ABSTRACT The Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) has become one of the EUs most contested policy areas. But despite widely observed patterns of rural resentment and farmers’ resistance to environmental policies, few studies have examined the CAPs political consequences beyond recent farmers protests. Drawing on policy feedback theory, Bourdieu’s theory of symbolic fields, and scholarship on sociotechnical imaginaries, this paper offers an interpretive policy analysis based on interviews, participatory observation, and digital ethnography in Sweden and Italy – two contrasting contexts of EU agricultural governance. The study introduces the concept ‘symbolic stratification’ to explain patterns in farmers’ reactions to the EUs promotion of an entrepreneurial farmer ideal. It offers a typology of four different farmer identities – entrepreneurial, traditional, environmentally caring, and resentful – the relative standing of which is significantly affected by EU policies. The findings have bearing on the EUs legitimacy in rural areas and Europe’s capacity to transition to sustainable food production.

This article examines the experiences of trans individuals in outdoor and adventure recreation, exploring the ways these activities shape their embodiment, empowerment, and gender transition processes. While outdoor spaces remain steeped in cisheteronormativity, participants described these environments as offering unique opportunities for self-reflection, self-confidence, and freedom from societal gendered constraints. Drawing on queer and feminist poststructuralist theories, the study interrogates the performative aspects of gender in outdoor settings and highlights how participants negotiate their identities in these spaces. Using a multisited ethnographic approach—including online ethnography, on-the-move interviews, on-the-move diaries, and autoethnography—the research reveals the transformative potential of outdoor and adventure activities for fostering personal growth and gender euphoria. Outdoor activities were found to provide a reprieve from gender surveillance, offering a space to construct alternative subjectivities. Despite the barriers to access these spaces, participants emphasised the therapeutic and empowering potential of the outdoors. The findings underscore the need for inclusive practices to reimagine outdoor spaces as sites of liberation and trans flourishing, advocating for a critical shift in outdoor recreation to centre diverse experiences and identities.

This study examines the evolution of religious messaging in the digital realm, driven by the need to understand the impact of visualization on young audiences' perceptions of faith amidst increasingly crowded social networks. The research aims to dissect the formation of meaning in online da'wah activities by examining the complex blend of visual elements and storylines on the Instagram account @hanan_attaki from 2021 to 2025. The primary focus is on examining how religious intermediaries transform conventional teachings into emotionally charged personal experiences, presented specifically for Gen Z. Using a descriptive qualitative approach through virtual ethnography and Roland Barthes's semiotic analysis, this study meticulously breaks down digital codes down to the levels of denotation, connotation, and myth. This methodology allows for an in-depth exploration of how digital content creators manipulate symbols to align with contemporary sensibilities. The study reveals that the use of cinematic backdrops, soothing color gradations, and intimate appearances successfully constructs a significant new ideological myth: "Islam as Aesthetic Healing ." This semiotic transformation integrates religious rituals into the framework of modern life, effectively bridging the gap between noble values ​​and the fast-paced nature of digital culture. The study's conclusion emphasizes that while visual appeal is a key gateway for maintaining spiritual messages' relevance in the digital age, there is a real threat of watering down the essence of rich religious teachings into mere lifestyle symbols. This study offers a needed critical perspective on how faith is conveyed, emphasizing that efforts to achieve digital interaction and visual appeal should not override the depth of theological substance. Ultimately, this research suggests that transforming religious symbols into merchandise on Instagram creates a paradoxical situation: faith becomes more accessible but risks being diluted when consumed.

