Since the economic upheaval of 1991, modern Indian art has been moving more and more toward research-based and ethnographic methodologies. What started as a plan to fix social division, political violence, and the effects of forgetting history has slowly become part of the institution. This study investigates the nuanced shift in the equilibrium between cognition and perception resulting from that consolidation.I use Henri Bergson's ideas about duration, Jacques Rancière's ideas about the distribution of the sensible, Fredric Jameson's ideas about late capitalism, and Ann Cvetkovich's ideas about emotional archives to show a conceptual shift in post-liberalisation art. The artwork is progressively susceptible to transforming into a medium for argumentation—explicit, research-backed, and discursively fortified—rather than a domain of perceptual uncertainty or visual involvement. The study analyses the reconfiguration of form, audience engagement, and pedagogy within the framework of liberalization, focusing on the methodologies of Shilpa Gupta, Riyas Komu, Gigi Scaria, Raqs Media Collective, and CAMP. I support a renewed emphasis on emotion, duration, and visual thinking, rather than rejecting ethnographic or conceptual approaches. This is not a retreat from politics, but a necessary complication of it in modern art and its pedagogy.

The purpose of the article is to identify and analyze the dramaturgical mechanisms of absurdity as a critical tool for interpreting social, political, and cultural realities in XXI century film comedy. The object of the study is contemporary absurd film comedy as a cultural and artistic phenomenon. The subject is the dramaturgical mechanisms of absurdity and their sociocritical function in three selected films. The relevance of the research lies in the growing role of absurd comedy as a form of philosophical and critical reflection in the post-truth era, where traditional analytical tools often prove insufficient to address crises of meaning, ideological constructs, and communicative collapse.The methodology of the theoretical analysis com-bines dramaturgical and genre-typological approaches with philosophical frameworks of the absurd — primarily A. Camus’ concept of the confrontation between the human quest for meaning and the world’s indifference — and cultural critique drawing on Baudrillard, Hutcheon, Eagleton, and others. The study applies close reading of three key films: The Death of Stalin (2017, dir. Armando Iannucci), Swiss Army Man (2016, dir. Daniel Kwan & Daniel Scheinert), and Triangle of Sadness (2022, dir. Ruben Östlund).The results. The analysis demonstrates how violation of logic, grotesque exaggeration, paradox, and hierarchical inversion function as critical dramaturgical tools in each film. In The Death of Stalin, absurdity exposes the irrational chaos and fear-driven bureaucracy of totalitarianism. Swiss Army Man uses bodily grotesque and existential nonsense to explore profound loneliness and the human need for connection. Triangle of Sadness deconstructs fictitious class hierarchies and simulacral roles in late capitalism through social satire. Absurd film comedy thus emerges as a distinctive philosophical language: laughter exposes social contradictions, cognitive fractures, ideological illusions, and commu-nicative failures.The scientific novelty of the research lies in the systematic description of absurdity specifically as a dramaturgical tool with a pronounced social vector — an approach not previously applied to this selection of contemporary films in the Ukrainian scholarly tradition.The practical significance of the article consists in the potential application of these findings in the professional training of directors and screenwriters, as well as within specialized academic disciplines in film studies and cultural criticism.

This essay reflects on the legacy of Fredric Jameson (1934–2024) as both a Marxist cultural critic and educator, emphasizing the relevance of his dialectical method and utopian commitments for pedagogy today. Against the backdrop of resurgent fascism, climate catastrophe, and a wave of assaults on academic freedom, Jameson’s work offers not merely a vital and uncompromising approach to literary theory or dialectical criticism, but a mode of teaching deeply attuned to matters of historical conjuncture, ideological production, and collective imagination. The essay explores what it means to "teach with Jameson" as universities find themselves under siege from AI and a range of authoritarian threats. Rather than treating Jameson’s thought as a fixed archive or static set of theories to be indexed or mastered, the essay proposes a pedagogical orientation that views the classroom itself as a “laboratory of futurity,” a space of dialectical mediation and general antagonism that internalizes both reactionary and utopian impulses. Expanding on Jameson’s ideas of ontology of the present and archaeologies of the future, the essay argues for a utopian pedagogy that resists moralism and essentialism, insists on historicization of thought, and activates speculative capacities for confronting cynical reason and late capitalism’s affective and ideological impasses. Through this, Jameson’s legacy is presented as a vital resource for teaching, theorizing, and imagining democratic revitalization.

