Archives primarily contain records about refugees rather than by refugees, while news media and political discourse often frame displacement through dehumanizing metaphors and crisis spectacle. This article examines how participatory digital archives can intervene in these representational regimes. Focusing on The Amplification Project—a community-led archive of displacement-related art—I theorize collective interventionist archiving as collaborative work that leverages digital archives to disrupt dominant frames and shift the terms through which refugee lives are represented. Through analysis of the archive’s founding, both relationship-based and crowdsourced collection development, and circulation practices, I demonstrate how such archives create infrastructure for encountering refugeedom on terms other than crisis news or platformed outrage, while confronting constraints, including partial visibility, hostile publics, and unequal digital access.
The 60th Venice Biennale, Foreigners Everywhere, placed the figure of the foreigner at its center, drawing on Adriano Pedrosa’s curatorial idea that foreignness is a pervasive condition of human existence. Within a broad spectrum of “minoritarian foreigners,” the “Indigenous” emerged as a particularly charged symbolic figure. This article situates the Biennale as a global institution whose strategies of expansion and rarefication sustain its symbolic power, examining four “framing moments” of Indigenous representation in the 60th edition: cosmologies, objects, alternative modernisms, and memory. These framings variously spiritualize, aestheticize, historicize, and politicize Indigeneity, producing visibility around Indigenous cultures in an exclusive environment where viewership is characterized by cultures of speed. The article argues that the institutional framing of Indigenous artists’ biographies and traditions simultaneously validates and commodifies identity, with “authenticity” serving as symbolic and economic capital. While such visibility can create opportunities for recognition and market access, it also may fetishize and flatten heterogeneous Indigenous histories into a universalized category of “the Indigenous.” The article explores how the Biennale’s pursuit of global relevance depends on the spectacular inclusion of difference, a process in which otherness—and, here, Indigeneity—is made visible but also subject to institutional power and gatekeeping logics. Reading the Indigenous not only through the lens of representation but also as a symbolic actor within the exhibition’s cultural-political economy, the article concludes by reflecting on whether alternative curatorial strategies—slower, more focused, and territorially specific—can create space for Indigenous representation beyond spectacle, enabling forms of knowledge production that better acknowledge the diversity and historicity of Indigenous peoples.
In Canada, Indigenous, racialized, and immigrant communities face systemic challenges in securing and sustaining cultural spaces due to real estate speculation, funding disparities, and exclusionary urban policies. These barriers not only threaten the continuity of cultural expression but also diminish the visibility and influence of marginalized artistic practices. This article explores how these communities resist spatial erasure through artistic interventions, grassroots activism, and alternative funding models, positioning their creative practices as sites of political-economic critique and creating alternative futures. The article emphasizes the connections between colonialism, anti-Black racism, and Islamophobia in contested cultural space dynamics.By mapping sites of artistic resistance and community-led cultural preservation, this article reveals the transformative potential of art as a tool for reimagining urban futures. It argues that sustainable multicultural urbanism requires policies that protect and invest in culturally significant spaces, recognizing them as vital components of both social infrastructure and political resistance. This article emphasizes the importance of recognizing culture as the fourth bottom line as part of urban development projects. The findings offer insights for policymakers, urban planners, and cultural organizations committed to fostering inclusive and equitable urban environments. Ultimately, this article contributes to the conversation on political economy and the arts by demonstrating how racialized and immigrant communities’ creative practices challenge dominant narratives of urban development, asserting their right to cultural sustainability and spatial justice.
This article explores the ways in which emergent cultural space-making practices—particularly practices of “instituting,” “blurring,” and “monstrous space-making”—challenge and ephemerally unsettle political and economic systems. It focuses on the history of the cultural space, EIGHT Critical Institute for Arts and Politics, in Athens, Greece. The concept of “instituting” is discussed as a form of space-making that refuses structuralization, while “blurring” signifies a process of dissolving boundaries and categories to create fluid, unpredictable spaces that resist fixed identities. The notion of “monstrous space-making” is introduced as a method of excess and refusal, capable of disrupting dominant political economies. The article argues that these practices, rooted in modes of “militant curating” and critical spatial interventions, operate as performative acts of reconfiguration—offering ways to produce new relations, economies, and imaginaries within contested landscapes. It suggests modes of continuous, open-ended spatial interventions that do not seek to fix existing systems but to deform and reimagine them from within.
