This paper examines Hao Jingfang’s speculative fiction—particularly “Folding Beijing” and “Xian Ge” as a critical lens through which to analyze contemporary ­Chinese science fiction’s negotiation with modernity. It explores how her narratives represent fragmented space-time structures to critique progress, social stratification, and the limits of human identity within technocapitalist societies. By foregrounding marginalized ­perspectives, Hao’s fiction challenges Enlightenment rationalism and offers a vision of humanity shaped by sociohistorical conditions rather than universalist ideals. The study further contextualizes her work within a broader global framework, positioning Chinese sf as both culturally specific and globally resonant. Drawing on theories of modernity, morality, and environmental ethics, this analysis argues that Hao’s fiction calls for a reconfiguration of human-nature relations and a renewed moral imagination. Ultimately, the paper situates Hao Jingfang’s work as a compelling response to the crisis of the Anthropocene and the failures of modernist ideology.

Dialogue between palace and land-rain garden and hydrological restoration strategies for sustainable landscape renewal at the Alhambra.

This paper delves into the representation of Afro-descendant wet nurses in the Americas’ visual culture, from nineteenth-century-colonial photography up to the present. Starting from the iconography created through this medium, which configures a language used as a tool for social control, we will review how contemporary visual production intervenes in these archives. The relational analysis of pieces created by women artists and based on collections from Brazil, Peru, and the United States, reveals that appropriationist operations are, firstly, a way of dismantling archival dynamics of erasure and stereotyping, allowing for the amplification of its stories, and secondly, a means for engaging the audience in the questioning of hegemonic discourses.

This paper examines an underexplored area in fashion scholarship by focusing on how prosthetic limbs are esthetically integrated as forms of identity expression and cultural authorship. Using visual and discourse analysis of content from the Chinese social media platform RedNote (Xiaohongshu), the study explores how disabled influencers style and incorporate prosthetic limbs into fashion practices and online self-presentation within digital visual culture. Drawing from the affirmative model of disability and fashion theory, the paper uses Fashioning Affirmative Embodiment as a conceptual lens that synthesizes existing frameworks to analyze prosthetic customization as aesthetic agency, subcultural participation, and resistance to ableist norms. While the findings are not intended to generalize across disabled populations, this study offers a situated analysis of visual practices that challenge and broaden the global scope of fashion and disability studies. The findings point to the development of a visual language in which prosthetic limbs are styled in relation to trend-driven and genre-based esthetics. In these practices, assistive technologies become associated with narrative meaning and stylistic experimentation. By focusing on the Chinese digital context, the study contributes to existing discussions in disability and fashion studies by situating embodiment, belonging, and self-expression beyond predominantly Western frameworks.

This article examines the prominence of infographics within the contemporary visual culture of global maternal health advocacy, exploring their aesthetic, narrative and semiotic power. Infographics are a ubiquitous sensory and aesthetic feature of the global health space, filling the pages of annual reports and websites of United Nations (UN), Non-Governmental organization (NGO) and government agencies and on display in the exhibition halls and power point presentations at international conferences. I focus on the social and political work that infographics do, observing the ways in which they go beyond their remit of conveying information and rendering complex numerical data in a neutral and accessible way. I begin by describing two key historical precedents in data visualization, highlighting the pioneering work of Florence Nightingale and W.E.B. Du Bois who used data visualizations as tools in their advocacy projects of social and institutional change. Infographics in the global maternal health advocacy space, I argue, are likewise calculated appeals, combining numbers with color and compelling imagery to move the viewer to awareness and action. Further, they tend to follow a contemporary neoliberal script that frames maternal survival in terms of investment, empowerment, and economic potential. In this way they shape how we understand the problem of maternal mortality and they legitimize solutions that can be taken up by policy makers and funders. This analysis contributes to broader anthropological conversations about visuality, biopolitics, and the humanitarian logic and procedural aesthetics of the contemporary global health enterprise.

