How are sacred landscapes produced, contested, and sustained amid competing spatial imaginaries? Through the case of Sukan Buru, a sacred hill in Jharkhand's Khunti district, the article analyses how ritual practices, memorialisation, and cultural revitalisation contribute to the production of indigenous space. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, including participant observation and interviews, the study employs Lefebvre's distinction between lived and abstract space to analyse competing spatial logics. It argues that Sukan Buru is not merely an inherited landscape but a socially produced space constituted through processes of resistance, reclamation, and revival. By analysing spatial contestation, Pathalgadi memorialisation, and initiatives of cultural resurgence, the article demonstrates how Adivasis contest spatial abstraction and reproduce the hill as a lived space of collective meanings, territorial belonging, and cultural continuity. More broadly, the study shows how sacred landscapes function as counter-spatial formations through which Adivasi communities reclaim geographies, revive lifeworlds, and sustain alternative futures.
This article aims to analyse the positioning of Vietnamese authors within the space of Francophone periodicals during the colonial era by examining the modalities of their intellectual and symbolic inscription within a cultural field structured by relations of domination. Drawing on a study of two representative publications - the Bulletin de la Soci & eacute;t & eacute; d'Enseignement Mutuel du Tonkin (Bulletin de la SEM) and La Nouvelle Revue Indochinoise (NRI) - the article explores how these journals functioned as sites of recognition, legitimation and testing of Vietnamese voices expressed in the French language. The analysis mobilises a multidisciplinary theoretical framework that brings together Pierre Bourdieu's sociology of fields and the cultural transfer approach developed by Michel Espagne. This theoretical intersection makes it possible to shed light simultaneously on authors' positioning strategies, the forms of intellectual habitus they construct, and the processes of cultural hybridisation at work within these periodical spaces.
Railway modelling involves the reproduction, miniaturisation and mimesis - with various levels of accuracy and realism - of life scenes that are centred around the display and/or running of model trains. Railway modelling is a serious leisure activity inasmuch as it requires continuous engagement on the part of the hobbyists as well as the development of various skills. The scholarly literature on railway modelling has described it as serious leisure, which engages aspects of craft consumption, and which presents the potential for hobbyists to achieve successful ageing. The aim of this article is to conceptualise railway modelling as a serious leisure centred on the materiality of the models, which act as conduits for reinforcing particular normatives within the hobby. To do so, it draws on the concept of 'object-relation' to demonstrate how material things configure the relationships and modes of communication within the hobby. In deploying the method of qualitative content analysis as applied to a corpus of issues of a French railway magazine, this article seeks to show how materiality cements modes of communication and types of sociality within the hobby.
This article outlines the challenges faced by traditional farmers in Central Kalimantan and their efforts to cope with regulations banning land burning. For centuries, the Dayak communities of Central Kalimantan have practiced slash-and-burn agriculture as a form of local wisdom for managing peatland farming. However, these new regulations have completely halted this traditional practice. The implementation of the Food Estate programme and the normalisation of trade have further exacerbated the situation by triggering an increase in water acidity levels. Consequently, these government policies and programmes, which do not prioritise the community's interests, directly burden the livelihoods of traditional farmers. As a vulnerable group, traditional farmers continue to demonstrate resilience in the face of the changes and crises they face. Since this crisis stems from state policies, the government should be present and address their concerns. Therefore, I propose a concept of resistance to address this issue, focusing on negotiating power over existing regulations to create a more equitable space for change.
This piece puzzles about the social logic of leadership through the lens of the movie Triangle of Sadness (2022), directed by the Swedish filmmaker Ruben & Ouml;stlund. A distinction is introduced between two modes of leadership, here called, respectively, 'fascist' and 'aberrant'. Phenomena of leadership, it is contended, illustrate the workings of social logic ex vivo, and offer exquisite examples of how intensities intervene in social interaction, giving rise to the tensive states in which the local protagonists of interaction are caught. & Ouml;stlund's film has noticeable diagnostic power, so that the piece unfolds as a study of the sociological materials it provides, even apart from the narrative plot and the satirical or critical intentions.