Observing rather than drawing conclusions about the moment, in this introduction the editors discuss dynamics that contextualize a collection of cultural productions—news, music, state communication, group chats on encrypted messaging apps, Wikipedia pages, experiences in crowds, and art—that we center around the winter of 2025–2026 in the US cities Minneapolis/St. Paul, in the state of Minnesota. This work, a kind of cultural studies in practice, is informed by our positionalities and experiences, in a range that includes on-the-ground actions and national reflections. This issue features three articles, an interview, and the new work in the Years section.
As an introduction to the Years section of Lateral, this essay suggests that the present-day “culture war” offers an opportunity for cultural studies to reflect upon the narration of time, especially through the invocation of important years in history.
A movement is growing to reimagine jewishness in a decolonial frame. As zionism loses its grip over white and white-passing jews in the global north, and with increasing momentum after Israel’s genocidal reprisal following the events of October 2023, the geopolitical figuration of jewishness has never been more contested. Yet while profound conversations unfold between black and indigenous studies, and across ethnic and cultural studies more broadly, jewishness and jewish studies rarely find a place at the table of critically situated identities. This essay argues that contemporary discussions of possible antiracist and decolonial futures should include a robust analysis of the re-racialisation of jews and jewishness across the twentieth century and into the present. Learning from recent work on blackness that extends beyond demographic empiricism, I propose a new research agenda for decolonial jewishness grounded in critical black studies. The final section alights on the cryptojew as a historical yet never fully knowable figure that is ripe for critical fabulation in apprenticeship to black studies.
This article explores the ways in which emergent cultural space-making practices—particularly practices of “instituting,” “blurring,” and “monstrous space-making”—challenge and ephemerally unsettle political and economic systems. It focuses on the history of the cultural space, EIGHT Critical Institute for Arts and Politics, in Athens, Greece. The concept of “instituting” is discussed as a form of space-making that refuses structuralization, while “blurring” signifies a process of dissolving boundaries and categories to create fluid, unpredictable spaces that resist fixed identities. The notion of “monstrous space-making” is introduced as a method of excess and refusal, capable of disrupting dominant political economies. The article argues that these practices, rooted in modes of “militant curating” and critical spatial interventions, operate as performative acts of reconfiguration—offering ways to produce new relations, economies, and imaginaries within contested landscapes. It suggests modes of continuous, open-ended spatial interventions that do not seek to fix existing systems but to deform and reimagine them from within.
Towers of Ivory and Steel: How Israeli Universities Deny Palestinian Freedom by Maya Wind considers Israeli universities’ relationship to and advancement of the Israeli government’s policies of apartheid and displacement against Palestinians. Through this study, Wind seeks to discredit two oft-cited arguments about Israeli universities: first, that they are paragons of academic freedom and democratic practices in a region otherwise hostile to these virtues, and second, that Israeli academics and university administrators should be seen as distinct from and potentially opposed to the Israeli government’s treatment of Palestinians. In contrast, Wind shows first that Israeli universities, administrators, and academics are deeply embedded in apartheid and occupation and second that university operations, curricula, research, and geographic expansion are deliberately crafted to dispossess, discredit, exclude, and terrorize Palestinians and critics of the state of Israel.
Using the management of Black athlete protest (e.g., Colin Kaepernick, Naomi Osaka, LeBron James, Brittney Griner) in the post-Ferguson era as a foil, Fred Moten, Roberto Sirvent, and Charles Athanasopoulos engage in a critical conversation surrounding Black sociality which has bearing on the arenas of sports, art, and the academy. The discussants ponder the appropriate terms for considering how Black athletes themselves may have their own investments in the logics which reduce them to countable units: perversity, codependency, co-option, complicity, ambivalence, do words even go there? How do such terms come each with their own assumptive and diagnostic logics? How do we relinquish our search for purity (of an arena, person, community, object of study) as concomitant with Black liberation? Moten also comments on how the logics of individuation come to bear on academics in thinking about the meaning of “fellowship” in the university. Such commentary dovetails with Moten’s critical inversion of Allen Iverson’s infamous line on “practice” as a way of thinking about Black sociality beyond the “game.” The conversation thus ends with a reflection on how scholars, students, and activists can “see through” the individuating logics of recognition or purity by refocusing on the “practice” and “fellowship” of Black study/activism.