ABSTRACT This study examines how nonhuman charisma is culturally, historically, and economically constructed through the case of fireflies in South Korea. While conservation scholarship often treats charisma as an inherent quality of species, this study demonstrates that firefly charisma emerged through historically embedded nostalgia and was later intensified by commodification and spectacularization within affective economies. Drawing on archival sources, folklore, media reports, interviews with activists and breeders, and analyses of firefly exhibitions and festivals, the study traces how fireflies transformed from abundant creatures in agrarian landscapes into nostalgic symbols of purity and childhood innocence during South Korea’s postwar modernization. This nostalgic attachment was strategically mobilized in a forest-conservation campaign, where fireflies proved more emotionally compelling than legally protected species. Advances in mass-rearing technologies enabled zoos and municipalities to stage spectacular displays, turning bioluminescence into a commodified and reproducible attraction. These developments illustrate how firefly charisma is filtered, amplified, and spectacularized within cultural and economic circuits, producing lively commodities aligned with broader affective economies. The analysis highlights the contingent and orchestrated nature of nonhuman charisma, showing how affective investments in nonhumans are entangled with historical trajectories, technological interventions, and cultural imaginaries.

This article examines the photographic practice of Mir Seid Ali (Mirza Seyed Ali Khan Mustawfi), a significant yet understudied figure in late Qajar visual culture whose dual position as royal accountant (mustawfī) and photographer enabled distinctive representational strategies. Through analysis of his photographic corpus housed in the Golestan Palace archives, the study demonstrates how Mir Seid Ali’s consistent formal interventions – particularly his strategic deployment of a balustrade motif across portraits of both courtiers and labourers, and his systematic documentation of elite subjects in dual representational modes – constituted theoretical propositions regarding photographic mediation and social classification. The research positions Mir Seid Ali within what might be termed an ‘institutional avant-garde’, challenging conventional binary oppositions between institutional conservatism and artistic innovation that have structured narratives of modernism’s development. By situating his work alongside contemporaries like Antoin Sevruguin, the article illuminates a distinctively Iranian photographic modernism characterised by metacritical awareness of representation’s relationship to power, and argues that these visual innovations prefigured the medium’s subsequent deployment during the Constitutional Revolution period.

Symbolic behavior is a unique and defining capability of our species. The emergence and subsequent evolution of this behavior-particularly with regard to visual culture-has been a topic that has historically attracted a breadth of different disciplinary perspectives, from archaeology and anthropology to linguistics, cognitive science, and psychology. Each discipline provides unique insights into the early evidence, mechanisms, processes, social role, and evolutionary trajectory of symbolic behavior. Yet, there are rare occurrences where these disciplines directly interact. The question of how our species began engaging in symbolic behavior, and the role it played within our evolutionary story, is one that cannot be answered by any one discipline alone. This thematic topic brings together new methodological and theoretical research on the evolution of human visual culture and symbolic behavior. The contributions within this topic span from archaeological investigations of early symbolic behavior, empirical interdisciplinary approaches that integrate multiple strands of evidence, to cutting-edge insights about the cognitive processes and mechanisms that may have given rise to meaning-making in relation to visual media. In drawing together these diverse, yet complementary, approaches to understanding marks and meaning, this topic intends to broaden the interdisciplinary horizons of research into the evolution of symbolic behavior.

The blistering development of digital spaces of visual media has transformed the experience and presentations of bodies, identities, and vulnerabilities on the Internet, especially through young people in universities. This paper focuses on analyzing the gendered cyber threats against women in light of visual culture and social protection, which concerns the perception and formation of policing narratives in online space. Based on the answers of Gen Z female university students, the study examines the experience of cybercrimes against women, its perception, and visualization in the social media, online platforms, and mediated discourse. The paper makes cyber harassment a part of modern visual culture in which images, acts of subjectivity and the relationship in the Internet help produce vulnerability and resistance. It also examines how the law enforcement is depicted in digital discourse, identifying the disjunction between protection mechanisms carried out by the institutions and how the youth understand safety. The integration of visual studies, gender studies, and cultural analysis perspectives will give the research a step forward to predict the nature of cybercrime visually by performatively, as well as in representational aspects. The results indicate that visual stories have a strong impact on awareness, reporting behavior, and trust in the policing structures. The present research is an addition to an emerging framework of literature on digital bodies and social protection by providing information about the utilization of visual culture with the help of preventive measures, awareness-raising activities and creative interventions to tackle gendered cyber threats in the current youth cultures.

