This article examines the rise of platformized collective creator cultures in rural India. Focusing on a rural YouTube collective in Telangana, South India, it explores how rural creators in non-urban contexts navigate and sustain their work within the global social media entertainment and creator culture ecology. Drawing upon ethnographic fieldwork and in-depth interviews, the study demonstrates how rural creators produce aspirational digital content through innovative storytelling practices that blend entertainment with social awareness, using cinematic production logics such as spectacular visuals, drone cinematography, and creative editing. Sustained through collective media labor, their professionalized, platformed cultural productions have not only established them as popular creators but also generated persistent economic and creative tensions. This study contributes to the growing scholarship on regional social media entertainment and creator cultures, particularly from non-urban and rural perspectives.

ABSTRACT Social work educators are teaching in a political climate where efforts to restrict diversity, equity, and inclusion content continue to grow. These pressures directly affect courses that focus on LGBTQIA2S+ (e.g., lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, intersex, asexual, Two-Spirit) communities, where curriculum and identity often become politicized. This teaching note describes the redesign of an undergraduate and Master of Social Work elective on social work practice with LGBTQIA2S+ individuals and communities during a semester shaped by antitrans rhetoric, a federal order targeting gender identity, and uncertainty about the future of diversity, equity, and inclusion instruction. Drawing on queer and trans scholarship on joy, belonging, and resistance, trauma-informed teaching, the work of adrienne maree brown, and Tuck’s critique of damage-centered narratives, I redesigned the course to center joy and wholeness. Instructor journal entries show the emotional and political conditions of teaching in this moment and how students shaped the learning environment. The course used ritual, flexibility, and student agency to build community. Assignments asked students to engage queer cultural production and create practice briefs. Lessons highlight the need for teaching that counters trauma fatigue, protects academic freedom, and prepares students for practice in politically hostile environments.

As the consumption of cultural and creative products (CCPs) increasingly shifts to e-commerce channels, consumers rely heavily on online visual-textual displays to perceive and compare cultural value, whereas systematic design-oriented methods for assessing such perceived value remain insufficient. To address this gap, this study proposes a hybrid method for assessing the perceived cultural value of CCPs in e-commerce visual-textual presentation. First, a three-domain indicator framework covering formal representation, usage inference, and meaning construction is developed by integrating hierarchical cultural semantics with narrative-structure organization, and refined through content validity testing. Second, a hybrid DEMATEL-CRITIC-MULTIMOORA model is used to integrate indicator influence and alternative-performance variation across indicators for weight determination, followed by multi-perspective alternative ranking. Using cultural aromatherapy burners as a case, Kendall's concordance tests reveal evident divergence in expert judgments, with W = 0.128 and p = 0.797 for indicator interaction judgments, and W = 0.414 and p = 0.066 for indicator-level assessments of alternative performance. Within this context, the model outputs should be interpreted as structured perceived cultural value assessment results aggregated from heterogeneous expert judgments, rather than as objective measurements of products' intrinsic cultural quality. External questionnaire validation demonstrates relatively high rank-order consistency between the model results and user-side assessments (Spearman's ρ = 0.829; Kendall's τ = 0.733). The proposed approach transforms implicit cultural semantic features of CCPs into observable and comparable evidence, providing a decision-support reference for competitor comparison, visual-textual presentation refinement, and CCP design practice.

Visual design serves as a key medium for value transmission in tourism cultural and creative products (TCCPs), yet how design elements combine to shape value perception and decisions within cultural-tourism contexts remains unclear. This study introduces a sensory-semiotic integration framework, proposing that congruent design—achieved through alignment between visual complexity and color saturation—guides tourists’ perception of specific sustainability values (cultural or environmental) and thereby drives purchase decisions. Three experiments (including an incentive-compatible behavioral study) show that congruent designs (high-complexity-high-saturation and low-complexity-low-saturation combinations) enhance purchase intention and actual choice more than incongruent designs (high-low, low-high). This effect is jointly mediated through dual pathways by perceived cultural sustainability and perceived environmental sustainability. Further analysis reveals differentiated mediation: the high-high combination operates mainly via perceived cultural sustainability, whereas the low-low combination works primarily through perceived environmental sustainability, with perceived cultural sustainability playing a secondary role. Thus, congruent design can directionally guide tourists toward semiotically oriented value perceptions in context. The findings clarify the value-linking mechanism behind design synergy and provide theoretical grounding and actionable strategies for communicating sustainable value through systematic visual design in TCCPs.

