artistic and literary inspiration. In this article, I analyze some perspectives on Crimea, starting with Ivan K. Aivazovsky’s paintings (1817-1900), and some selected texts from those of the above-mentioned authors. For a current view on Crimea, I shall also consider some aspects of Ilya Kaminsky’s contemporary poetry.

Аксиологический конфликт как потенциальный триггер дискурсивной практики культуры отмены (на материале обновленных словарных статей “woman” / “man” в Кембриджском словаре (2022))

The study aims to identify a potential trigger for the discourse practice of cancel culture in the context of supplementing/redefining/correcting the meaning of linguistic units, changing their evaluative qualification. The paper considers the change in the value components of the notional content as a result of updating the dictionary entries of the words “woman” / “man”. Based on the discourse analysis of the article “Biden admin agencies refuse to answer, What is a woman?”, the researcher examines a set of communicative means used by the author of the article to achieve communicative intention, as well as the communicative behaviour, tactics and strategies of government agencies of American linguistic culture in the zone of communicative risk. The study is novel in that it is the first to consider the discourse practice of cancel culture within the framework of axiological linguistics. As a result of the study, the implicit possibility of activating public censure in the media sphere due to an axiological conflict has been established and the communicative strategies and tactics of avoiding the communicative situation of cancel culture have been identified.

Of gods, tricks and weirdos—A perspective related to content, practices and aims in the usage of AR for touristic experiences and spatial storytelling

<p>The complicated and interwoven relation of the tourist as an explorer and in the same time as audience of digital content is the background of this perspective. The topic is strictly based on the work, and its impact, made in 10 years by the group “Komplex” in the field of creation of augmented reality experiences in urban space, mainly for social enterprises funded by cultural agencies. The transformation of citizens in tourists able to discover “further experiences” hidden in the urban environment and also the bridging of this experience with specific imaginary diffused in the web is the scenario that this perspective wants to highlight in order to achieve a multilayered set of impacts such: i) slow tourism, ii) cultural and technological activation of neglected areas, iii) twisting narratives related to specific neighbors, iv) inclusion of slices of the urban society far from the touristic hot spot.</p>

An exploration of participants’ views and experiences of cultural museums and their challenges

Cultural museums have always been considered guardians of culture, promoting the core concepts of cultural preservation and conservation. This paper delves into the challenges faced by two cultural museums from various perspectives and examines the transformation of museums in supporting Papuan culture through values centered on conservation and preservation, as gleaned from the experiences and views of the participants. This study is qualitative research that employs an interpretive strategy, with participants including museum personnel, cultural agencies in Papua Province, academics, and teachers from Cenderawasih University. Data were collected through in-depth interviews, field observations, and literature studies. The study identified three themes: (1) Collection and space management, (2) Museum image, and (3) Capacity building and moral responsibility of human resources. To enhance cultural services, the study suggests that museums in Papua need to focus on strengthening collection management, enhancing visitor convenience, and providing increased staff support in the cultural field.

Intermedial Cross-dressing Performance as Cultural Intervention

As a theatrical phenomenon, cross-dressing performance has passed down through many centuries and manifested itself in different parts of the world. In the era of film and television, it was adapted to and has appeared on screen, as a popular means of entertaining the audience, and so plays an important role in influencing public opinions on certain social and cultural issues, such as the politics of gender and interculturalism. In light of theories of gender performativity and cultural agency, the intermediality of cross-dressing performance is approached in this article, mainly based on a careful analysis of Li Yugang’s solo shows on TV, the Chinese film Farewell My Concubine, and the American film M. Butterfly. By having the intermedial intersected with gender and interculturalism, this article argues that intermedial cross-dressing performance, on the one hand, has transformative power over gender politics, as it contributes to the gradual acceptance of differences in gender as well as other social categories. On the other hand, in some cross-dressing performances on screen, the subversive and the reiterative are blended together in cross-dressing performance, which undermines the legitimization of sexual orientations outside of the heterosexual norms. In addition, the entanglement of intermediality and interculturalism in cross-dressing performance in such a film as M. Butterfly contributes to critical reflections on cultural and categorical boundaries, which has profound implications for cross-cultural communications.