Painting has also been a core purpose of visual storytelling since it allows one to express cultural materials, beliefs, and human experiences in a visual form. This paper analyses the changes in the methods of visual storytelling in both traditional and contemporary painting along with the development of the way narrative organization, symbolism, material activities and interaction with the viewer has been changing over the recent decades. Traditional painting is examined as a form of narrative based on these characteristics of sharing of iconography, linear or cyclical storytelling and culturally fixed meanings through which stories are interpreted. Contemporary painting, in contrast, has been approached as an open-ended narration practice, which is fragmented, conceptually rich, highly-mediated, and participatorily interpreted. The study is conducted through the lens of a qualitative and comparative analysis based on the narrative theory, visual semiotics, and art-historical analysis to identify the preservation and the breakage of the conventional and modern methods of visual storytelling. The evidence shows that even though modern painting has broken the ties with organization and clarity of storytelling, it still possesses the basic instincts of storytelling in symbolic articulation, emotional appeal, and physical arrangement. The transformation in collective narratives into the subjective and critical storytelling is an indication of wider social, cultural, and philosophical transformation that has attempted to influence the visual culture.

Historically, patronage has been the main support system through which arts have been produced and nurtured in any time period and any region in the world. Starting from ancient rulers to present day market-driven systems, art creation has been in the need of patronage to sustain. An Art history of Hyderabad has witnessed the development of visual art culture through royal patronage to institutional support. Along with patronage, the motivation behind it is equally important as it can significantly influence the creation of art itself. This study focuses on studying the art patronage in Hyderabad from the ancient times till late nineteenth century when the art scenario changed drastically. Study of all the arts of the past and existing literature on them provides us the evidences to understand the motivation behind these patronages

This study focuses on the important visual text "A Mirror for the Emperor", exploring how it transforms Confucian "rites" into social norms through visual mechanisms. Unlike previous studies that mainly remained within the fields of textual analysis or political history, this paper approaches it from the perspective of visual culture and etiquette dissemination, analyzing its unique value as a "visual etiquette mechanism". Methodologically, this study combines Panofsky's three-level analysis method of iconography, visual semiotics, and political etiquette theory to conduct in-depth interpretations of the three core images: "Appointing Talents for Governance", "Warning Stelae and Criticism Boards", and "Filial Piety Ascending to Heaven". At the same time, this study pays attention to its regional reconfiguration in Shandong, Henan, and Shaanxi, revealing the recontextualization process of these images in local academies, temples, and families. Additionally, this study draws on Cosmological Ethics and normative social psychology to examine how these visual symbols construct the paradigm of normative compliance. The research on Ming Dynasty etiquette images also confirms that the visual presentation of natural symbols reinforces society's understanding of "the harmony between heaven and man", thereby extending the political admonition consciousness to a widespread reverence for cosmic order and social order. The research results indicate that the visual mechanism of "A Mirror for the Emperor" mainly manifests in four aspects: Firstly, through elements such as postures, objects, and spaces, it constructs a stable visual grammar, making "rites" have systematic expressibility; Secondly, the images align with the political tensions of the Wanli period and become symbols of admonition; Thirdly, the regional re-production realizes the cycle of "central generation - local adaptation", promoting the diffusion of the ritual system in grassroots society; Fourthly, the visual medium transforms ethical norms into daily learnable postures, strengthening social integration. The academic contributions of this study can be summarized as four points: expanding the artistic history perspective beyond textual studies; emphasizing the cultural function of etiquette in visual communication; integrating iconography and etiquette theory to reveal the interaction mechanism between visual and power; and placing Chinese etiquette images within the academic discourse of global visual culture and cross-cultural comparison.