The article revisits the concept of the Anthropocene uncanny in the context of the recent spate of New Weird speculative fabulations. Analysing three drama series The Rig (2023), Snow (2023) and True Detective: Night Country (2024), the article argues that in these fabulations, the uncanny becomes an analytic for describing encounters between human and more-than-human bodies operating at different spatio-temporal scales. The encounters are examples of what the article terms 'weird geosocialities': situated, embodied and intimate relations between the bios and the geos that effectively unsettle the Western modern essentialist conception of the (human) body as a bounded entity. Set in various post-extractive landscapes, the New Weird fabulations discussed in the article show that the Anthropocene uncanny may be used to rewire weird geosocialities towards radical intersectional (eco)political aims. It opens up a potentiality for aligning environmental actions with struggles against anti-worker, patriarchal and (neo)colonial realities of contemporary extractive capitalism.
This article explores how contemporary fiction and theory grapple with the 'ecological uncanny' - the unsettling recognition of human entanglement with nonhuman forces in the Anthropocene. Drawing on Amitav Ghosh's call for new narrative forms, the article examines the imaginative limits of Western culture's human-centred epistemology. It connects Ghosh's notion of the uncanny with Timothy Morton's 'hyperobjects' and Anna Tsing's 'Anthropocene hotspots,' arguing that these concepts reveal ruptures in systems where human mastery collapses. Building on recent developments in environmental narratology (Caracciolo, James, Kortekallio), it proposes that fiction operates as an affective technology capable of reconfiguring perception and ethics by immersing readers in multispecies entanglements. Through close readings of Adrian Tchaikovsky's Saturation Point (2024) and Jeff VanderMeer's Southern Reach series, especially the new instalment Absolution (2024), the article demonstrates how near-future narratives enact 'readerly choreographies' that invite audiences to experience the limits of knowledge and control. Both texts construct 'critical zones' - feral, hybrid spaces where human and nonhuman agencies blur. These zones, marked by epistemic uncertainty, compel readers to 'unthink' human sovereignty and confront the affective and cognitive disorientation of living amid environmental collapse.
The figure of the mermaid offers a fertile lens through which to explore the uncanny and the symbolic, material, and imaginative potentials of water. The main argument this article develops through its three sections is that the fictional figure of the mermaid exemplifies how the uncanny in arts and literature can generate new imaginaries that help us confront contemporary societal and environmental challenges. In particular, the article focuses on a case study to make the argument more concrete, providing an analysis of Laura Pugno's novel Sirene. The first section outlines the conceptual framework, defining uncanny hybrid characters and linking them to notions of fluidity and water-focused theoretical discourses, often marked by feminist and posthuman orientations. The second section examines the fictional figure of the mermaid and its subversive potential, showing how contemporary artists and writers use it to address disability, posthumanism, and the crisis of the Anthropocene. The final section turns to the literary case study, demonstrating how Sirene engages with complex issues of posthumanism and feminism through its powerful reimagining of the mermaid figure.
Norman Leto's Photon (2017) is a transdisciplinary work integrating biological (bios), technological (techn & eacute;), and artistic (art) perspectives to speculate on the future of human existence. The film can be read as an aesthetic-philosophical simulation of possible trajectories of civilization, technology, and posthumanism. Existing scholarship on Photon is largely essayistic and aesthetic, with limited attention to the film as a speculative cognitive model or experimental epistemic tool. Although Leto is often described as an outsider artist, his work remains underexplored in scientific and futurological contexts. This article identifies key elements in Photon that reflect bio-tech-med concepts and examines its potential applications in education, science communication, and futurology. The film is proposed as a "living cognitive model" that operates within mass communication environments. The study addresses how Photon negotiates the boundary between science and art, whether it can function as a form of knowledge comparable to scientific modeling or philosophical hypothesis, and how its narrative and visual strategies integrate interdisciplinary knowledge for future-oriented speculation. Findings suggest that Photon operates as a "thought capsule" connecting multiple disciplines and stimulating reflection on the human condition, the limits of knowledge, and processes of transformation. It functions both as a product of technological culture and a critical instrument for its analysis. Leto's work supports an expanded view of epistemology as visual and affective as well as linguistic, enabling "knowledge scenarios" that engage the viewer as an active participant. Methodology includes semiotic and narratological film analysis, hermeneutics, and frameworks of posthumanism and transhumanism.