Reducing Uncertainty Caused by Social Noise on Social Media Platform

Social noise and social entropy are two concepts that have been the subject of studies in the last two decades (Bruno, 2010; Matei et al.,2010; Alsaid et al., 2020; Alsaid & Pampapura, 2022; Pampapura et al., 2022). Studies that discussed misinformation, fake news, conspiracy theories, controversies, and disinformation also focused on certain aspects of social noise (Romer & Jamieson, 2020; Van Prooijen & Douglas, 2018). In this study, social noise refers to users intentionally or unintentionally participating in creating, disseminating, or spreading misinformation on social media. Recent studies have identified six characteristics or constructs of social noise. The six constructs identified by the recent studies include image curation, relationship management, cultural agency, conflict engagement, affiliation & politics, and norms & beliefs. In this study, we use the constructs to quantify and measure social noise using entropy and uncertainty reduction theory. The study focuses on two questions. How do we measure entropy as a degree of uncertainty caused by social noise? How does reducing uncertainty and social noise contribute to reducing the spread of misinformation? The primary analysis indicated that entropy as a measure of disorders of a tweet 1.5. This result is in line with the results produced by Son et al. (2019). Sentiment analysis results show that 66.6% of the tweets are subjective, while 33.4 % of the tweets are objective (facts). Topic modeling results also indicated the presence of keywords that is characteristics of social noise constructs in the dataset.

Pera+Flora+Fauna: The Story of Indigenousness and the Ownership of History @ 59th Venice Biennale (23 April–27 November 2022)—An Exhibition Review

Commissioned by the People of Remarkable Talents (PORT), the Perak state’s creative and cultural agency, the exhibition, entitled Pera+Flora+Fauna: The Story of Indigenousness and the Ownership of History was curated as one of the official collateral events in the 59th International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia. It highlights the local inquiries and interpretations of indigenousness, ownership of history and nature through creative expressions of contemporary artists, towards further interrogating the inter-affecting relationships between inhabitants, culture, and nature in the context of Perak state (La Biennale di Venezia 2022; Nabila 2022; PORT 2022a). Through interviews with the stakeholders involved (i.e., organising and management team, curatorial team, and participating artists), this article reviews the curation, the exhibits, and the outreach of exhibition.

글로벌-로컬 혼종문화상품의 정체성과 진정성

This article examines the issue of whether hybridised cultural products created in the colonial Western-centric global-local world system can retain local cultural identity and authenticity through the case of African wax. African wax, a wax-printed fabric, is a raw-dye printed cotton fabric produced in factories by European textile companies based on batik, a traditional Indonesian fabric. It is a hybrid cultural product that is neither a traditional African fabric nor produced in Africa, but has acquired the attributes of African culture through its consumption in Africa. According to the conventional view that local culture should be locally generated and produced with originality, uniqueness, and purity, it is difficult to call hybridised wax prints made in Europe during the colonial period as African local culture. Therefore, based on transcultural theory, which interprets colonial local culture from a post-Western perspective, we found that the agency, creativity, and tradition of African local culture in the consumption process transformed the Indonesian-style European wax into African wax and made the wax print an African local culture. Furthermore, we suggest that if authenticity as a commodity is based on originality and genuineness in the production process, then authenticity as a culture should be based on usability, functionality, knowledge, and spirituality in the consumption process, so that Africans as consumers can recognise the cultural products created by wax prints, just as Europeans as producers naturally accept new cultural products such as fashion shows and exhibitions that reappropriate Africanness created by Africans. African wax is an important example of how hybrid cultural products created through the dynamic process of global-local production and consumption during the colonial period can define local cultural identity and authenticity, and what it takes to become new local global cultural contents today.