ABSTRACT When Chiung Yao (瓊瑤 1938–2024), the ‘Queen of Romance’ who shaped the emotional landscape of generations across East Asia, staged her death as a public protest, she authored a final, telling paradox. This article argues that Chiung Yao’s ‘labour of decline’ constitutes a radical confrontation with the cultural and biopolitical narrative of ageing as decline. Her struggle – spanning the clinical, domestic, and public spheres – diagnoses the systemic failures of late capitalism. Intervening in celebrity ageing studies, this study shifts the focus from the representation of ageing and repositions the end-of-life stage as the most intense frontier of decline, offering a structural critique grounded in East Asian Modernity. To trace this paradoxical trajectory, the analysis first demonstrates how Chiung Yao mobilised her celebrity persona as biopolitical resistance against the medical gaze. It then excavates the unwaged social reproductive labour and moral injury that revealed a deeper crisis of care, before showing how this resistance was ultimately captured by the logic of communicative capitalism. Ultimately, Chiung Yao’s case reveals the bleak efficacy of a system that extracts value even from our final acts of dissent, transforming a demand for dignity into a marketable spectacle.

This essay offers a cultural semiotics of the relationship between agency, work, nourishment, and social life in the contemporary dog–human relationship. The pet industry has introduced a concept – enrichment – that is supposed to alleviate the despair of captive animals. However, animal behavior studies show that the antidote to boredom is not entertainment but meaningful work and the experience of agency that accompanies it. The enrichment market literally banks on the value of exhausting your dog. In the case of such profoundly social animals as humans and dogs, real enrichment takes place and is sustained only between species. Understood ontologically, as the exhaustion of being as being, boredom and fatigue emerge as social problems, not a feature of individuals. When read as late capitalism’s extraction of life itself, they emerge as essentially interspecies/ecological.

Once a vibrant trading hub in Southeast Asia, the Malaysian port city of Malacca is now part ghost town, part real estate development. Built on the prospect of transforming Malacca into a tourist magnet and a node in China’s Belt and Road Initiative, hasty reclamation and exaggerated sales promises have turned the coastline into a mud field and the construction sites into ruins. Driven by national and transnational interests, sand is made operational as a medium of economic transformation and political consolidation. Taking the silted Straits of Malacca as a point of departure, this article proposes a reading of land reclamation aimed at transforming sand into fixed forms against the unpredictable vibrancy of the matter. As fieldwork reveals, mudskippers thrive, and locals claim unexpected agency in the mire of Malacca’s near abandonment and the decaying remnants of past and future urban designs. Attention to the structural potential of sand’s granular physics unsettles practices of environmental control and financial speculation, highlighting the ambiguity of contemporary processes of urban transformation. Substrate and effect of the ongoing limbo that conflates urban and economic development strategies and postcolonial identity politics, Malacca’s coastline comes to express capital flows as partial and unstable sedimentation.

ABSTRACT This paper explores how Chloé Zhao employs adaptation strategies to construct her transnational identity in her film Nomadland (2020). Through two significant adaptations, Zhao replaces the real protagonist, Linda May, in the original with the fictional middle-aged white woman, Fern. This intervention allows Zhao to project her authorship shaped by mobility, outsiderhood, and personal cinematic aesthetics into an easily understood role from an American left-wing liberal perspective. Through Fern’s persistent loneliness and repeated farewells, Zhao maintains low political visibility, transforming the instability of American society into a personalized, “safe” narrative space. Meanwhile, the film’s poetic reconstruction of the vans and the American West transforms spacesshaped by colonial history, labor exploitation and the instability of late capitalism, into heterotopias, facilitating personal healing and identity. Through these strategies, Zhao reconstructs these spaces as an aesthetic sanctuarywhere she can reconcile her outsider identity. This aestheticization constitutes a creative mode of low political visibility, allowing Zhao to participate in American mainstream film industry without directly confronting ideological tensions. Together, these adaptive strategies collectively reveal how Zhao uses fiction and landscape to negotiate transnational identity through a personalized and politically cautious cinematic languages.

ABSTRACT Higher education faces many challenges in the current climate. Some of these challenges are not new; the face of neoliberalism has been a part of higher education for a few decades, as colleges and universities have sought to fit within the model of late capitalism. The message of market capitalism has been a component of the structure of schools as they have sought to position themselves within a fiscal setting. More recently, there have been tendencies toward authoritarianism, as some colleges and universities have attempted to limit some freedoms and faculty and others. A potential remedy for the present state of affairs is attention to genuine liberalism, in which freedom is of the utmost concern.

