Cultural Meaning-making Research Articles

Doenjang in the Air: Maangchi and the Mediation of Korean Cultural Authenticity

In this article, I explore the ways that women of the Korean diaspora engage in cultural meaning-making through material culture in efforts to redefine what it means for people, things, and ideas to be considered “authentically Korean”. Using the case study of famous internet chef Maangchi, I examine one of her best-selling cookbooks and her digital presence to identify the tactics she uses to exert agency in the meaning-making and community-building process, using Korean food and her role as a maternal figure as vehicles for analysis. Due to her roles as a mother and her positioning as a quintessential immigrant subject in the US context, I argue that Maangchi challenges colonial and Eurocentric models of cultural authenticity as part of a long history of women of color that actively disrupt social perceptions of value, expertise, and knowledge production. By exploring her business ventures, I consider how embedded pieces of knowledge, racialization, perceived expertise, and cultural assumptions are all connected to challenge the historical concepts and applications of authenticity in favor of a more inclusive, radical, and politically potent understanding of what truly makes something “Korean”.

Cultural Imaginary of Terrorism: Close and Distant Readings of Political Terror in Swedish News and Fiction During the Cold War


 
 
 The digital history project ’The Cultural Imaginary of Terrorism’ (2022–2025) examines the cultural meaning-making of political terror in Swedish nonfiction and fiction during the Cold War, a critical period for the formation of the international discourse on terrorism. To explore the Swedish ‘cultural imaginary of terrorism’ is to study how a society makes sense of terrorism and itself in relation to the phenomenon through figures of thought, frames of reference and fantasies in, among other things, national newspapers and periodicals. This paper gives an overview of the project, demonstrating our integrative use of distant and close reading methods through a pilot study of elements of the cultural imaginary of terrorism as represented in the conservative periodical Svensk Tidskrift 1945–1991. Our exploratory analysis focuses on the extraction of relevant texts, the visualization and mapping of the discourse through the development of key terms as well as individuals, places, groups and states associated with political terror and terrorism. We conclude by stressing the benefits of an integrative research design drawing upon complementary perspectives: how our text mining methods allow us to identify significant patterns in the text data and how our historical expertise allows us to single out aspects that call for further investigation.
 
 

Semiotic analysis of cultural representations in Iranian English textbooks

The Peircean semiotic approach suggests a non-linear and dynamic view of culture to examine it through signs, sign systems and meaning-making processes. This approach emphasises that images, texts and tasks are considered semiotic resources, generating cultural meanings through semiotic processes. This study aims to reveal the concept of culture in a dynamic manner concerning the semiotic potential embedded in the Iranian EFL textbooks used in junior high schools from the perspective of a semiotic framework. Semiotic analysis showed that cultural meaning-making is directed through guided semiosis, hampering students’ exploration of cultural potential meanings, cultural reflection, understanding and awareness. The denotational and the indexical relationship between texts and images also does not foster students’ intercultural understanding of living and maintaining in a global community, and hence, teachers need to move towards the symbolic aspect of texts and images through unguided semiosis to develop students’ cultural understanding of self and others.
 Keywords: Cultural, English textbooks, Peircean, semiotic, unguided semiosis;

“But there is a God”: Teaching Nat Turner in early childhood education

This study set out to gain a deeper understanding of how early childhood students, specifically Black boys in first and second grade, would respond to the teaching of historical figures and events traditionally omitted from classrooms. Contrary to general assumptions, these students were able to astutely contribute to classroom lessons, discussions, and interviews about Nat Turner, an enslaved Black American, who led a rebellion in 1831. Employing notions of Black intellectual thought and curricular and pedagogical resuscitation as theoretical frameworks, in addition to critical hermeneutic phenomenology as its methodology, this study highlights the voices of young Black boys often missing in early childhood discourse. Findings indicate that the students expressed a favorable assessment of Nat Turner and his comrades. The statement, “But there is a God,” ultimately confronts the unavailability and restricted options for Black humanity in a racist society, but also an awareness testifying to a self-ordained defense of the Black body. This study gives added perspective to the understanding of the early learning process, cultural meaning-making, and connection to a Black educational legacy spanning generations.

