Cultural Studies is an international journal which explores the relation between cultural practices, everyday life, material, economic, political, geographical and historical contexts. It fosters more open analytic, critical and political conversations by encouraging people to push the dialogue into fresh, uncharted territory. It also aims to intervene in the processes by which the existing techniques, institutions and structures of power are reproduced, resisted and transformed.   Cultural Studies understands the term "culture" inclusively rather than exclusively, and publishes essays which encourage significant intellectual and political experimentation, intervention and dialogue.

Cultural Studies is an international journal that explores the relationship between cultural practices and everyday life, as well as material, economic, political, geographical, and historical contexts. It promotes more open analytical, critical, and political discussions by encouraging individuals to push the dialogue into new, uncharted territories. The journal also aims to intervene in the processes by which existing techniques, institutions, and structures of power are reproduced, resisted, and transformed. Cultural Studies understands the term 'culture' in an inclusive manner rather than an exclusive one, and publishes essays that encourage significant intellectual and political experimentation, intervention, and dialogue.

《Cultural Studies》是一本国际期刊，探讨文化实践与日常生活、物质、经济、政治、地理和历史背景之间的关系。它通过鼓励人们将对话推向新的、未知的领域，促进更开放的分析、批判和政治讨论。期刊还旨在干预现有权力技术、机构和结构的再生产、抵抗和转变过程。《Cultural Studies》对“文化”一词的理解是包容性的，而非排他性的，发表鼓励重要的知识和政治实验、干预和对话的论文。

Cultural Studies

The political theory and practice of Austro-Marxism provided an understanding of culture as an area of political conflict and as a class-based way of life. As a cultural and educational movement, Austro-Marxism defined the framework for transdisciplinary extramural cultural studies. An Austro-Marxist cluster defined by a number of scholars associated by political orientation and an alternative form of academic institutionalization emerged in interwar Vienna. This cluster disagreed with the paternalistic claim of leading representatives of the SDAP. Nevertheless, the SDAP defined the pluralistic framework for the formation of Austrian cultural studies. Socialist-oriented scholars such as Otto Neurath, Edgar Zilsel, Paul Lazarsfeld and Marie Jahoda developed a materialistic idea of culture focused on the social conditions of cultural practices. Furthermore, they provided a profound understanding of mass culture and popular culture.

Günther Sandner

FROM THE CRADLE TO THE GRAVE: AUSTRO-MARXISM AND CULTURAL STUDIES

从摇篮到坟墓：奥地利马克思主义与文化研究

The potential of consumption to figure as a site of political agency is now recognized by both corporate capitalism and its No Logo opposition. Many now also accept that the pursuit of consumerist lifestyles is the major contributor to ecological crisis. This article argues the importance in this context of recognizing the impact and longer term implications of some emerging forms of self-interested disaffection with consumerism on the part of affluent consumers themselves. For a small, but arguably growing number of these, consumerism is now compromised by its specific displeasures (stress, congestion, pollution, ill-health…) and seen as actively pre-empting other more rewarding ways of living. The ‘alternative hedonism’ implicit in these forms of consumer ambivalence is analysed with a view to disentangling its perspective from either the more didactic (and often overly naturalistic) conceptions of need and satisfaction offered by some Marxist strands of cultural theory, and from the post-modernist celebrations of consumer culture as a resource for the pleasures of fantasy, fashion and self-styling. In pressing the case for the development of a new ‘hedonist imaginary’ with which to subvert current perceptions of the attractions of a consumerist material culture, the article also considers the possible contribution of cultural and artistic activities to the formation of an anti-consumerist aesthetic.