The project 4 Elements introduces four symbolic color-coded agents #ccff00, #000000, #c0c0c0, and #cc99ff through textile objects and installation in public space. These agents operate at the intersection of speculative fiction, game design, and posthuman myth-making, forming a visual scenario for possible future LARP-based narratives. Drawing from posthumanist, feminist, and environmental theory, the work addresses the tensions of creating amidst climate crisis, political instability, and dominant anthropocentric systems. It embraces nonlinearity and multispecies entanglements by situating its presence within the landscape as a porous, temporary gesture. Expanding on earlier experiments with participatory movement and costume in public space, the project resists fixed meaning in favor of symbolic drift—proposing alternative modes of being, sensing, and assembling in a world marked by collapse and transformation. Keywords: artistic research, game design, textile design, art criticism, color theory, mythology, late capitalism, site specific, textile object, performance, institutional critique, nonlinearity, gamification, participation Topic-specific keywords: larp, anthropocentrism, environmental crisis, polycrisis, rhizome, noh-human entities, posthumanism, object-oriented ontology, feminist theory

ABSTRACT This article reads J.G. Ballard’s Cocaine Nights alongside Disneyland as parallel case studies in the absorption of utopian desire into the architectures of late capitalism. It examines the novel as a critical intervention into the cultural logic of late capitalism, focusing on its representation of leisure societies as hyperreal utopias sustained by commodified transgression. It will be argued that Estrella de Mar, the novel’s luxury resort on Spain’s Costa del Sol, mirrors Disneyland’s meticulous spatial design and thematic simulation, yet inverts its logic: where Disneyland suppresses conflict to preserve the fantasy of harmony, Estrella deliberately engineers deviance to sustain social cohesion. Drawing on Fredric Jameson, Jean Baudrillard, and David Harvey, the paper situates Ballard’s narrative within broader debates on the waning of affect and the domestication of dissent. By reading Ballard’s fictional resort alongside Disneyland’s cheerful authoritarianism, the article argues that utopian desire in the neoliberal era is not extinguished but perverted. Under such conditions, rebellion is aestheticized, dissent becomes a lifestyle accessory, and the utopian imagination is redirected into forms that reinforce the very systems it once sought to resist.

The supermarket industry is an “industry in flux.”[1] Modern grocery stores face multinational opposition at the millennium paralleling the extinction of neighborhood “mom-and-pop” stores with the rise of chain stores of the late 19th century (Strasser, 1989). With this large-scale reorganization of the grocery store industry comes a concomitant restructuring of what constitutes a grocery store itself—its architecture, services, and signs. The following study analyzes the evolving discourse on signs—or ‘signage,’ as it is called in the industry—in Progressive Grocer magazine over the 12-year period from 1996 to 2008. First, signs are contextualized in terms of the history of in-store marketing, beginning with the birth of packaging that accompanied the shift away from neighborhood stores to chain stores at the close of the 19th century. This transformation parallels the change supermarkets faced at the close of the 20th century in response to consolidating forces, out of which emerged a new strategy for survival in the form of highly integrated customer-oriented marketing. This marketing strategy encompasses a number of themes, including streamlining organization of the grocery store to maximize profit, outsourcing of store design, re-evaluation of the role of labor and the creation of new in-store environments emphasizing customer experience. These conflate with the fragmentation of what has traditionally been called a sign. Finally, the study looks at some possible future trends for signage, including the integration of RFID into shelves, the increasing struggle to win space in shelf-ads, and a vision for the overhaul of the entire spatial construction of the store. The development of signage as a source of revenue in-and-of itself is considered in the context of emerging surveillance networks, and also from the perspective Baudrillard’s theory of symbolic exchange and the meaning of commodity fetishism under advanced capitalism.

Recent proposals for large-scale nature conservation, such as Half-Earth (Socialism) or the 30 × 30 agenda, rely on a distorted notion of nature as a pristine realm untouched by human influence. This idea, which we term the ‘wilderness fetish’, builds on the historically produced separation of nature and society central to capitalist modes of accumulation. In upholding a moral and aesthetic ideal of untouched nature, the wilderness fetish conceals the material and social relations involved in the production and conservation of ‘the wild’ and its own socio-historical genesis. We argue that the wilderness fetish gained traction at the precise moment when the search for capitalist solutions to the capitalogenic crises of climate change, biodiversity loss, and ecological degradation intensified. Drawing on Marx's concept of the commodity fetish, we theorise the wilderness fetish as a category of both moral and economic value. It is inspired by, and complementary to, the concept of commodity fetishism, but takes shape in the domain of conservation. Under conditions of late capitalism, wilderness is produced and valorised, while simultaneously playing a pivotal role in ideological and material reproduction. Capitalism and conservation are deeply entangled by a fetishistic logic. Therefore, we foreground the importance of pursuing qualitative, rather than merely quantitative, changes to enable genuine social-ecological transformations for the future.