Construction of Teaching and Learning Cultures in Transnational Pedagogical Development: Discourses Among Palestinian University Instructors

This qualitative study explores teaching and learning cultures in the context of a community-oriented pedagogical development process initiated during Finnish–Palestinian transnational cooperation. Research data include focus group interviews and texts produced during a pedagogical training program with Palestinian university instructors. The study examines teaching and learning cultures as constructed by discourses in and around the Palestinian university. A poststructuralist discourse analysis identified five discourses of teaching and learning: disciplinary differences, traditional and modern education, improving education, sociocultural and religious context, and political and economic circumstances. The study shows that teaching and learning cultures are dynamic and fragmented as they are constructed by the contrasting discourses. The findings suggest that pedagogical development initiatives need to provide spaces for discursive transformation, especially in the transnational context that introduces additional alternative discourses into the institutional cultural meaning-making.

Performing Turtle Island: Indigenous Theatre on the World Stage

Performing Turtle Island: Indigenous Theatre on the World Stage

Brand Texts and Meaning in Post-Digital Consumer Culture

This paper discusses the mechanisms of post-digital consumer cultural meaning-making using advertising as its point of departure. The assumption is that the post-digital is neither an era nor an epoch but a characterisation that reflects a consumer cultural world of digitised content that operates as a default for many consumers, while the analogue world hovers ghost-like, re-asserting itself where digital technologies cannot serve, where and when they cannot be accessed, or when they fail. In this post-digital world, the locus of consumer cultural meaning-making has shifted, from long-form advertising campaigns, to fragmented and polysemous intertexts that circulate kinetically via social media. In other words, the locus of consumer cultural meaning-making has shifted from the primary texts of brand marketing, to secondary or paratexts. Drawing on Gérard Genette’s theory of transtextuality, the paper discusses how this post-digital meaning-making mechanism plays out, for brands, and beyond, within a post-digital consumer culture. Article received: May 25, 2020; Article accepted: June 30, 2020; Published online: September 15, 2020; Original scholarly paper

Cultural meaning-making in challenging interactions in L2 Spanish: language teachers’ perceptions

ABSTRACT Some challenges to intercultural communication prevent intercultural interactions altogether, while others can prevent effective and successful communication during an intercultural exchange. This article addresses a key challenge within intercultural interactions: cultural meaning-making. This is a process that requires both communicative and intercultural competence and encompasses the interdependent and ever-present relationships between language, culture, and worldviews. Considering the important role of language teachers in second language (L2) learners’ cultural meaning-making development in challenging interactions that may be faced by learners in the target language community, the current pilot study elicits teachers’ perceptions of linguistic and cultural resources required by their students to engage in challenging interactions and focuses on the pedagogical approaches employed by them to foster cultural meaning-making in challenging interactions. Three types of challenging situations were examined: difficult situations (uncomfortable or even hostile for the students); impolite situations (those that may be rude or impolite); and situations of imposition (those that involve imposition on the student or another person, e.g., requests, commands, favors). Results indicated teachers’ reliance on certain resources involved in cultural meaning-making and a general absence of a theoretical approach to intercultural communication.

Brainbodies and the imaging of plasticity

ABSTRACTThis article considers two conceptual formations – brainbodies and plasticity – through some of the image-form processes of neuroscience, art and curation. Underpinned by the writings of philosopher Catherine Malabou, the ethnography of Science and Technology Studies (STS) scholar Joseph Dumit, and the artistic projects of curator Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, the article firstly examines Positron Emission Tomography (PET) (as articulated by Dumit) and its image-making processes to show how plasticity is at work in the brainbody’s molecular negotiations with the scanning apparatus. Secondly, the article analyses the entanglements generated out of the receptions of neuro-aesthetic and artistic image-forms in the curatorial directions of two of Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev’s projects: dOCUMENTA (13) and the 14th Istanbul Biennial SALTWATER: A Theory of Thought Forms. A diffractive methodology of reading, as articulated in the feminist technoscientific writings of Donna Haraway and Karen Barad, helps to re-register the plasticity of matter in the contexts of art and curation. The image-forms that feature in this article expose some of the boundaries and limitations of cultural meaning-making and their associated forms. This includes the productive insights generated out of the crossing through of disciplinary perspectives and their image-making mechanisms.