ABSTRACT The Romanian titles of Dan Lungu’s 2007 novel Sînt o babă comunistă! and the eponymous film from 2013 announce the narrator- and hero’s gender, age, and cultural-historical mindset as the starting point of a satirical tableau of Romania’s historical transformations. A romanticized socialist past (1945–1989) is contrasted with present-day inequalities in a questionably democratic system (post-1989), where brutal capitalism results in invisibility, loss of status and dignity. The protagonist’s nostalgic gaze is towards a utopian system, albeit not a future possible one – but a utopia of her youth. The novel considers the consequences, individual and communal, of banalization, generalization, and lack of social dialogue about complex patterns of the past. Following Boym’s understanding of nostalgia (2001), the paper analyses the intersection of age, gender and narration, and asks questions about personal and collective discourses around memory, nostalgia, their contextualizations and creative potential for literary and film narratives. The ‘Yugosphere’ is taken as horizon of comparison, where re-examining the politics of remembrance about socialist Yugoslavia (1945–1991), and post-1991 societies, as well as a reconsideration of gender roles and intergenerational conflict and are also present in cultural production.

ABSTRACT Cultural competence is widely invoked in multilingual and heritage language education, yet it remains under-theorised in migrant family contexts. This study examines how Chinese migrant parents in Aotearoa New Zealand conceptualise the forms of cultural competence they expect their children to develop. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with ten Mainland Chinese migrant parents in Auckland, data were analysed using reflexive thematic analysis. The findings indicate that parents do not frame cultural competence simply as the acquisition of cultural knowledge or adherence to fixed identity categories. Instead, they describe it as a situated capacity that emerges through intergenerational interaction and engagement with multiple social environments. Across three dimensions – moral grounding, identity negotiation, and contextual practice – parents’ reasoning consistently reorients cultural competence from content toward ethical reasoning, from affiliation toward moral coherence, and from reproduction toward situated negotiation. By foregrounding parental epistemic frameworks, the study reconceptualises the family as an epistemic site of cultural production and proposes a thickened understanding of cultural competence that foregrounds relational ethics, contextual calibration, and intergenerational negotiation within migrant family life. The findings carry implications for heritage language educators, curriculum designers, and policymakers working within superdiverse and bicultural educational contexts.

ABSTRACT This introductory article to the special issue Translating and Publishing Turkish Literature in the Anglosphere examines the conditions under which Turkish literature enters, circulates within, and is received by the English-speaking world. Situating translation within the asymmetrical structures of the global literary system, the article explores how publishers, translators, editors, literary agents, cultural institutions, and market forces shape the selection, presentation, and interpretation of Turkish texts in the Anglosphere. It highlights the growing visibility of Turkish literature in English translation, including the increased representation of women writers and the diversification of genres and voices. Drawing on frameworks from world literature, translation studies, feminist theory, and the sociology of cultural production, the introduction maps the thematic and methodological concerns of the issue's contributions.

ABSTRACT Engaging with the intellectual legacy of Shannon Bell presents an opportunity to re-insert sexuality into femme scholarship and make explicit femme’s contribution to sexuality studies. In this article, we offer a femme analysis of Bell’s work and use femme scholarship to extend and rework two of her key concepts: the female phallus and fast feminism. We bring femme scholarship into dialogue with Bell to offer a ‘fast femme-inist’ theory of femme erotic artforms – including postpornographic practices – as sites of knowledge and cultural production that contribute vital femme-inist perspectives to sexuality studies. We analyse femme life-writing, femme erotica, and pornography to demonstrate that femme cultural producers ‘do violence to the original context’ of normative femininity; re-articulate ‘receptive’ sexuality as agentic and erotic through enactment of the femme phallus; and position femme-inist sexual appetites as voracious and lesbian femme-inist sex as hardcore through an eroticization of vulnerability.

ABSTRACT This paper examines the Ruta del Bakalao (1978–1995) as a case of rural and peri-urban place-making driven by a music ecosystem in the periphery of Valencia, Spain. While research on music, tourism and place has focused on urban centres and planned destinations, this study explores how informal cultural production transformed agricultural landscapes and secondary roads into a significant node of European electronic music culture. Drawing on historical-documentary analysis, oral histories, press archives and spatial reconstruction, it analyses how cultural actors, mobility practices and regulatory ambiguity produced territorial imaginaries of modernity and nightlife. The findings show the “Ruta” functioned as a dispersed cultural system generating tourism-like effects and later heritage-making. The paper contributes to debates on place-based tourism and rural cultural geographies.