In Canada, Indigenous, racialized, and immigrant communities face systemic challenges in securing and sustaining cultural spaces due to real estate speculation, funding disparities, and exclusionary urban policies. These barriers not only threaten the continuity of cultural expression but also diminish the visibility and influence of marginalized artistic practices. This article explores how these communities resist spatial erasure through artistic interventions, grassroots activism, and alternative funding models, positioning their creative practices as sites of political-economic critique and creating alternative futures. The article emphasizes the connections between colonialism, anti-Black racism, and Islamophobia in contested cultural space dynamics.By mapping sites of artistic resistance and community-led cultural preservation, this article reveals the transformative potential of art as a tool for reimagining urban futures. It argues that sustainable multicultural urbanism requires policies that protect and invest in culturally significant spaces, recognizing them as vital components of both social infrastructure and political resistance. This article emphasizes the importance of recognizing culture as the fourth bottom line as part of urban development projects. The findings offer insights for policymakers, urban planners, and cultural organizations committed to fostering inclusive and equitable urban environments. Ultimately, this article contributes to the conversation on political economy and the arts by demonstrating how racialized and immigrant communities’ creative practices challenge dominant narratives of urban development, asserting their right to cultural sustainability and spatial justice.
Here, Katerina Paramana introduces the articles in the “Political Economy and the Arts” special section of this issue. In the current climate of geopolitical upheaval (from Ukraine, to Gaza, Iran, Venezuela, and Greenland), the articles illuminate what arts do to produce resistance at a micro level by re-writing problematic narratives, visibilizing marginalized communities, imagining alternative models and futures, and working towards equitable space-making.
Nishant Upadhyay’s Indians on Indian Lands bridges settler colonial studies and South Asian diasporic studies to examine the complex, often contradictory position of dominant-caste Indian diasporas on Indigenous lands in Canada. Rejecting reductive frameworks that cast diasporic Indians solely as settlers, Upadhyay foregrounds the entangled relationalities of caste, race, labor, and intimacy that structure Indian presence on occupied lands. Through interdisciplinary methods, including ethnography, literary analysis, and archival research, the book examines how caste and brahminism operate transnationally, shaping diasporic complicity in settler colonial projects. From critiques of dominant-caste erasures in the settler academy to analyses of labor and sexual intimacies between Indians and Indigenous peoples, Upadhyay shows how caste and hindutva ideologies reproduce colonial hierarchies abroad. Yet, the book also gestures toward decolonial futures, highlighting diasporic solidarities and anti-caste praxes that disrupt these complicities. Indians on Indian Lands offers a critical and urgent intervention into how dominant-caste South Asians occupy, negotiate, and can potentially transform their roles on stolen land.
This article proposes the concepts of “brutal” and “gentle” affects as a critical framework to analyze affective economies of freedom in paradoxical times. Drawing on Sara Ahmed’s work on affect, Sruti Bala’s on participation, and Franco Berardi’s on freedom, it argues that freedom emerges not solely as a historical achievement of an inalienable right, but as an embodied experience enhanced by theatrical dispositifs. I consider forms of celebrating, performing, and capturing freedom in paradoxical times, including the staging of the fiftieth anniversary of the Carnation Revolution; the production 25th of April 1974 by Portuguese company Mala Voadora; and The Seagull by Argentinian director Guillermo Cacace. I begin with a discussion of the relationship between populism and notions of freedom, describing the nuanced usage and political capture of the latter to examine its paradoxes in the present. I then examine how these productions critically engage with the paradoxes of freedom and reset the conditions of experience of its affective-sensorium.
The 60th Venice Biennale, Foreigners Everywhere, placed the figure of the foreigner at its center, drawing on Adriano Pedrosa’s curatorial idea that foreignness is a pervasive condition of human existence. Within a broad spectrum of “minoritarian foreigners,” the “Indigenous” emerged as a particularly charged symbolic figure. This article situates the Biennale as a global institution whose strategies of expansion and rarefication sustain its symbolic power, examining four “framing moments” of Indigenous representation in the 60th edition: cosmologies, objects, alternative modernisms, and memory. These framings variously spiritualize, aestheticize, historicize, and politicize Indigeneity, producing visibility around Indigenous cultures in an exclusive environment where viewership is characterized by cultures of speed. The article argues that the institutional framing of Indigenous artists’ biographies and traditions simultaneously validates and commodifies identity, with “authenticity” serving as symbolic and economic capital. While such visibility can create opportunities for recognition and market access, it also may fetishize and flatten heterogeneous Indigenous histories into a universalized category of “the Indigenous.” The article explores how the Biennale’s pursuit of global relevance depends on the spectacular inclusion of difference, a process in which otherness—and, here, Indigeneity—is made visible but also subject to institutional power and gatekeeping logics. Reading the Indigenous not only through the lens of representation but also as a symbolic actor within the exhibition’s cultural-political economy, the article concludes by reflecting on whether alternative curatorial strategies—slower, more focused, and territorially specific—can create space for Indigenous representation beyond spectacle, enabling forms of knowledge production that better acknowledge the diversity and historicity of Indigenous peoples.