Abstract Calls have been growing for government interventions to address diets high in ultra-processed foods (i.e., ultra-processed diets), which are associated with a large and rising burden of preventable death and disease. To date, however, government action relating to ultra-processed foods (UPFs) has been mostly insufficient. In this paper, we argue that one of the key reasons behind this lacklustre response has been the dominance of ‘UPF fetishism’ in scientific, public, and policy discussions. Adapting Marx’s concept of ‘commodity fetishism’, we refer to UPF fetishism as the tendency to view UPFs only in terms of their final qualities or characteristics at the point of purchase (e.g., price, quality, convenience), while failing to consider all the socio-ecological processes, relations, and activities involved in their provisioning (e.g., intensive agriculture, widespread value extraction). UPF fetishism, we argue, undermines efforts seeking healthy, equitable, and sustainable diets worldwide by obscuring the wide range of harms and inequities generated along the entire UPF value chain, and by undermining and potentially foreclosing discussions on alternative visions and solutions for improving population diets. Researchers and advocates can help to challenge UPF fetishism by turning their focus to the structural and systemic drivers of ultra-processed diets. Taking this critical systems-level view ultimately draws attention the need to confront the very systems – particularly corporate food systems, late capitalism, and imperialism – that structure and sustain the harmful processes, relations, and activities underpinning the current system of UPF provisioning. While some trade-offs may be required, particularly with respect to pragmatism and political feasibility, a strategic advantage of moving beyond UPF fetishism is that it may help to illuminate meaningful opportunities for collaboration within the vast ecology of values-aligned movements seeking better diets, food systems, and economies for people and planet.

ABSTRACT The creative industries are shifting rapidly with the emergence of generative AI technologies. These transitions provide new opportunities for young people entering higher education in the creative industries, while perpetuating existing patterns of extraction and marginalisation under late capitalism. This article turns to the algorithmic arts in search of counter-practices that disrupt instrumental applications of AI within creative industries and higher education. Bringing the philosophy of technology into conversation with education and the digital arts, the authors identify three tactics to inform educational design with AI: (1) continuous mattering between algorithms and world; (2) playing with algorithmic assemblages; and (3) ethics-in-formation. The article builds on these critical tactics to inform the development of AI-powered software for navigating education and work futures in Southeast Asia. By situating generative AI within broader assemblages of human relationships with algorithms, the article offers critical interpretations of AI and its situated design implications for the creative industries and higher education.

This autoethnography critically reflects on receiving and providing care in late capitalism, trans modes of relational world-building, and cross-racial and working-class solidarities in the face of structural denial all the while grieving. It is as much about providing care as it is grappling with receiving the same. It is also a study about recovery and repair within a commune of world makers; about pressing in, not on, and learning to love otherwise. And finally, it is about feeling the fullness of grief while laboring to sense pleasure in a commune constituted in compassion, care, and critical love.

Social science studies can contribute to environmental issues, including through literature, which serves not only as an aesthetic medium but also as a critical reflection to raise ecological awareness. This paper demonstrates that works of fiction can serve as an alternative medium for raising public awareness that environmental degradation is a reality with far-reaching consequences for the sustainability of life. One example is the film Into the Wild (2007), which depicts Christopher McCandless' journey away from the hustle and bustle of the city to ecological regions such as rural areas, mountains, rivers, and ultimately the wilds of Alaska. By employing the concepts of pastoralism and wilderness through an eco-Marxist approach, Christopher's journey can be understood as an ideological discourse that promotes pastoral values while criticizing overly exploitative characteristic of late capitalism towards nature. However, this criticism is ambivalent because the main character remains dependent on the material products of late capitalism to survive. Thus, Into the Wild can be read as both a representation and a problematic critique of late capitalism and the relationship between humans and the environment.

