Cultural Contestation Research Articles

Panna Addams: współczesna tożsamość „z pogranicza”. O postawie głównej bohaterki serialu Wednesday

The article is a part of qualitative interpretive research conducted as part of a doctoral thesis addressing the portrayal of femininity in contemporary selected film fairytales. The aim of the analysis was to present fairy tale heroines as an audiovisual representation of expectations, norms, and values stemming from gender and inscribed in the prevailing socio-cultural order. The qualitative interpretation of the active stance of the main character in the popular series Wednesday serves as an exe mplification of cultural contestation between the traditional understanding of femininity and its androgynous redefinition, not constrained by widely accepted social norms.

Analysis of students' computational thinking skills in solving algebraic problems in cultural contexts

This research aims to find out about students' computational thinking abilities in solving algebraic problems in cultural contests. This research is qualitative research carried out at Yogyakarta Middle School. The participants involved were 31 students in the even semester of grade 7. The data sources in this research were the results of students' computational thinking tests, interviews with students who were selected based on their communication skills and the results of test answers. Data instrument testing uses validity and reliability tests with data validity using triangulation techniques. Data analysis in this study used the pullulation technique between student test results and student interview results, then data reduction, data categorization, power display and conclusion drawing were carried out. The results of this research are that students in the high category can complete all indicators of computational thinking and problem-solving abilities. Students in the medium category can only complete two indicators of computational thinking and problem-solving abilities. Students in the low category have not been able to complete all indicators of computational thinking and problem-solving abilities. The study reveals a significant variance in the computational thinking abilities among junior high school students in Piyungan Development class VIII when solving algebra problems within a cultural context. High-achieving students demonstrated proficiency across all indicators of computational thinking, effectively navigating through various stages from abstraction to solution verification. In contrast, students categorized as moderate showed partial success, managing only a subset of the indicators, while struggling with the more complex stages of problem decomposition and implementation. Meanwhile, students classified in the low category were unable to achieve any indicators of computational thinking and problem-solving skills. This indicates a clear need for targeted educational interventions to enhance computational thinking among students, particularly those who are struggling, to ensure all students can develop the necessary skills to solve problems effectively.

From Veganism to Dinosaurs and Religion

The Essay provides space for scholars to present peer-reviewed research in a manner that uses data studies and critical reflection as occasions for advancing currents in the broader academic study of religion. Jason Ellsworth analyzes vegetarianism and dinosaurs in pop culture to highlight the ways that humans construct categories to facilitate social relationships. While such constructions serve useful for legitimation and negotiation in cultural contests, they may be less useful in actually representing objects of study with the order of fidelity scholars claim to seek.

Cultural Recontestation of Chinese Ethnicity in Surakarta City During the Reformation Era

One of the assimilation policy implementations during the New Order era was prohibiting the display of Chinese traditions and culture in public. This discriminatory policy ended in the Abdurahman Wahid Presidential era, marked by the revocation of Presidential Instruction No. 14 of 1967 through Presidential Decree No. 6 of 2000. The Chinese community regained the rights to publicly practice their religion, traditions and culture. This study investigates the forms of Surakarta Chinese community’s cultural recontestation after this revocation. This study uses historical method. Primary sources include archives of Inpres No. 14 of 1967 and no. 26 of 1998, Kepres No.6 of 2000 and interview data. The results show that after the revocation of Inpres No. 14 of 1967, the Surakarta Chinese community regained the freedom to practice their religion, traditions, and culture in public, such as praying at the temple, holding Grebeg Sudiro Festival during the Chinese New Year, revitalizing Balong Chinatown village while maintaining typical Chinese architecture, increasing the number of temples, and making Kalipepe River Bandar in Balong Chinatown village as a tourist destination. This study concludes that the Chinese community in the reformation era has regained their space for cultural contestation in public.