This essay explores the pedagogical use of images generated by artificial intelligence (AI) to investigate the politics of facial representation. Through a media archaeological and visual culture lens, the essay outlines a classroom assignment, Facial Subjects , in which students generate photographic portraits using generative AI to critically examine how identity categories such as race, gender and class are constructed, mediated and encoded by machine learning (ML) systems. By comparing AI-generated portraits to archival and real-word photographic portraits, students engage in visual critique while developing media literacy in the analysis of images. The essay argues that teaching with AI-generated images provides new resources for critical media pedagogy and that comparing those images with archival and real-world portraits equips students with conceptual tools for thinking about questions of aesthetics, normativity, and bias central to film and media studies today. Through this exercise, teaching with AI becomes a method of inquiring into the ideological underpinnings of contemporary image systems while fostering experimental and critical approaches to media pedagogy.

This study examines the visual and discursive construction of patriotic narratives in advertising art, situating commercial imagery within broader theoretical frameworks of nationalism and visual culture. Drawing on the concepts of imagined communities and banal nationalism, the research investigates how national symbols, collective identity narratives, and affective appeals to belonging are embedded within contemporary advertising visuals. A mixed-methods design integrating critical visual analysis, semiotic interpretation, and quantitative content analysis was employed to analyze a purposively selected corpus of print, digital, and outdoor advertisements produced between 2019 and 2024. The findings reveal that advertising art frequently mobilizes aestheticized and emotionally coded forms of nationalism, privileging subtle visual cues over overt political iconography. Statistical analysis further indicates a significant association between the presence of patriotic imagery and higher levels of audience engagement, underscoring the persuasive efficacy of national symbolism in commercial communication. The study contributes to scholarship on visual culture and media nationalism by demonstrating how advertising operates as a key site for the everyday reproduction and commodification of national identity. The findings have implications for critical media studies, advertising ethics, and the broader understanding of how nationalism is normalized within consumer visual culture.

Abstract The intensification of environmental crises across the globe—manifested through climate change, biodiversity loss, pollution, and resource depletion—has profoundly reshaped the cultural imagination of the twenty-first century. Within this context, contemporary art has increasingly emerged not merely as a site of aesthetic production but as a critical platform for ecological reflection, public engagement, and environmental activism. This review paper examines the evolving relationship between environmental crisis and contemporary art practice, with particular emphasis on Indian contemporary art since 2000. Drawing upon secondary literature including scholarly articles, exhibition catalogues, curatorial essays, and critical art histories, the study synthesizes major theoretical frameworks such as ecocriticism, environmental aesthetics, postcolonial ecology, and art activism. The review identifies how Indian artists employ installation, site-specific practice, recycled materials, community participation, and indigenous knowledge systems to address urgent ecological concerns. At the same time, the literature reveals significant debates regarding the effectiveness, accessibility, and institutionalization of environmental art. While many practices successfully generate awareness and alternative ecological imaginaries, others risk remaining symbolic or confined to elite art spaces. By critically comparing existing scholarship, this paper highlights key contributions, conceptual tensions, and research gaps, particularly the need for more empirical studies and regionally diverse documentation. The review concludes that contemporary art in India functions as an important cultural mediator between environmental knowledge and public consciousness, yet its transformative potential depends on deeper interdisciplinary collaboration and socially embedded methodologies. Keywords: environmental art, contemporary art, ecocriticism, sustainability, Indian art, art activism, environmental aesthetics

Abstract This article traces the history of the research hub Visible Justice, fore-grounding the necessity for transdisciplinary thinking and the need to seek alternative modes of address for transformative discourse in cultural spaces. Founded at University of the Arts London in 2018, and emerging from a global moment of political unrest and mass mobilization, the initiative is dedicated to exploring the intersections of visual culture, ethics, aesthetics, and social justice beyond the confines of traditional legal frameworks. Visible Justice fosters collaboration between artists, activists, scholars, and legal practitioners, channeling political voice through visual, sonic, and performative interventions. It seeks to reckon with the specters of slavery, empire, colonial rule, and totalitarian control—forces that have never been laid to rest and that continue to render lives unlivable and environments unbreathable today. Recent projects have examined the algorithmic mediation of justice, the rise of neocolonial “frontierism” in space exploration, and the entanglements of climate colonialism with indigenous and diasporic dispossession. Through a series of symposia, exhibitions, and performances, Visible Justice envisions transformative, collective futures grounded in environmental, racial, and social justice. Can working across traditional disciplinary lines with artists, activists, academics, lawyers, and arts institutions create collective routes to political freedom?