The phenomenon of digital da'wah has significantly transformed the ways religious knowledge is accessed, interpreted, and disseminated in contemporary society. This study aims to analyze the patterns of actions and perceptions of TikTok and YouTube users toward religious content delivered by Gus Baha within the context of the digital religious space. Using Max Weber’s theory of rationalization as an analytical framework, this research explores how religious authority, knowledge transmission, and user interpretation undergo processes of rationalization on digital platforms.This study employs a qualitative approach using virtual ethnography, content analysis, and in-depth interviews with users of both platforms. Data were collected through observation of uploaded content, analysis of user interactions and comments, and examination of engagement dynamics.The findings indicate that user responses to Gus Baha’s content reflect Weber’s four types of social action. Instrumentally rational actions are evident in the use of short videos as practical and efficient learning tools. Value-oriented rational actions appear in users’ consistent efforts to deepen religious understanding. Affective actions emerge from emotional attachment to Gus Baha’s communicative style, while traditional actions are reflected in the perception of digital da'wah as a continuation of established religious learning traditions. Furthermore, digital rationalization through algorithms, short-video formats, and platform accessibility, shapes how religious knowledge is selected, interpreted, and circulated.This study concludes that digital religious spaces function not only as channels of dissemination but also as arenas for the transformation of religious authority, meaning construction, and religious practice in the digital era.

ABSTRACT Digital technologies are reshaping human–wildlife relations, yet their spatial logics remain under-examined. This article proposes the digital landscape of care: a multi-species, multi-scalar assemblage where online practices, physical sites and non-human agency converge. Using Fubao – the first giant panda born in South Korea – as a case, it combines two years of digital ethnography, a large social-media corpus from Xiaohongshu, Weibo and Bilibili, and fieldwork at Wolong. Short videos, ‘daka’ pilgrimages, gift exchanges and transnational storytelling weave keepers, distant supporters and pandas into an affective network. This care network reflects human affective attachment and care practices toward Fubao, while also showcasing Fubao’s own agency of being a caregiver through her animal nature, interactions with keepers and digital mediations. Further, these mediated practices foster broader care relationships among humans united by their connection to animals. Although algorithmic ‘cuteness’ fuels grassroots stewardship and policy lobbying, the same platform logics that prioritize Fubao tend to overshadow lesser-known pandas. By examining the digital-reality tension intersecting multiple stakeholders in panda conservation, this study uncovers a bottom-up form of panda diplomacy and shows both the promise and the limits of digital affect for conservation, arguing that effective wildlife governance must pair algorithmic visibility with scientific guidance and participatory oversight to turn online empathy into tangible multi-species benefit.

ABSTRACT This article examines how sensory and digital ethnography can enrich climate education through relational, arts-led methodologies. Conducted amid the COVID-19 pandemic, our ethnographic project, Global Youth (Digital) Citizen-Artists and their Publics, engaged over 500 secondary and university drama students across six global sites. As pandemic restrictions necessitated a shift to virtual spaces, we embraced sensory ethnographic approaches, focusing on feeling with participants through creative methodologies such as site-specific theatre-making and soundscape workshops. Through these methods, we uncovered how youth collaboratively construct new socio-ecological imaginaries, moving beyond individualistic climate education models towards intergenerational and intercultural engagement. We argue that attunement to sensory and more-than-human dimensions of climate research fosters alternative ways of knowing and engaging with the environmental crisis. Our findings suggest that theatre and performance can serve as transformative spaces for climate education, offering relational, embodied and participatory approaches that challenge conventional pedagogies.

Promoting bystander interventions is a core strategy to prevent suicides in public places, but little is known about how people with lived experience perceive this intervention. To explore people's experiences of receiving an intervention during a suicide attempt on the railways. Interviews were conducted with 28 people with experience of receiving a bystander intervention during a suicide attempt on the railways. Interview data were triangulated with an online ethnography exploring posts made on forums and similar platforms openly discussing suicide. Using reflexive thematic analysis, five themes were generated: (a) 'I'm a good actor… we all carry a mask': concealing feelings and intentions; (b) 'It kind of draws your attention away but it doesn't almost shine a spotlight': interventions should be gentle and not draw more attention; (c) 'People that were getting in my way were just making me want to try harder': interventions can trigger difficult feelings in the moment; (d) 'I did feel different, I felt better': the power of small talk; and (e) 'You feel like a human being and you feel like they actually care': wanting to feel cared for. Findings suggested that some people actively avoid receiving an intervention by concealing how they are feeling in that moment. Interventions that are gentle and do not draw attention may be preferable, such as making small talk and simple gestures such as smiling or being near the individual. Conversely, more intrusive or aggressive interventions may be triggering and exacerbate suicidality.