Kate Soper

ALTERNATIVE HEDONISM, CULTURAL THEORY AND THE ROLE OF AESTHETIC REVISIONING

This paper offers a critical review of the proliferation of the contemporary art colony in China since the beginning of the twenty-first century in the context of China's promotion of cultural creative industries as one of the strategies for urban development and economic growth. Through analyzing cases in Beijing, Xi’an, and Sanya, cities ranging from ‘first-tier’ to ‘third-tier’ in their size and status, the paper explores the challenges and opportunities many contemporary Chinese art professionals find themselves face amid the competitive city image building campaign, a top-down movement led by local state and private investors in cities across China. It is evident that contemporary art and alternative art spaces associated with it have been drawn into the process of commodification, inadvertently recruited to play an ancillary role in the reproduction of the hegemonic collusion between political power and capitalism in a rapidly urbanizing China. Nonetheless, I argue that the inclusion of contemporary art communities as a player in the production and reproduction of the urban space has provided critical-minded artists, critics, and curators opportunities to participate in the reconfiguration of the physical and cultural landscape of Chinese cities, albeit not always with positive outcomes. As such, some art professionals are able to appropriate the process of capitalist urbanization to create their own ‘infrastructures of resonance’ [Thompson 2015. Seeing Power: Art and Activism in the Twenty-first Century. Brooklyn: Melville House], which support artistic freedom and facilitate the growth of diverse forms of cultural creation and exchange despite the coming dominance of ‘power plus capital’ [X. Wang 2003. A Manifesto for Cultural Studies. In: C. Wang, ed. One China, many paths. London: Verso, 274–291].

Meiqin Wang

Power, capital, and artistic freedom: contemporary Chinese art communities and the city

权力、资本与艺术自由：当代中国艺术社群与城市

Tejas Harad

Children’s digital experiences in Indian slums: technologies, identities and jugaad

印度贫民窟儿童的数字体验：技术、身份与即兴应对

Crisis scholarship has so far remained inattentive to the uneven entanglements and encounters that operate in what are designated as times or spaces of crisis, such as conflict and war. Indeed, scholarship on crisis suffers from a division between scholars who study the effect of crisis on privileged groups and locations and those who research marginalized communities. This has led the first to approach crisis as an exceptional moment, and the latter to argue that crisis is a semi-permanent condition. The lack of exchange between these two bodies of crisis scholarship has resulted in insufficient consideration of the divergent experiences of the nature and temporalities of crisis by unequally situated actors. This article looks at the contact zone forged by the 2001–2021 Afghanistan war to demonstrate that temporalities of crisis manifest themselves in varied and uneven ways, depending on the positionality of actors. Empirically, this article draws on interviews conducted with western Afghanistan veterans and with Afghan interpreters who worked as linguistic and cultural brokers. By contrasting the experiences of Afghan interpreters with that of the international soldiers who were dependent on their brokerage, I show how differential structures of power and privilege shape what constitutes a crisis, who is touched by it and how and when crisis makes itself felt. Close analysis of the narratives of Afghan interpreters also challenges scholarship which presents brokers as crisis opportunists, who subsequently experience an existential crisis and tragic demise (Distiller and Samuelson Citation2005, Gaskill Citation2023). Instead, I develop the argument that brokers' relationship to crisis can be better understood when the relational and spatio-temporal frames to situate their actions are expanded. I suggest that the cliché of the tragic broker is unsettled when tracing the strategies of Afghan interpreters over time and with attention to the interactions with those for whom they broker.

Abbreviation	Cult. Stud.
Journal Impact	1.51
Quartiles(Global)	CULTURAL STUDIES(Q1)

ISSN	0950-2386, 1466-4348
h-index	62

Publication Information	Publisher: Taylor and Francis Ltd.，Publishing cycle: ，Journal Type: journal，Open Access Journals: No
Basic data	Year of publication: 2003，Proportion of original research papers: 100.00%，Self Citation Rate:0.00%， Gold OA Rate: 15.34%

Cultural Studies

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FROM THE CRADLE TO THE GRAVE: AUSTRO-MARXISM AND CULTURAL STUDIES

ALTERNATIVE HEDONISM, CULTURAL THEORY AND THE ROLE OF AESTHETIC REVISIONING

Power, capital, and artistic freedom: contemporary Chinese art communities and the city

Children’s digital experiences in Indian slums: technologies, identities and jugaad

Brokering war: Afghan interpreters, western soldiers and unequal encounters in crisis

Afterword: Crisis broker as method

Streaming services and brokerage in the music industry crisis in Nigeria

Brokering war: Afghan interpreters, western soldiers and unequal encounters in crisis

Children’s digital experiences in Indian slums: technologies, identities and jugaad

Witch camps and witchcraft discourse in Africa: critiquing development practices