Intercultural Awareness Through Indonesian Gastronomy with European Flavours in The Midst of Plurilingualism Political Framework

In the midst of a multicultural society, cultivating intercultural awareness is a part of the political framework of plurilingualism, as European linguistic policy is based on a multilingual phenomenon. Plurilingualism is a renewal of the individual's ability to communicate on paralinguistic and paratextual aspects and develop intercultural skills, likely their cultural roots. This political hegemony unwittingly developed massively before the infiltration of French language in Indonesia through flavour contact in the form of gastro diplomacy. Starting with the European cookery heritage in Indonesia, this study aims to explore the presence of European flavours in culinary development to set up the attitudes of respect and understanding of the uniqueness of language culture based on French language learners. In addition to intercultural communication skills, this term contains nationalism as a political goal of plurilingualism, which ideally can eliminate cultural contestation. Therefore, the research methods are document studies, observations, and questionnaires, which aim to explore the existence of intercultural flavours as a form of cultural contact, authenticate cultural knowledge, build intercultural awareness, and diplomatic efforts from French language didactic. The result is a significant change, increasing interest in learning French, and also the development of national identity through knowledge, skills and behaviour as a part of intercultural awareness with authentic language materials.

Feminist Relational Agency and the Cultural Contestation of Heteronormative Gender Norms in the Indian American Diaspora

Through an analysis of essays published by the online magazine American Kahani, a publication that centers contemporary generations of the Indian American community, we argue that feminist relational agency allows Indian American community members to challenge dominant expressions of culturally specific heteronormative gender norms while simultaneously fulfilling their need to maintain an “authentic” sense of cultural identity. In doing so, cultural contestation emerges as a process internal to the community through which members seek to develop alternate forms of relationality while sustaining their connectedness to “Indian (American) culture.” This study contributes to scholarship about intersectional and transnational feminist agency and the Indian American diaspora by challenging the problematic application of western frameworks of agency that see non-western cultures as barriers for women of color to overcome and by specifically calling for studies that center complex and culturally specific conceptions of agency.

Fang experiences in Whitby’s Goth/ic theatre

A sign which regularly appears on the door of St Mary’s Church in Whitby, North Yorkshire, alerts visitors that Dracula is not buried in the churchyard. Dracula arrives in Whitby in Bram Stoker’s fiction, exits the stage and finally turns to dust near his Transylvanian castle. The sign, however, underscores Dracula’s enduring association with Whitby, forged by Stoker’s visit to the town in the summer of 1890. Just over one hundred years after Stoker’s visit, Jo Hampshire, a Goth from Barnsley, West Yorkshire, inspired by Dracula’s association with the town, arranged a Goth visit to Whitby, after posting an advertisement in NME magazine. The gathering launched what would become Whitby Goth Weekend (WGW). Thirty years after Hampshire’s visit, Whitby attracts a range of Goth/ic tourists, a term which here denotes Goths, the subcultural movement dating from the 1970s, and those who are attracted to the Gothic from literary tourists to Instagrammers. The article explores how Whitby, particularly its East Cliff, inspired by Stoker’s vision, operates as Goth/ic tourist space and, in particular, how it presents and is experienced as Goth/ic theatre. It reads the Whitby passages from Dracula in the context of Stoker’s experience of Gothic and melodramatic performance at London’s Lyceum theatre where Stoker worked as business manager. It traces the establishment of WGW in 1994, its evolution and adaptation in the age of social media, and how Whitby has developed to become a place of Goth/ic experience, performance and cultural contestation.

Situation Analysis of Female Academics' Career Advancement in Higher Education in Syria