ABSTRACT GenAI chatbots increasingly influence tourist experiences beyond functioning as a tool. This study applies digital ethnography and semi-structured interviews, grounded in the Service-Dominant Logic framework, especially the dynamics of experiential value co-creation and co-destruction, to identify how GenAI reconfigures the en-route and post-trip experience. The findings indicate that GenAI chatbots, acting as active social actors, reconfigure tourists’ experiential values by co-creating functional, emotional, and social connected value. They may also co-destruct experiential value by causing cognitive dissonance, behavioural misalignment, and various technical constraints. The study further explores the recovery mechanism and argues that value co-creation and co-destruction are not binary opposites, for which reflective value can transform value co-destruction into a positive experience through multi-actor collaboration within the tourist-GenAI-destination system. Moving beyond a single-actor perspective, this research positions GenAI as part of a multi-actor tourism system where tourists, GenAI, and destinations jointly shape and transform experiential value.

Abstract In this paper we aim to articulate an interdisciplinary research agenda for the study of multilingual families that draws upon and transcends existing theorisations in the fields of language socialisation and family language policy. We understand family as a discursive space, where members negotiate not only what counts as valid knowledge, that is, the language repertoires that matter to them, but also who they are, the social relations they establish, and how they want to be seen socially. Family knowledge is transmitted through everyday communicative practices, mostly rituals and shared family stories. This transmission entails a continual renegotiation and adjustment, according to the different life circumstances each family member is experiencing. We argue that the notion of discursive space enables a socio-historically situated understanding of family as a social space of both consensus and dissensus where members’ trajectories ultimately shape what and how knowledge is distributed. Methodologically, family as a discursive space is captured through the longitudinal/biographical ethnographic study of the situated idea of ‘our family’. This notion is mobilised by family members either to align or misalign themselves with what others aim to transmit. We illustrate how ‘our family’ is done and displayed by drawing on Clara’s case. Clara, a Catalan-speaking mother decides to raise her children in English. She engages in a set of family activities to expose her children to English from birth. Being an English-speaking family in a Catalan context becomes a family project in need of discursive normalisation, to which even the husband, who does not speak the language well, agrees. Our analysis brings together data collected from a virtual ethnography conducted during the pandemic. With this paper, we aim to contribute a new research programme to studies of multilingual families that places centre stage a thorough understanding of the notion of family, and how it is done and displayed.

The growing popularity of video games as a means of historical representation has significantly changed how people understand and experience the past. This study analyzes alternative representations of the Hundred Years' War (1337–1453) in the video game Fate/Grand Order, with a focus on the figure of Joan of Arc and the narrative construction of the concept of "historical singularity." Using a qualitative approach combining historical methods and virtual ethnography, documented historical events are compared with the game's narrative. The results reveal fundamental differences in chronology, characters, and conflict motives, reflecting a reinterpretation of the past from a transhistorical and fictional perspective. While the game offers pedagogical opportunities to spark interest in history, it also poses the risk of misinterpretation if not accompanied by critical historical literacy. It concludes that digital history, as presented in Fate/Grand Order, must be approached with a reflective eye to foster a deeper understanding of the relationship between historical reality and its cultural representation in digital media.