This article analyses how Brazil’s early Internet was represented in two distinct sectors of its cultural field: television drama and print journalism. Focusing on Glória Perez’s Explode Coração (Rede Globo, 1995–96) and Maria Ercília’s Netvox column in Folha de São Paulo, it applies Pierre Bourdieu’s field theory to explain how media institutions with different forms of autonomy and capital framed the same technological event. The comparison is not empirical excess but a theoretical strategy to reveal how field positions may condition representations of technology. While Globo presented the Internet as a space of emotional release and consumer aspiration, Folha approached it as a question of market forces versus the State and national dependency. Both cases show how long-standing beliefs in modernisation as redemption persisted under different guises. By identifying this continuity as a national doxa of modernisation, the article demonstrates how imported technologies become locally meaningful within Brazil’s field of cultural production. The study contributes to the global history of the Internet by showing how peripheral contexts rework technoscientific imaginaries according to their own symbolic hierarchies and historical aspirations.

Recent advancements in the field of artificial intelligence have driven the rapid adoption of artificial intelligence generated content in the cultural and creative industries, making it a core driver of innovation. However, empirical research on user acceptance of artificial intelligence generated content remains limited. To address this research gap, this study, based on a review of the literature, constructs a four-dimensional analytical framework comprising technical functionality, cultural and aesthetic value, perceived psychological value, and user acceptance. Using structural equation modeling, this study analyzed data from 323 users with experience using artificial intelligence generated content to reveal the underlying relationships among these variables. The results indicate that technical functional experience has a significant positive impact on both user acceptance and cultural aesthetic value; cultural aesthetic value directly enhances psychological perceived value and positively influences user acceptance through a mediating effect; and psychological perceived value has a direct positive effect on user acceptance. The findings of this study provide empirical evidence to help stakeholders in the cultural and creative sector optimize their strategies for applying AI-generated content.

ABSTRACT This study examines how traditional Chinese martial arts experience systematic cultural discount when institutionalized within secondary school physical education curricula. Applying cultural discount theory, originally developed in media economics to explain value loss when cultural products cross boundaries, to educational contexts, we investigate the mechanisms through which meaning is lost when embodied cultural knowledge encounters formal schooling structures. Through a qualitative multiple-case study of four secondary schools in Jiangxi Province, China, involving 47 participants and 48 lesson observations, we identify three interconnected discount mechanisms: curriculum fragmentation and technicization, temporal compression and assessment regimes, and spatial dislocation and environmental decontextualization. The findings reveal that martial arts undergo transformation from holistic cultivation practices integrating physical, philosophical, and ethical dimensions into disaggregated technical skills amenable to standardized assessment. Traditional training's extended temporal logic becomes compressed into bounded instructional units incompatible with embodied learning requirements, while culturally meaningful spaces are replaced by generic institutional environments. These mechanisms operate through what we term ‘institutional discounting’, systematic meaning loss generated by structural incompatibilities between traditional knowledge systems and modern educational institutions. The study contributes to sport sociology and curriculum theory by demonstrating how institutional contexts transform the meaning and nature of physical practices, and illuminates a fundamental paradox in heritage policy: formal institutionalization intended to preserve traditional practices may generate conditions that undermine their cultural integrity. The mechanisms documented here parallel processes of sportification and disembedding identified in the broader martial arts literature, suggesting that the cultural discount framework offers analytical tools with applicability extending beyond the Chinese educational context to any setting where holistic, embodied traditional practices encounter modern institutional structures.

ShilpoBangla: A dataset of Bangladeshi cultural product images with alternative texts in Bangla and English

ABSTRACT Given the extreme dearth of empirical studies documenting the prevalence and operation of caste in Pakistan, this article invites viewers of Pakistani Urdu-language drama serials to consider how caste dynamics shapes characters and plotlines of widely consumed media. Urdu language dramas are viewed extensively not only in Pakistan but also across the diaspora, making them an important site for both the encoding and unraveling of dominant caste ideologies prevalent in a predominantly Muslim Pakistani context. Drawing on two drama serials, Standup Girl (2023) and Udaari (2016), I examine how caste is simultaneously consolidated and concealed through discourses of “class difference,” “family honor,” and patriarchy. I focus on these two dramas because their female protagonists hail from caste-oppressed communities associated with lower class hereditary performance traditions in Punjab. Pejoratively labeled as Mírási/bhānd, these characters depart from the normative figure of the “respectable” heroine – typically coded as belonging to dominant-caste or Sayyid backgrounds – even when economically disadvantaged. By centering the characters of Zara and Meera and their association with performance labor on the stage, the article renders caste legible in ways that resist its narrative erasure. This article contributes to broader, transregional, transcultural, and transreligious discussions by demonstrating how cultural production serves as an important site for enacting, normalizing, and contesting caste violence.