Norwegian black metal, transgression and sonic abjection

This article explores the music and transgressions of Norwegian black metal in the early 1990s. Facial and vocal masking, emblematic in corpsepaint and screaming, lay at the intersection between these two modes of existence, musical and criminal. Masking in black metal leads to the creation of a new persona, what I call the ‘black metal double’. This double enacts a splitting of subjectivity between personal and public personas, and the vocal scream comes to navigate the space between these personas. This bifurcated existence predicates an alternate, abject mode of being for black metal performers. Masking becomes a theoretical means for living two lives: one as private citizens and the other as black metal musicians who transgress criminal and musical limits. By collapsing the boundaries between abjection and subjection, black metal musicians create new spaces of political and cultural meaning-making through masking.

Creating cultural heritage: three vignettes on Carl Jacobsen, his museum and foundation

ABSTRACTThe paper addresses the larger question of how cultural heritage becomes taken for granted focusing on how cultural value becomes assigned. This is illustrated by taking departure in the case of Carl Jacobsen, an élite philanthropist, owner and founder of the New Carlsberg brewery, who came to have a profound effect on Danish cultural heritage through the establishment of the museum The New Carlsberg Glyptotek and the New Carlsberg Foundation in Copenhagen. Using archival sources, the paper investigates the mechanisms by which cultural value is assigned, conceptualizing these through framing, canonization and consecration. The paper shows the prominence of each mechanism with vignettes from the early work of Carl Jacobsen, to the contemporary work of the New Carlsberg Glyptotek and the New Carlsberg Foundation. In doing so, the paper sheds light on the managerial and organizational processes of cultural meaning-making as well as the way in which élite philanthropy may directly and indirectly influence the cultural heritage of a nation.

Book Review: Mediatized Worlds: Culture and Society in a Media Age

Mediatization has become a vibrant topic in media and communication research and has led to a paradigmatic shift discussing and interrelating processes of socio-cultural with media-communicative change. With Mediatized Worlds, the editors Hepp and Krotz fruitfully connect mediatization with perspectives on everyday lifeworlds in order to grasp dialectically how the omnipresence of the media has shaped and transformed everyday lives and vice versa. Theoretically, this endeavour is convincingly grounded by the editors in social phenomenology and symbolic interactionism, paying particular attention to the media’s consequences on social practices and processes of cultural meaning-making. The book has emerged as outcome of a conference in Bremen in April 2011. It brings together renowned scholars from the main fields of media and communication research in Germany, the United Kingdom and the Nordic countries; 13 out of 24 authors are or were members of the priority programme ‘Mediatized Worlds’ based in Bremen.

Boundary Plants, the Social Production of Space, and Vegetative Agency in Agrarian Societies

ABSTRACTBoundary plants lie at the intersections of landscape ecology, social structure, and cultural meaning-making. They typically relate resource rights to social groups and cultural identities, and make these connections meaningful and legitimate. Landscape boundaries such as hedges and fence lines are often repositories for social identities and cultural meanings, and tools for the negotiations and struggles that comprise them. This article surveys botanical boundaries in classic ethnography, outlines social science approaches to boundary objects, and describes new theoretical work on space, place, and agency. It also introduces the concepts of monomarcation and polymarcation to delineate the contrast between technologically simple and socially complex forms of marking land. Three case studies, concerning the social lives ofDracaenain sub-Saharan Africa andCordylinein the Caribbean, illustrate how boundary plants have a particular sort of vegetative agency to turn space into place in culture-specific ways.

The Chimera of Proportionality: Institutionalising Limits on Punishment in Contemporary Social and Political Systems.

The concept of proportionality has been central to the retributive revival in penal theory, and underlies desert theory’s normative and practical commitment to limiting punishment. Theories of punishment combining desert-based and consequentialist considerations also appeal to proportionality as a limiting condition. In this paper we argue that these claims are founded on an exaggerated idea of what proportionality can offer, and in particular fail properly to consider the institutional conditions needed to foster robust limits on the state’s power to punish. The idea that appeals to proportionality as an abstract ideal can help to limit punishment is, we argue, a chimera: what has been thought of as proportionality is not a naturally existing relationship, but a product of political and social construction, cultural meaning-making, and institution-building. Drawing on evolutionary psychology and comparative political economy, we argue that philosophers and social scientists need to work together to understand how the appeal of the idea of proportionality can best be realised through substantive institutional frameworks under particular conditions.