This study investigates how WhatsApp/WA-mediated da’wah shapes trust, religious authority and communal identity within Indonesia’s urban hijrah movement, particularly among Salafi-influenced youth networks. Drawing on digital ethnography, and support by in-depth interview, of the Kopdar Masjid BDG Raya WA Group and guided by computer-mediated communication (CMC), media ecology and Islamic activism theory, the research reveals how online religious interaction is structured around peer-led trust, symbolic authority and affective participation. Findings show that WhatsApp functions not merely as a dissemination tool but as a symbolic environment where religious identity is continuously negotiated through daily messages, thematic da’wah and shared rituals. Authority is cultivated less through formal credentials than through interactive consistency, tawadhu’ (‘humility’) and ikhlas (‘sincerity’), a key marker of ethical credibility in Islamic communication ethics. Serialized da’wah content, ranging from voice notes to curated sermons, enables horizontal engagement, with moderators and members co-producing theological meaning. The study finds that Salafi doctrines are localized through youth-led leadership, where values like modesty, ritual precision and moral vigilance are reinforced in daily chat interactions. These peer-driven exchanges shape an alternative public sphere where young Muslims renegotiate orthodoxy, social piety and digital belonging. This article contributes to scholarship on Islamic authority, social media and digital religion by demonstrating how mobile platforms facilitate both theological transmission and grassroots activism. It underscores the roles of affective labour, participatory structure and cultural adaptation in sustaining digital religious communities.

This paper explores the multifunctional roles of the Porta Mariae, a neoclassical arch built in Naga City, Philippines, in 2010 to mark 300 years of devotion to Our Lady of Peñafrancia. Beyond its devotional purpose, the monument serves as a civic landmark, cultural symbol, and political project. Using a qualitative case study approach—a combination of field observation, resident and pilgrim interviews, archival research, and digital ethnography—this study identifies five core functions: religious threshold, civic marker, collective memory anchor, participatory urban space, and product of church-state collaboration. Framed by theories of sacred space (Durkheim, Eliade), collective memory (Halbwachs, Nora), and the social production of space (Lefebvre), the analysis argues that religious monuments are dynamic, shaping spiritual, social, and spatial identities. The Porta Mariae illustrates how contemporary religious architecture continues to mediate between sacred devotion and civic life in modern Philippine society.

This study examines a critical intervention in revitalizing intangible cultural heritage through digital symbiosis, focusing on the Sumbawa traditional horse race (Bare Spee) at Angin Laut Biru Arena. As a living embodiment of indigenous values including honor (siri'), communal solidarity (menyama braya), and ethno-ecological wisdom, this tradition faces erosion due to generational disconnect, infrastructural neglect, and rigid management practices. Addressing the lack of integrated digital and cultural frameworks for rural heritage, the study employs an immersive qualitative case study approach. Data were triangulated through participatory observation across two event cycles, in-depth interviews with 22 key stakeholders consisting of ritual elders, kebalan jockeys, samara horse masters, local entrepreneurs, and cultural tourists, as well as digital ethnography. The findings identify a tripartite authenticity framework comprising ritual sanctity, socio-familial reciprocity, and embodied equine knowledge. Based on this analysis, the study proposes a Symbiotic Digital Mediation Model implemented through four strategies, namely community-curated digital storytelling by local youth, context-aware augmented reality using QR-based cultural portals with native-language narratives, an integrated digital ecosystem encompassing a heritage portal, blockchain-based ticketing, and a local product e-marketplace, and the use of appropriate lightweight digital tools for event management and documentation. Crucially, the study demonstrates that digital mediation must adhere to cultural subsidiarity so that technology amplifies rather than replaces indigenous epistemologies. The model supports regenerative cultural governance by enabling community-led digital stewardship and offers broader implications for safeguarding living heritage in the digital era.