The philosophical debate between C. Thi Nguyen and Michael Ridge defines the contemporary ethical landscape of gamification: Nguyen's 'value capture' diagnoses its reductive dangers, while Ridge's 'playfulness' advocates for its liberating potential. This article argues that despite their sophistication, both frameworks are constrained by a form of methodological individualism, analysing gamification primarily as a problem of applied design or agential psychology. By demonstrating how this focus obscures the social logic that gamification operationalises, we expose the need to re-situate the phenomenon within its historicity - that is, within the concrete social relations it both reflects and reshapes. Advancing beyond their paradigm, the article proposes analysing institutional gamification - particularly in the domain of labour - as a form of social fetishism: a process that conceals relations of exploitation and control under the appealing, objective guise of voluntary play. The conclusion contends that only by centring this social-structural critique can philosophy grasp gamification's role in reshaping the very texture of collective life under late modernity.
This article examines how M & amacr;ori indigeneity is ethically reconfigured in diaspora when M & amacr;ori live on Aboriginal land in so-called Australia. Drawing on tikanga-based obligations of manuhiritanga, it argues that M & amacr;ori are tangata whenua in Aotearoa New Zealand but become implicated in settler/invader relations in Australia unless they practice humility, restraint, and accountability to local Aboriginal authority. The central questions are: under what conditions do Indigenous migrants become entangled in settler/invader power on other Indigenous lands, and how are claims to indigeneity, mana whenua, or customary authority articulated and contested outside their originating jurisdictions? The analysis is grounded in the sovereign jurisdiction of Dharug Ngurra, treating Dharug Law/Lore as the enduring legal and ethical framework for Parramatta and the Dyarubbin. Using the 2019 Lady Crown/Ng & amacr;ti Rangihou Corrangie case as a diagnostic 'limit case,' the article traces how whakapapa, missionary history, pseudo-law, and media amplification can be mobilised to manufacture trans-Indigenous sovereignty claims that bypass Aboriginal consent and governance. It concludes that such diasporic overreach risks reproducing settler/invader logics in Indigenous dress, and that M & amacr;ori integrity in Australia requires acting as manuhiri under Aboriginal leadership.
This article examines the role of the uncanny in visual artworks that invite the viewer to rethink the body in the light of environmental change and plastic pollution. Drawing on Stacy Alaimo's concept of trans-corporeality, I explore how the uncanny contributes to (re)imaging the body as inextricably enmeshed with plastic waste. My focus is on artistic portrayals of trans-corporeality that evoke uncanny feelings. I analyse three science-inspired artworks that exemplify uncanny trans-corporeality in contemporary visual art: Swaantje G & uuml;ntzel's artwork MICROPLASTICS II (2016), Christine Baker's sculpture Micro Plastic Menu (2022), and Thijs Biersteker's interactive installation Plastic Reflectic (2016). In the analysis of the case studies, I make two points: first, I show that the feeling of the uncanny arises from revealing the enmeshment of the body with plastic waste and the unpredictable agency of nonhuman matter; second, I consider several features that support and reinforce the uncanny effects of the artworks: distorted scales, the figure of the double, and the strange suggestive resemblances of plastic to body parts and other material things.