This research examines factors which may be influencing female academics career advancement at Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) in Syria. The paper conducts situation analysis on academic environment at HEI in Syria, exploring factors which may be impacting female academics experience and career progression and lack of academic representation at senior management levels. The paper examines a private HEIs investigating the environment in Syria highlighting the situation after 2011. The methodology applied in diagnosing the situation, is based on data collected from a capacity building in higher education project (CBHE), funded by Erasmus+. The methodology employs the design of questionnaire survey administered at the research target group. A one-way translation from English to Arabic is performed by expert academics and verified by linguistic experts. The sample design employs nonprobability sampling techniques. The size of the sample is 47 observations for academics. The findings of the analysis are reported across individual, and institutional levels. The research results signify that interest in research is a strong motivator; while career satisfaction still reveals an area of future development. There is still little awareness on gender issues topics, as well as little research works being performed in the scope gender research issues. The concept of gender equality has a high potential for evolution and expansion on the intermediate and long term at the institutional and socio cultural contests in Syria. The future direction of this research emphasizes developing a conceptual framework on the factors which may be affecting female academics experience and career advancement in HEIs in Syria. Furthermore, future research recommends the development of institutional and national policies in the scope of gender equality, which could be reflected at human resources practices, environment of the workplace, infusion of gender at university mission and planning, curriculum, research, and university governance.

What Science Can You Teach Without Language? A Conversation with Timothy Wangusa

This biographical dialogue with Timothy Wangusa explores the interface between indigenous culture, Christianity and education in Uganda, how this disrupted the indigenous cultural base and practice and continued to inform and impact lives and culture in Uganda. It interrogates the binary colonial–cultural contestation and disorientation of indigenous identities from an existential base rooted in the body, the spirit and the land. It acknowledges tensions of identity for the African writer as a product of multiple heritages and the challenge of emboldening it in contestation of manifold historical and structural peripherisations in education and national development policies and interventions. In response to the general national emphasis on science in education and development, Wangusa highlights, through his example, the function of language in education and the value of an inclusive curriculum. He decolonises the definitional scope of science to a more inclusive and relational application as a function of civilisation and education. The word, ‘language’, remains central as an enabler in the understanding and pursuit of development and human civilisation. This interview, conducted on 6 July 2022, was a commemoration of Professor Timothy Wangusa at 80 years and part of the Department of Literature’s activities during Makerere University Centennial celebrations, 2022.

Malaysia in 2023

Prime minister Anwar Ibrahim steered his cobbled-together government through economic and sociocultural challenges in 2023, emerging stable but spooked. State-level elections in August sustained each party’s roster of states, but with declining margins for Anwar’s coalition. Fiscal pressures—high debt, declining revenues, rising cost of living, and a persistently weak currency—constrained room for maneuver, while state-level and societal cultural contests tested Malaysia’s multiracial, multireligious tolerance.

Cultural Contestation and Acculturation in Islamic Education at an Indonesian School in Den-Haag, the Netherlands

The establishment of Indonesian schools abroad is a mandate that must be fulfilled by Indonesian representatives abroad, including Sekolah Indonesia Den-Haag, the Netherlands. Indonesian schools have the responsibility of organising education with the distinctive character of Indonesian society with great challenges in the form of differences in culture, character, and values. This research aims to explain how the process of Islamic education at the Indonesian School in the Netherlands amidst these cultural and value differences. This research is a field research with a descriptive qualitative approach. Data were collected through observation, interviews, and documentation and then analysed using interactive analysis. The results showed de facto cultural differences between the people of Indonesia and The Netherlands such as eating habits and religion. The cultural contestation that occurs in Indonesian schools in The Netherlands found a "win win solution", namely cultural acculturation where different cultures blend together without leaving their distinctive characteristics. Islamic education is implemented by teaching Islamic values and Indonesian wisdom such as moderation, tolerance, courtesy, and brotherhood. The cultivation of these values is done through habituation and social religious activities in school activities. Islamic education at Sekolah Indonesia Den-Haag is able to preserve Islamic and Indonesian values while respecting the culture of the people of Den-Haag.