This article examines the subversive mobilities and vernacular legal navigation of Uzbek migrants in Finland and Sweden, highlighting their tactical responses to restrictive Nordic migration regimes. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork (2022–2025), including interviews, focus groups and digital ethnography, we explore how migrants with precarious statuses navigate legal ambiguity, administrative opacity and discretionary enforcement. Through informal knowledge networks, cross-border mobility and performative compliance, Uzbek migrants creatively reinterpret and circumvent institutional constraints. We advance the concept of subversive mobilities (Cohen et al., 2017) and introduce ‘vernacular legal navigation’ to theorise how migrants engage with law as a plural, culturally mediated field. These practices reveal tensions between formal legal frameworks and migrant agency, contributing to socio-legal and migration scholarship. By bridging strategic mobility and everyday legal consciousness, we re-theorise migrant agency as adaptive, relational and situated within the moral and bureaucratic complexity of European migration regimes.

The rapid expansion of social media has significantly transformed the construction and negotiation of cultural identity among Generation Z. Rather than merely disrupting traditional identity structures, social media has emerged as a dynamic arena where identities are performed, hybridized, and continuously reshaped. This study aims to critically analyze how social media functions as a space for the transformation of cultural identity among Generation Z and to develop a humanities-based framework for interpreting these dynamics. The research employed a qualitative design combining digital ethnography, document analysis, and in-depth interviews with Gen Z participants aged 18–25. Data were analyzed using thematic analysis and critical discourse analysis to identify patterns of identity fluidity, digital cultural agency, and algorithmic influence. The findings reveal that cultural identity in digital spaces is characterized by hybridity and performativity, with Generation Z actively producing cultural narratives, revitalizing heritage, and engaging in digital activism. However, identity formation is simultaneously shaped by algorithmic pressures and globalization, creating risks of homogenization and fragmentation. In conclusion, understanding the transformation of cultural identity in the digital era requires an integrative humanities framework that combines identity theory, digital cultural studies, and digital ethics to ensure cultural sustainability and representational justice

Ethical and methodological challenges are common in ethnographic research on digital intimate platforms, with which we identify digital platforms designed and used for intimate, sexual, and romantic interactions and encounters. Referring to the eight principles for conducting justice-oriented research with digital data of data feminism, with particular attention to the affective experience of research, we explore some of the ethical and methodological challenges encountered in conducting digital ethnography on OnlyFans and mobile dating apps and propose strategies to confront them. Findings revolve around three key issues: 1) Users’ privacy: tensions between conducting ethical ethnographic research and respecting users’ privacy; 2) Researcher’s privacy: Doing research on platforms that require identifiers, like facial pictures and/or identity verification creates a tension between protecting researcher’s privacy and conducting research; 3) Researcher-user interaction : digital platforms for intimacy are characterized by implicit norms of interaction and relational expectations, and the researcher’s presence is interpreted accordingly; researchers experienced unwanted sexualised interactions, ghosting and blocking, and fatigue connected to information overload. Overall, the article shows how studying intimate digital spaces raises ethical and methodological challenges and proposes that feminist digital ethnography entails: (i) making labor visible, (ii) reporting the embodied experience of research, (iii) centering users’ consent, privacy, and self-determination, and (iv) striving for diversity in the research team.

ABSTRACT This paper examines how contemporary social media users in Kazakhstan engage with early Soviet-era figures known as the Kazakh Intelligentsia, particularly in the context of the war in Ukraine. It explores how historical memory and nostalgic longing are reconstructed, contested and repurposed through the digital representation of Alash movement leaders of the 1920s. These figures are increasingly reimagined across various cultural forms, including sculptures, AI-generated animations and digital art. The study argues that the resemiotisation of Alash leaders functions as a spatiotemporal trope, allowing social media users to symbolically reclaim a chosen part of a mythologised sovereign past. Employing multimodal discourse analysis and digital ethnography, the research investigates how social media platforms serve as sites of ideological negotiation and cultural resistance. Drawing from decolonial theory, sociolinguistics and memory studies, this project contributes to discussions on de-russification and de-Sovietisation in Kazakhstan’s public space.