This paper examines the collapse of Soviet internationalism through the lens of artistic resistance, using cultural analysis and chaos theory to explore tensions between unity and diversity within universalist projects. It analyzes the works of Sergei Parajanov, Andrei Tarkovsky, Vladimir Vysotsky, Bulat Okudzhava, and Chingiz Aitmatov, whose films, songs, and narratives did not oppose Soviet ideology from outside but operated within its symbolic framework, exposing its internal limits. Through folklore, spiritual motifs, and personal memory, these artists rendered visible the fragility of ideological coherence and the contradictions embedded in the internationalist project. While art did not cause the Soviet Union's unravelling, it amplified systemic dissonances and made legible the symbolic limits of imposed identity. Conceptualised as a 'strange attractor,' Soviet internationalism generated bounded instability rather than equilibrium, orbiting an unattainable ideal of unity. The paper concludes by situating this analysis in structural - rather than historical - relation to contemporary frameworks such as cosmopolitanism, pluriversalism, and global citizenship, suggesting that sustainable internationalism depends not on cultural standardisation but on the capacity to host multiplicity, with art functioning as a critical diagnostic of universalist ambition.
Asghar Farhadi's film About Elly [Darbare-ye Eli] (2009) can be regarded as a critique of the concepts of morality and certainty. Although it has been largely deemed by many critics a cinematic portrayal of Iranian middle-class ethics, gender norms, and interpersonal deception, by adopting different more-than-human approaches, one can unravel the effect of material and semiotic hyperobjects at the heart of the film that cannot be explained with conventional readings. The present study aims at studying the functions of the sea in this film based on Sidney I. Dobrin's blue ecocritical thought and Timothy Morton's concept of hyperobjects. Contrary to previous readings, the present study argues that, rather than being a symbolic landscape, the sea becomes an active, revolutionary force that dismantles human discourse in moments of silence and failed communication and narrative certainty. Accordingly, the sea space challenges the dominance of anthropocentrism beyond land-centred thoughts and further affects the form of the film and 'wet's mise-en-sc & egrave;ne, sound, and colour, enforcing uncertainty, estrangement, and unpredictability.
The article mobilises the notion of 'environmental uncanny', which has been worked out by such scholars as Amitav Ghosh, Rebecca Peterson and Brian Irwin, to apply it to an analysis of contemporary artistic/speculative practices of contemporary image-makers, who conceive of mediation as a geologic process or a multispecies event. Set in the theoretical context of ecomedia the present paper investigates how medial (in this case photographic) practices problematise their on involvement in ecological destruction and pollution. As has been argued in numerous studies, modern practices of image-making not only critically contributed to creating the concept of nature as conquerable and controllable but also, through their carbon footprint and toxicity, have kept significantly exacerbating the current ecological crisis. Therefore, in times of the ongoing climate and environmental emergencies, when feral forms of life proliferate, mediation as a foundation of cohabitation requires a thorough re-thinking and re-design as well. I approach this problem by looking at two projects of artists gathered under the aegis of the UK research collective Sustainable Darkroom - Ed Carr and Scott Hunter - who modify photographic technologies of image-making and invent medial dispositives and techniques of developing images with plants and environmental factors as contributing agents.
This paper seeks to reconceptualise dark tourism within Northeast India, shifting focus from its conventional understanding as the intentional visit to death-themed places to a broader examination of structurally dark spaces, which are inherently shaped by previous histories of imperialism. It argues that darkness in these postcolonial sites is intrinsic and seeks to examine tourists through the metaphor of neo-vampiric figures, who mirror the colonial mentalities. Their fascination with death, framed through exotic encounters, sucks the life out of the Indigenous myths while simultaneously trivialising the lived experiences of colonial violence. This study further discusses the existence of cryptids such as the Buru and Thlen, who can be seen as hauntological beings embedded within the ethnoscape, and functioning as resistant figures that carry memory and postcolonial trauma. They emerge and recede in response to the ongoing cultural commodification and serve as cultural symbols. By foregrounding the neo-colonial practices exercised through tourism, this paper provides a nuanced reading of dark tourism as a mutation of colonialism that exoticises Indigenous cosmologies. Ultimately, it presents the idea that the colonial host-guest relationship remains eminent even today, with the cryptids serving as warning figures against continued extraction and violation of sacred ontologies.