The Norm of Marriage Age Limit and Cultural Contestation of Child Marriage Law in Rural Communities

Changes in state legal norms regarding the age limit for marriage have been implemented to reduce the number of child marriages in Indonesia. However, child marriage is still practised, especially in rural areas of Central Java. This paper discusses three main problems, namely the prevalence of child marriage in rural areas, the dominance of tradition and dogmatic understanding of religion, the impact of poverty and social media technology as factors influencing child marriage in rural communities, and the transformation of social engineering through education and economic improvement to overcome the problem. child marriage in rural areas. This legal sociology research uses a qualitative approach. Data analysis techniques use interactive models. The study shows that the prevalence of child marriage increased by 300% after changes in norms regarding the age limit for marriage, especially in rural communities. This happens because child marriage in rural communities is a tradition passed down through generations. Traditions and religious norms understood by rural communities as allowing child marriage have become an unwritten legal system implemented by the community. Changes in state legal norms regarding marriage age limits have the potential to disrupt established social institutions, so that sociologically they are not binding as norms for rural communities, giving rise to an apathetic public response. Therefore, efforts to improve the education and economic systems with a holistic approach are very effective in overcoming the problem of child marriage in rural communities.

Guarding information’s Other: Theorising beyond information and communications technologies for disinformation

ABSTRACT If Plato’s allegory of information trouble occurred within a torchlit cave, the scale and scope of technical developments in information and communication technologies have not superseded his perennial concerns. Drawing from the sociology of knowledge and objectivity in news, in this article, I examine a set of cases of contested information within American communication. Beyond reductionist approaches to objectivity and falsehood in information, these cases bring to light political and cultural contestation over the presentation, omission, and selection of information, as well as value in speculative information. Taken together, these highlight the need for a framework to cover a range of informational issues. The proposed meta-classification of information’s Other opens an analytical space not only to account for today’s alleged information disorder, but also to address long-standing concerns with information order.

Extinction in Public

AbstractThis essay argues that the concept of extinction, polysemous if not overdetermined, is becoming an emergent keyword of contemporary public life as it faces the climate crisis. To make this argument the essay critically considers the ways in which extinction is currently being made public—within and by the environmental humanities but also in the wider public sphere of political and cultural contestation. The essay begins by problematizing the concept of extinction itself, positing that it makes sense to think of the Sixth Extinction as the first historical extinction event—that is, as a social articulation of an organic process in which the causes and impacts are at once natural and social. Then the essay discusses the different extinction imaginaries that have operated across modernity, before finally turning to the writings of the Extinction Studies Working Group, whose conception of extinction as a process rather than event, and whose arguments that mass extinction presents an ethical call to responsibility, have become a template for how extinction is thought about within the field of the environmental humanities. The essay ends by posing some companionly criticisms of the extinction studies project.

Red Dynamite: Creationism, Culture Wars, and Anticommunism in America

This book offers stunning new depth to a relatively familiar tale: the 1925 Scopes monkey trial and the campaign of some evangelical Christians to publicly castigate evolutionary science and propagate their own views of creationism. Launching with the undertold labor backgrounds of John Scopes himself and of Dayton, Tennessee, the book examines the vicissitudes of the antievolution movement throughout the twentieth century and into the present. Red Dynamite includes the role of well-known figures (J. Frank Norris, Aimee McPherson, Ronald Reagan, Ken Ham and his Kentucky Noah's Ark), as well as their captivatingly more obscure comrades (George McCready Price, Gerald Winrod, Fred C. Schwarz). Creationism, argues Carl R. Weinberg, was never just about narrowly scientific models, ideological technicalities, or biblical hermeneutics. It was deeply, and intentionally, embedded in broader American cultural contestations over capitalism's sacrosanctity, skepticism of labor unions, changing gender roles, evolving sexual morality, social power, and America's status as a perceived Christian nation. Antievolutionists mobilized politically to respond to all of these as a cluster of concerns. The interconnections forged between these issues Weinberg monikers the “Red Dynamite” tradition. Such an account further demonstrates continuity between the old and new Christian Right and the persistence of conservative evangelical quests to shape the culture. It also reveals how the latter tradition never honestly reckoned with the blatantly anti-Semitic and segregationist legacy of earlier antievolutionists.