Christianity and the negotiation of citizenship in Hong Kong: an account of faith-based active citizenship

ABSTRACT Cultural traditions, including religions, are central to understanding and practising citizenship. The complex relationships between religion and citizenship should be explored in depth. Both citizenship and Christianity were transplanted from the West to Hong Kong during the colonial era, and Christianity still occupies an important place in public life and civil society today. In the specific context of state – civil society, we discuss the development of citizenship and Christianity in Hong Kong and illustrate how some Christian organisations and leaders exercise their cultural agency in social activism through a wide range of social and political events. Their work creates a strong civic culture of Hong Kong Chinese Christians, advances citizenship and supports a vibrant civil society. By examining the roles of individual and collective agents in the formation and contextualisation of a Christian tradition, we develop a framework for faith-based active citizenship and expand the discussion of Chinese citizenship.

The afterlife of punk: Evental sites of punk 771

Building on the argument of my previous article ‘Autonomy and agency: The event of punk 77’, this article defends the continuing political relevance of punk. Rejecting the dominant story that punk was a utopian, short-lived revolution, over before it had a chance to effect any social change, I argue that punk survives through people who, radicalized by its vision of cultural agency, motivate revolutionary ‘ways of being’ committed to realizing and transmitting that vision to others. The subjects of 77 are heir to a revolutionary tradition, choosing to ‘keep’ punk ‘alive’ through fidelity to its inaugural event; a fidelity that involves renewed acknowledgement of the ‘subversive’ dimension of the event’s original ‘epochal rupture’. Two case studies are offered in support of this argument. An account of the eruption of a punk scene in the provincial town of Drogheda in Ireland in the early 1980s is followed by discussion of the specific way punk engaged young women, a case study based on interviews with Gina Birch, founding member of first-generation all-female punk band the Raincoats. I conclude by recasting the legacy of punk as a tradition of revolutionary inheritance.

Kara Walker: A Black Hole is Everything a Star Longs to Be

Following exhibits in Basel and Frankfurt, Kara Walker’s show A Black Hole is Everything a Star Longs to Be: Drawings 1992–2020 is on display in the De Pont Museum for Contemporary Art in Tilburg, The Netherlands. New works on paper alongside a selection from Walker’s private archives compose a treasure trove of well over 600 drawings, experimental writings, personal notes, dream narratives, sheets of textual and visual play, found objects, and scrolls. Incontrovertibly finished pieces appear side by side with try-outs, gestures, studies, and sketches. Occupying the halls of a former textile factory, they proclaim the ongoing process of making, a lot more making, and then trajectories of other kinds of making: new forms, new directions. The viewer soaks up the existential inquisitiveness permeating the artist’s encounter with language and the world: with concrete political developments and incidents in the news but also with the colonialist tools, identity constructions, and racial and gender elisions honed by centuries of Western art. A spirit of playful investigation and rambunctious humour hails from many works. Lightness is seldom absent. It is an aspect of the works’ depth of curiosity. Gravity and levity fuel each other in engagement with ferociously difficult subjects, carried by form and language (Figure 1). A compellingly anti-heroic notion of cultural agency emerges from this subjective richness, which veils neither pleasure nor racial and sexual atrocity. One expects this affective intensification and conceptual rigour from Walker, but it is a stunning accomplishment when it flows forth from a massive turn to the artist’s archive.

Gazed Pottery: an Archaeometric-Cognitive Approach to Material Culture Visuality

This paper presents a study of visual perception through the application of eye-tracking of prehistoric ceramics. The study is a feasible methodology to understand the agency of material culture through quantitative techniques, which allows for the analyses of possible relationships between visual-perceptual behaviour, material culture and social complexity. In particular, the horizontality of gaze is shown to be associated with pottery from early periods and its verticality increases in pottery materials from later, more complex societies. These, and other results, confirm that differential patterns of visual response by observers are determined by the material characteristics of each ceramic style. Implications for improved interpretation of archaeological phenomena are discussed including the possibilities of new applications for heritage management. Therefore, eye-tracking analysis appears to be a powerful and profitable archaeometric technique.