Abstract My objective in this piece is to use the Roman legal fiction of Lex Ruinae, which, simultaneously refers to the law of ruins and ruinous law, to try to understand the relationship between law and what we might call the contemporary poly- / perma-crisis. In this regard, the overall thesis of the piece is that we might understand the legal dimensions of the crisis that seems to be spatially expansive, in the sense that it takes on planetary scale, and temporally extensive, in respect of seeming to stretch out into an endless critical future, through a theory of spasm . Here, the ruinous law of late capitalism seeks to force ever more progress, modernity, and profitability, but prevailing global economic conditions mean that further development is impossible and, in this way, exert a kind of contractive counter-force upon the global system that expresses itself in a tendency towards collapse and ruin. On the basis of this thesis, my argument is that rather than continue to live through the ruinous law of the code of capital, we should engage in what I am calling crisis jurisprudence to think about how we might live in the age of ruins and what a law of ruins might involve. Following a discussion of Lex Ruinae in the context of Roman crisis, and the struggle between Cicero, Caesar, and Antony over the purpose of law, I develop my discussion through an exploration the modern crisis of sovereignty, decision, and power, before showing how the economic version of imperium that has developed over the course of the second half of the 20th and early 21st century has led to the point of global poly- / perma-crisis, where there is nowhere else to go but a world of ruin. Thus, we confront the problem of Lex Ruinae.

Aim. To identify the conditions for the transformation of algorithmizing which is understood as one of the processes of the ontogenesis of digital society into an inhuman socio-technological process. Methodology. The research is based on interdisciplinary and activity-based approaches as two social-philosophical explanatory principles. The main method used is systems analysis, which is applied in combination with general scientific tools. Results. It is established that the process of algorithmizing, which in the conditions of the capitalist system is inseparable from the process of commercialization and mutually stimulated by it, turns out to be, along with it, a mode dehumanizing digital society. Research implications. The results of the research make it possible to understand new levels of alienation, which arose in the era of late capitalism, and stimulate efforts to further explore and conceptualize the ever-changing modes of dehumanizing society.

This study examines how Ma constructs hybridity and diasporic consciousness as central narrative dynamics that interrogate the complexities of cultural belonging, displacement, and self-definition in a globalized world. Through the figure of Candace Chen—a Chinese American woman navigating both the collapse of a capitalist system and the lingering weight of immigrant memory—Severance dramatizes the tensions between assimilation and cultural preservation. Drawing on postcolonial theories of hybridity, particularly Homi K. Bhabha’s conceptualization of the “in-between” or liminal space, the study highlights how the novel reimagines this zone as simultaneously a site of alienation and a locus of creative resistance. The narrative’s oscillation between monotonous routine and apocalyptic disruption mirrors the psychological dissonance of the diasporic subject, whose fractured identity parallels the broader dissolution of postmodern subjectivity under late capitalism. Ultimately, this study argues that Severance transforms the diasporic condition into an allegory of contemporary global precarity, illustrating how hybrid identities function not only as symptoms of displacement but also as strategies for navigating an increasingly homogenized cultural landscape.

Aim of the study: This research examines the expression of the Freudian uncanny in Ling Ma’s novel, Severance and the study reveals how the novel blurs the boundary between the familiar and the strange. Candace Chen, serves as a metaphor for the issues of alienation, emotional detachment, and obsessive repetition, all of which are common in late capitalist civilizations. This study broadens our understanding of how futuristic fiction can serve as a mirror for internal human struggles. Methodology: This research uses a qualitative analytical method to investigate the Freudian idea of the uncanny in Ling Ma's Severance. This analysis's primary goal is to show how unconscious urges, suppressed memories, and the resurgence of the suppressed materialize in the futuristic dystopia of Severance, where psychological alienation is examined against the backdrop of social breakdown and the pandemic. Findings: By using Freudian Psychoanalysis and his theory of the uncanny, this research has proved how Severance deconstructs traditional conventions and narratives of the dystopian fiction and unveils deeper psychological aspects hidden under the masks of routines, memory, and identity. Severance. Instead of using spectacular violence or intense narrative, Ma offers a quiet horror of the stillness and repetition along with internalized collapse. The novel rejects the idea of having a great hero. It replaces it with a psychological realism that centers not on action but on numbness, emotional alienation, and subtle horrors of daily life in the modern world. Conclusion: This study concludes that Severance subverts dystopian and zombie genre conventions by prioritizing psychological realism over spectacle. Through the uncanny, Ling Ma exposes how modern subjects internalize trauma and alienation, suggesting that the true dystopia lies not in societal collapse but in the persistence of emotionally hollow routines.