In Heavy Processing, T.L. Cowan and Jas Rault offer “heavy processing” as a guiding concept that occupies the space between research method and information technology. Adopting a Trans-Feminist and Queer (TFQ) framework, they critique dominant institutional and informational systems while proposing alternative infrastructures for fostering intimate and accountable TFQ artistic, activist, and scholarly publics.
Archives primarily contain records about refugees rather than by refugees, while news media and political discourse often frame displacement through dehumanizing metaphors and crisis spectacle. This article examines how participatory digital archives can intervene in these representational regimes. Focusing on The Amplification Project—a community-led archive of displacement-related art—I theorize collective interventionist archiving as collaborative work that leverages digital archives to disrupt dominant frames and shift the terms through which refugee lives are represented. Through analysis of the archive’s founding, both relationship-based and crowdsourced collection development, and circulation practices, I demonstrate how such archives create infrastructure for encountering refugeedom on terms other than crisis news or platformed outrage, while confronting constraints, including partial visibility, hostile publics, and unequal digital access.
In its depiction of interracial, international marriage, the reality television show 90 Day Fiancé has become an object of morbid fascination to US and global audiences alike. Featured prevalently in the series, couples consisting of white US men and Filipina women constitute a recurring motif through which 90 Day Fiancé solidifies the institution of marriage as a locus for creating and enforcing politics of global capital, heteronormative gender, racialization, and imperialism. This article focuses on the depiction of a couple, Larry and Jenny, as one example of how the series restages the abusive colonial relation between the US and the Philippines through the marriage institution. Further, the figure of the Filipina is rendered along a spectrum of uncivilized animalism vs. nationalist caregiving—that which the US white male subject defines himself against. Following scholarship in Filipinx studies, visual culture, and postcolonial studies, I argue that 90 Day Fiancé extends occupation- and Cold War-era rhetorics of sentimentality and nationalism into the current globalized moment. Thus, I offer unsentimental decoding as a method of reading, viewing, and interpreting Western media that resists the recuperative logics of neoliberalism, (neo)colonialism, and historical erasure.
During the COVID-19 lockdown, I joined a Facebook group of scholars with a non-scholarly focus called “Baking in Uncertain Times.” The online community offered participants a series of weekly baking challenges, intended in part to allow those who might be feeling alone and unfocused by the pandemic a chance to come together virtually to create food as well as a shared baking experience/memory. While the group wasn't intended as a pedagogical model or outlet, my participation in this highly distributed baking community has transferred to my teaching, specifically with how I approach learning through doing. Drawing on Annemarie Mol’s concept of doing, which conceptualizes things that should be done by recognizing that “Doing . . . may also be configured as a task . . . creative and adaptive, infused by desire and attuned to the circumstances,” my focus was twofold: doing tasks as a member of the baking group, and doing (or fostering) hope while adapting to pandemic circumstances and uncertainty. Following Jody Shipka, this paper examines how using a “food lens” and “the centering of food-related practices provides ways of reimagining the potentials of our research, scholarship, and teaching, while encouraging us to rethink [cultural concepts] in new ways, such as literacy, collaboration, embodiment, memory, and community.” Additionally, I highlight some of the processes by which I devised responses to the weekly challenges over a year and provide pictures of a few completed challenges. I also detail how the group ended up functioning as a divergent model of composition pedagogy, as a way to tap into joy, curiosity, and creating a stronger sense of community both in the classroom and among colleagues.
Corinne Mitsuye Sugino’s Making the Human: Race, Allegory, and Asian Americans theorizes how Asian Americans are constructed and made legible through cultural narratives to shore up normative European colonial whiteness, or what Sugino calls “Western Man.” This process happens through “racial allegory,” or discourses that narrativize racial difference, often by making distinctions between the human/inhuman or “in/animacies”; these allegories in turn work to reproduce power. Further, because Western Man is founded on anti-Blackness, Sugino demonstrates how Asian American racialization is intimately tied to anti-Black violence. By focusing on the process of Asian American legibilization itself, Sugino sidesteps portraying an accurate or “authentic” Asian America; instead, Making the Human takes up the relationship between discourse and materiality, centering the question of what narratives around Asian Americans do, create, and enact. Making the Human offers to scholars across multiple fields a significant and novel theory to understand Asian American racialization and its imbrication in complex vectors of power.