ABSTRACT This study builds upon and refines current scholarship on Late Antique Judaism, which increasingly recognises that rabbinic sages did not dominate synagogue life. Rather than presenting this as a new discovery, the article emphasizes its unique contribution: that Judaism from the third to the sixth centuries CE. often reflected semi-polytheistic practices. Using literary, historical, and archaeological evidence—including dedicatory inscriptions and mosaic floors—this research demonstrates how Galilean Jewish communities adopted semi-polytheistic religious practices that incorporated pagan and Christian artistic influences, reflecting a theological framework that recognised multiple divine entities while maintaining primary devotion to one. This openness was facilitated by non-rabbinic leadership structures where local civilian leaders (archisynagogos or rosh knesset), rather than rabbinic sages, governed synagogue life. These educated administrators created space for religious practices diverging from emerging rabbinic orthodoxy. Synagogue visual culture provides compelling evidence for theological openness to divine plurality. This study, therefore, extends the consensus on synagogue diversity by demonstrating that post-Temple Galilean Judaism represented a distinct, more theologically inclusive branch of Jewish practice, fundamentally reshaping our understanding of Jewish religious diversity during Late Antiquity.

Phenomenology of visual culture: building an imaginative culture for learning and teaching art in higher education

This study examines how the Palestinian Arab cultural elite in Israel, divided between institutional and custodian currents, navigates the intersecting pressures of national identity, political exclusion, and evolving cultural regimes. The findings reveal that the cultural elite is far from monolithic, comprising two interwoven yet distinct camps, each grounded in a common national identity but shaped by different generational experiences. Custodian elites, an older cohort formed when culture served as partisan resistance, remain rooted in party-affiliated associations and traditional literature, investing their ideological capital in community-driven, non-formal initiatives to preserve Palestinian collective memory. Institutional elites have emerged amid recent global social and political shifts. This younger, formally educated group operates within NGOs, municipal bodies and universities, combining commitment to the Palestinian narrative with liberal and cosmopolitan values, and harnessing digital media, multilingual networks, and diverse funding to drive policy-focused educational and cultural reforms. The findings also reveal that despite divergent orientations, these camps engage in dynamic exchange. Institutional actors draw on custodian narrative practices to legitimize innovation, while custodians utilize institutional platforms to expand the reach of Palestinian narratives, showing how progressive cosmopolitanism and identity-centered nationalism co-produce a multifaceted cultural leadership under Israeli exclusion. Two clusters of challenges are identified. Custodian elites face declining legitimacy and funding shortages as their traditional patriotic discourse loses appeal among younger audiences. Institutional elites contend with mistrust in Arab society due to partnerships with state bodies and dependence on government funding. Both groups share two obstacles: inter-elite struggles that dilute authority and the absence of robust cultural infrastructure or a coherent cultural vision.

Keringkam is a traditional Sarawak Malay embroidery with gold or silver wrapped threads. The embroidered motifs function as visual symbols deeply embedded in both Islamic art and local cultural identity. This study employs Ferdinand de Saussure’s semiotic theory to analyze how the motifs in keringkam operate as signs, wherein the visual forms (signifiers) correspond to culturally constructed meanings (signifieds) derived from Islamic aesthetic principles and Sarawak Malay social traditions. By examining recurring floral, vegetal, geometric, and cosmological patterns, the research demonstrates how keringkam functions as a visual language that conveys local values. Drawing on primary data collected from Sarawak embroiderers and cultural practitioners, together with secondary literature on Islamic ornamentation and Malay material culture, this study challenges conventional interpretations that regard keringkam as merely decorative. Instead, it positions keringkam motifs as symbolic expressions of faith, identity, and heritage, thereby contributing to broader scholarly discussions on Islamic textile semiotics and Malay visual culture.