Silence, Absence, and Forgetting: Traditional Music and Dance Contests of Gaelic Cape Breton

A documented history of cultural competitions and contests in Gaelic Cape Breton is being deliberately forgotten. Drawing on Paul Connerton’s theory of social forgetting, the author suggests that this has happened for ideological reasons involving the construction of Gaelic culture as participatory and inclusive, characteristics that many Cape Bretoners find irreconcilable with competitions. By examining historical evidence demonstrating that cultural contests and competitions existed in Cape Breton at various times and in various places, and how they relate to a broader, international context of competitions in “Celtic” cultural communities, the author concludes that present-day claims about the absence and insignificance of contests are inconsistent with the historical record.

World Literature as Palimpsest

Abstract Has the Cold War, anchored in both the US-USSR rivalry and the rising power of China, impacted the sense and the meaning of literature as art, and our understanding of world literature? If the world literature discourse reveals a cosmopolitan feature to the cultural contestation of great power politics in the Third World and Eastern Europe, does this also mean that the Cold War discloses an irreducible agonism at the heart of world literature? This article suggests we need to answer both questions affirmatively. I approach these questions both historically and heuristically; I begin with a fictional palimpsest, composed by short excerpts from three larger texts by Peter Schneider, Boris Polevoy, and Ismail Kadare. This reading strategy aims to show that both ideological and geopolitical concerns are relevant in theorizing world literature through the lens of Cold War literature.

For an African elenchus: colonial and postcolonial misprisions and Classics in Africa

Abstract This paper reflects on the god Dionysus in the context of African explorations of the role and meaning of Classical traditions in and for Africa. The problem of decolonization entails the creative challenge to conceive an African modernity, but how we shall recognize what that is to mean remains open. Knowledge as claim and contestation are foregrounded with Dionysus and in his presence. He is a figure who is chronically misprised, so that misprision itself becomes a feature of his experience and meaning. Offering examples of two kinds of popular interpretive stances and arguing that they represent typical but weak readings, the idea is developed that Africa requires elenchus as hermeneutic ideal, an epistemic pessimism and commitment to seeking as it finds its own way. It ought not, from a peripheral position, to adopt or reject the popular and low-yielding misprisions and cultural contestations that obtain in the Western academy and offer little to a flowering African Humanities.

Teaching gender in and through uncertainty

Where higher education classrooms can be sites of both cultural contestation and epistemic violence, this article examines the critical and ethical value of building uncertainty into our teaching of gender. The reflective piece draws on my own experience in a new subject at Monash University, and situates this one very small site of knowledge production within the wider processes that shape the (neoliberal) Australian university, and the discipline of sociology. I elaborate a theoretical framework for embracing epistemic uncertainty that is informed by feminist pedagogies and begins with a feminist provocation, and present my practical strategies for organizing knowledge within this framework, as well as the strategies of the students themselves. An analysis of the students’ project work (collaborative virtual exhibitions) reveals their capacity to navigate uncertainty through an interpersonal and contextualized approach to knowledge, and produce new learning spaces which unsettle harmful truths and make material new realities.

The Bazaar as a Public Domain of Cultural Contests at Colonial Cuttack, 1870–1940

By choosing the bazaar at colonial Cuttack for a narrative of ‘recreation, social interaction, transport and economic activity’, the present article draws on Dipesh Chakrabarty and Anand Yang’s bazaar studies in South Asia. For Chakrabarty, the bazaar was an arena of evolving contest between modernity and tradition, while Anand Yang sees it as a place where people increasingly acquire notions of identity and community. The present study, concentrating on a provincial town, seeks to combine both perspectives and to provide a wider perception of bazaar as a site of compressed display of an area’s way of life, being a place of exchange and negotiation and of circulation and redistribution—in short, of extra-community or supra-community connections and institutions. In such a situation, the image of bazaar/market, as it emerges, goes much beyond the one conceived by Christopher Bayly for the bazaars in the cities of early colonial North India as an inert place where everything seemed to be peaceful with little conflicts, a respectable and orderly autonomous place than a place of contest and competition.