Cultural Meaning-making in the Journey from Diagnosis to End of Life

This article is based on an ethnographic study undertaken to explore whether eight people diagnosed with terminal cancer and their families drew on aspects of their cultural identities to make sense of their journey towards death, and if so, how. Ethnographic methods were supplemented by semistructured interviews. Most participants received medical treatments until close to death and invested much effort, time, and hope in these. Consequently, they made little sense of their palliative referrals. Instead, they accommodated the biomedical cultures of treatment-oriented services, thus delaying their own and their family's preparation for death. Only three participants appeared well prepared one month prior to death. An ecological perspective helped to explain the systemic factors involved in this prioritisation. The authors make recommendations for greater involvement of social workers in palliative care, and for more attention to supporting dying people and their families to make culturally meaningful decisions in the journey toward death.

Trends in the Turn to Affect

This article explores the psychological logics underpinning key perspectives in the ‘turn to affect’. Research on affect raises questions about the categorization of affective states, affective meaning-making, and the processes involved in the transmission of affect. I argue that current approaches risk depopulating affecting scenes, mystifying affective contagion, and authorizing questionable psychobiological arguments. I engage with the work of Sedgwick and Frank, Thrift, and Ahmed to explore these points and suggest that the concept of affective practice offers a more promising social psychological grounding. Notions of affective practice are more commensurate with trends in contemporary psychobiology, explain the limits on affective contagion, and emphasize relationality and negotiation, attentive to the flow of affecting episodes. A practice approach positions affect as a dynamic process, emergent from a polyphony of intersections and feedbacks, working across body states, registrations and categorizations, entangled with cultural meaning-making, and integrated with material and natural processes, social situations and social relationships.

“To Make a History From This Kind of Material is Not Easy”: The Narrative Construction of Cultural History in Contemporary Fiction

Abstract In a postmodern understanding of textuality, fact and fiction can no longer be regarded as opposites; in this context, Hayden White’s studies of fictional techniques in historical texts have initiated an interdisciplinary discussion about the significance of fictional narration as a meaningful cultural technique. The narrative reconstruction of the history of lost civilisations and earlier cultures also plays a central role in contemporary literature in English. The historiographical search for the reality of the lives of earlier oral cultures and the attempt to provide academic interpretations of such cultures in order to explain the past structure novels such as Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, Jane Yolen’s Sister Light, Sister Dark, and Doris Lessing’s The Cleft. By analysing the different textual layers and narrative forms of these novels, the difficulties of a historiographical reconstruction of lost cultures in the medium of fiction are highlighted and the ambivalent truth claims of academic discourse become apparent. These novels illustrate how the integration and negotiation of historiography in fictional literature creates a tension-fraught discursive network of different competing voices that sheds light on the complex processes of cultural meaning-making.

EXISTENTIAL CONCERNS ABOUT DEATH — A QUALITATIVE STUDY OF DYING PATIENTS IN A DANISH HOSPICE

BackgroundResearch suggests that addressing dying patients' existential concerns can help improve their quality of life. Common existential conditions, such as a search for meaning and considerations about faith, are probably...

Guiding Principles for Cultivating Sustainable Christian School Cultures in an Era of Change

This article presents a selection of findings arising from a recent study that analysed and investigated how sustainable Christian school cultures can be cultivated during changing times. The inquiry was positioned within the contextually bounded system of Christian schools which, according to the literature, have historically struggled to maintain core ideology and distinctiveness beyond the consolidation or mid-life phase of cultural development. The study was framed within a qualitative paradigm of inquiry that utilised a multiple case study design to investigate how principals within six Christian schools were seeking to cultivate sustainable school cultures that preserved core ideology whilst responding to change imperatives within an ever-increasingly complex and market driven socio-cultural milieu. The research findings identified four guiding principles that leaders were using to cultivate sustainable Christian school cultures within these site specific settings. These principles formed a foundation upon which cultural meaning-making and core ideology, expressed as cultural processes and practices, may be sustained and perpetuated during a Christian school’s organisational mid-life or consolidation phase of cultural development.

Mentoring in the creative economy

Finland is among those countries leading research into the creative economy and co-configuration. A new economy preoccupied with intangible values and cultural meaning-making is being promoted in Finnish business and industry. This article argues that traditions of mentoring in business and education have much to offer in creating the necessary conditions for the new forms of work needed in this context. Mentoring as an area is ripe for development in art education also where attempts are under way to break down existing boundaries between the economy, society and the arts.