ABSTRACT This paper investigates the experiences of Australian Football League Women’s (AFLW) footballers with club-led digital performance monitoring, such as GPS tracking and holistic wellness surveys. Guided by feminist new materialism, underpinned with affect theory, we analyse how human and non-human elements – athletes, devices, data infrastructures, and organisational norms – co-produce embodied and affective responses to monitoring. We conducted a qualitative digital ethnography with eight AFLW footballers and four fitness staff members across six clubs. The footballers’ (8) data were collected through interviews, reflexive surveys, and video re-enactments, alongside interviews with club fitness staff (4) for context. Data collection occurred between October 2021 and April 2022. We analysed these data through a feminist new materialist lens, finding that performance monitoring was a contested practice for the footballers. Consequently, the footballers perceived performance monitoring to be an expected feature of elite sport, yet reported demotivation, anxiety, and body image concerns, heightened by team-wide data sharing, limited contextualisation of metrics, and gaps in organisational support. These affective responses were shaped by the semi-professional conditions that restricted time, resources, education, and communication around monitoring. To address these issues, we propose an organisational, player centred framework – emphasising communication, understanding, consistency, proportionality, transparency, and wearability – to guide athlete focused monitoring within emerging women’s elite sport settings. By integrating feminist new materialism and affect theory with our digital ethnography, our study advances theoretical and methodological directions in sport management and offers actionable guidance for the management of digital performance monitoring of women athletes.

The emergence of cancel culture has transformed digital spaces into arenas of moral judgment, where public outrage frequently functions as a mechanism of social control. In the Indonesian context, this phenomenon unveils pronounced gender asymmetries, particularly in the form of symbolic punishment endured by women, which is disproportionate and enduring. This study aims to examine how cancel culture functions as a gendered practice that undermines women's dignity and reframes solidarity through conditional moral standards. Employing a virtual ethnography approach, this study analyzes digital interactions, public narratives, and mediated responses surrounding selected cases of online cancellation involving women. The findings suggest that cancel culture functions not merely as an expression of collective accountability; rather, it constitutes a structured process shaped by patriarchal moral hierarchies, algorithmic amplification, and selective public empathy. Women's purported moral transgressions are characterized as character flaws, whereas analogous actions by men are frequently contextualized and pardoned. In addition, the discourse of Woman Supporting Woman frequently functions as a normative instrument that disciplines women rather than cultivating authentic solidarity. This study makes a significant contribution to contemporary feminist and communication scholarship by conceptualizing cancel culture as a form of gendered power practice and emphasizing the need to reposition digital solidarity as a structural, ethical, and political commitment to achieving gender justice.

In contemporary game fandoms, sharing news, reactions, and gameplay videos serves as a personalized affective record and a semipublic practice of community bonding. The release of Black Myth: Wukong catalyzed such practices at scale: creators on Bilibili and YouTube circulated walkthroughs, edited clips, and commentary that drew large cohorts of “cloud gamers.” Interactions among these communities significantly reshape the game's global image. Through digital ethnography of leading creators and their interaction cultures, this study approaches video adaptations as both discourse and a form of fan-driven “entertainment journalism.” We analyze heterogeneous practices—across narrative, technology, and nationalism—to show how adaptations on platforms reconfigure the game from a singular “central text” into a transmedia heteroglossia. Within this arena, the game's story of resistance fragments into symbolic, non-narrative signifiers: domestically adopted into nationalist narratives, and globally operating as a metonym for “China.” Yet the same symbols are continually repurposed by creators and viewers to generate alternative articulations, transnational solidarities, and inclusive participation, including players and audiences constrained by various barriers. The “Wukong” imaginary crystallizes this ambivalence, being at once a nationalist emblem, an assertion of individual agency, and a marker of collective fan identity. The resulting fan-curated archive thus functions as a living cyberinfrastructure that documents and circulates noninstitutional cultural knowledge. Concurrently, “cloud-gaming” spectatorship produces an illusion of equality while maintaining the stratification between players and viewers. By introducing an East Asian fandom perspective, this article demonstrates how nationalist mediation can paradoxically incubate transnational heteroglossia.