This article investigates radical Palestinian epistemology through a tradition of literary knowledge production as a dynamic and generative field. Drawing on Edward Said’s assertion that dominant narrative frameworks routinely render Palestinian existence illegible, the author argues that the struggle is not merely over narration or the right to narrate, but more fundamentally over the production and recognition of knowledge itself. Rather than simply reframing facts within new narratives, she contends that it is necessary to reconstruct the conditions of intelligibility, interrogating not only what is known, but also what is rendered knowable. This study approaches Palestinian Indigeneity (al-aslaniya), rootedness (al-judhuriya), and movement (al-haraka) as both political categories and epistemological premises, opening a space to examine how these concepts operate across diverse forms of cultural production.

• We unpack the production network of a modern dance piece to explore processes of innovation in the Cultural and Creative Sector • We show that modern dance is a more extreme case within the CCS being Bourdieuan restricted field of cultural production aimed at experimentation • We found that the whole production network - not just the creation phase - is permeated with a deeply ingrained attitude to create cultural value. • We show that a production network lens highlights the relational character of innovation which transcends boundaries of the conventional categories • We propose an interactionist approach to investigate processes of innovation in the CCS

Effects of perceptual, cognitive, and social levels on the aesthetic appreciation of traditional cultural products.

This paper argues that to understand the Cultural and Creative Sectors (CCS) we need a wholesale re-conceptualisation of its economic organisation to render visible its production system. We counter the model of the sole artist engaged in craft production, or the corporate industrialised mass production of commercial products, with a more nuanced model of cultural production (eco-)systems which does not depart from location, but instead from organisation. Drawing on research for the CICERONE Horizon 2020 project, we show that by adapting a Global Production Network (GPN) framework to analyse the particularities of the CCS, we can develop a conceptual lens which goes beyond the creation phase and systematically maps other related activities and their respective locations; looks at the forms of embeddedness of these activities and at the governance of the production networks. This challenges extant approaches to understanding the CCS which are siloed either by industry, phase of production or by location. The structure of the paper is as follows: we present a brief overview of key developments in the CCS. This is followed by a critique of existing cluster and ecosystem approaches. Next, we outline the conceptualisation of the cultural economy version of the GPN. Finally, we provide a synoptic overview of the key findings of the CICERONE project organised around production network cycle, mode of governance and embedding to explain the spatiality of the creative economy in a new way. • A new understanding of the Cultural and Creative Sectors (CCS) based on a wholesale re-conceptualisation. • Starting point is organisation not location. • Adapting a Global Production Network approach to the CCS provides a novel lens to render the complexities of CCS visible. • An overview of the key findings of the CICERONE project organised around production network cycle, mode of governance.

Advice-giving is a key form of social support, yet little is known about how its style varies across cultural contexts. Across three studies, we examined how Americans, Chinese, and Indians give, evaluate, and culturally transmit advice, drawing on the cultural logics of idiocentrism, dialecticism, and allocentrism. In Study 1, open-ended data revealed culturally distinct styles: autonomous advice among Americans, contingent advice among Chinese, and direct advice among Indians. In Study 2, participants preferred their culture's normative style, with these preferences driven by culturally rooted motives: self-esteem for Americans (reflecting idiocentric values), option generation for Chinese (reflecting dialectical thinking), and fulfilling responsibility for Indians (reflecting allocentric values). Study 3 analyzed children's storybooks, revealing that these advice styles are reflected in everyday cultural products. These findings suggest that advice-giving is a culturally embedded practice shaped by deeper moral and epistemic values, extending beyond the traditional individualism-collectivism framework.

Abstract Mud crabs ( Scylla spp.) are being cultured in vertical crab boxes using a recirculating aquaculture system. One approach to accelerate and increase the frequency of mud crab molting is to provide plants containing the molting hormone ecdysteroid through feed. This research aims to analyze the production and business performance of soft-shelled crab culture in vertical crab boxes fed diets supplemented with purslane Portulaca oleracea , mulberry Morus alba , and spinach Amaranthus hybridus . Purslane was given to mud crabs at doses of 0 (control), 40, 50, and 60 g/kg, while mulberry was given at doses of 0, 30, 40, and 50 g/kg, and spinach was given at 60 g/kg of feed compared to autotomy and control treatments. Purslane and mulberry, related to the molting percentage and business performance in this mangrove crab culture, were 60 and 50 g/kg of feed, respectively. Purslane and mulberry improved the molting percentage and business performance of mangrove crab culture, although they did not compete with the autotomy treatment. This research contributes to the development of productive, efficient, environmentally friendly, and sustainable soft-shell crab culture by using herbal ingredients to increase the molting percentage.