Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies

This paper introduces a Multimodal Soundscape Walking (MSW) methodology to explore a city's cultural and linguistics complexities. Employing soundscaping and walking methods, the study views the city as a sentient being rather than a static entity. Guided by complexity theory, it demonstrates interconnections among human and non-human experiences. Findings reveal urban spaces as dynamic participants where languages and cultures synergize, fostering community and solidarity. Documented multimodal artifacts (sounds and images) provide insights into sociocultural dynamics. The project advocates celebrating cultural diversity in educational practices, amplifying communal knowledge while fostering hope, solidarity, and mutual learning.

This article takes up collaborative writing as both subject and object, assembling a vitally ambivalent archive through written and visual art journaling. Arguing for this mode of thinking to trouble ideas of authorship, the authors intra-rupt subjective entanglements vis-a-vis correspondence with myriad co-constituting elements assembling and disassembling thoughts and things. Engaging with material feminist and other critical cultural perspectives, the authors explore the humble journal’s role in collaborative inquiry. Private habits of practice come into dialogue, producing a vital and vulnerable resistance to singularity and incitement for becoming-with conceptual-material experimentation and negotiation.

This article develops Affective Narrative Inquiry (ANI) as a diagrammatic practice for tracing affect as it circulates across media, audiences, and political imaginaries. Focussing on conservative coverage of the United States Women’s National Soccer Team (USWNT) from 1999 to 2024, it follows how admiration is progressively reorganised into irritation, hostility, and moral condemnation within contemporary culture wars. Drawing on Ahmed’s affective economies and Bakhtinian dramaturgy, the analysis approaches news articles and comment threads as co-performed narrative assemblages. Across four dramaturgical acts and interludes, ANI maps how pride, resentment, and outrage attach to figures, gestures, and symbols, becoming portable judgements that begin to precede events themselves. The USWNT emerges as an affective surface through which anxieties about gender, nationalism, feminism, and authority are worked. ANI is offered as a methodological contribution for studying affective circulation without treating affect as a stable meaning to decode.

This autoethnography analyzes the U.S. Border Patrol's sponsorship of Professional Bull Riding (PBR). I consider the Border Patrol “capture” halftime shows to critique white nationalist narratives in these popular contexts of “Western” entertainment. I consider how rodeos performatively affirm the U.S. as a white supremacist nation. I theorize how rodeo and PBR commodify and normalize the spectacle of land ownership and patrol of the U.S./México border. I argue that the cowboy signifies and secures U.S. property ownership. I ground my claims in stories of different rodeos to analyze how the “play” of rodeo performs real violence.

Through the “affective presencing” (Gale, 2023) of collaborative practices that “spirit” new experiencing, this paper forces into emergence the sympoiesis of ecomaterialities that challenge the constraining intentions of egocentric formations of neurotypicality and neoliberal institutionalisation. Using Spry’s creative and collaborative elision of the “natureculture body” the paper generates movements aligned with radical, botanical kin making. In this, through exemplification and affirmative critique, the inter-species mycorrhizal, sympoietic relationality of plants and fungi, are used to assist in the writing, figuring and event full worlding into practice of more than simply human collective subjectifications.

The Arctic Terns are six creative artists|writers|photographers|poets, who perform the paper you will encounter here. We Arctic Terns engage in collaborative writing and artmaking, connecting with each other, along with some of the other-than-human earth and animal others, through whom our own being-human is extended. We Terns become and write together as an archipelago of ‘singularities’; we have been meeting on Zoom for years, listening to and inspired by each other. We perform, here, in this paper, our approach to collaborative writing that builds on|pings off and playfully diffracts from whatever there is around us that provokes and inspires us. We invite our readers to take up the practice of emergent listening, to become with us in our archipelago of separate and connected becomings.

This article examines writing as a material-discursive practice that both produces and stills thought. Using a posthumanist phenomenological approach, temporally separated writing sessions, personal narrative, cultural texts, and a longitudinal collection of notes are placed in conversation with one another. The article enacts its central claim that writing lays a thought to rest even as it enables future meaning making to occur. This inquiry invites reflexivity and restraint in how writing is treated as the definitive site of knowledge production, situating writing as both a necessary technology for sharing inquiries and a practice that alters what it seeks to represent.

This lamentation skewers a primary post-truth neoliberal practice of the Anthropocene in America: scourging the scapegoat. Barding the alleged immigration issue with layers of attribution intended to imbrute vast segments of the population has both enflamed ethnocentric prejudice and helped mobilize a resisting local-level relativism. Tension in social relations has heightened. Other provocative practices such as political prevarication, gaslighting, rage-baiting, and the militarization of policing have further aggravated engagement between groups, endangering the common good. An angry persona grieves a brutalized populace, a traumatized citizenry, and the sacrifice of foundational ideals, fearing that psychic numbing may become normalized.

What would it mean to engage with more-than-human landscapes as collaborative writing partners? Through a collaborative process we explore this question, developing a practice of feral collaborations. Starting from Tsing et al.’s (2024) ‘patchy Anthropocene’, the inquiry leads us through four landscapes across Europe as we consider embodied, relational co-creation that unfolds between human and more-than-human agencies. Piling these patches in collaborative writing comprises another feral landscape, in which concepts, technologies, schedules, and commitments become feral actors themselves. Our ongoing collaboration illuminates themes across our patches that lead us to engage our own research in new ways. Heterogeneous temporalities, ruptures, fragility, and endurance emerge as characteristics of feral collaborations. A practice of care for the other and the common becomes important in each landscape and in our collaborative process.

If given the chance, what consejos would you write to your younger self? In this paper, we draw on the methodological richness of letter-writing to reflect on our experiences as two Guanjuatense scholars living in diaspora. Grounded in the frameworks of diasporic community saberes and transnational funds of knowledge, we engage epistolary methodologies to make sense of our transnational journeys as they intersect with language(s), identity, memory, dreams, and aspirations. Transnational funds of knowledge refer to the cultural, linguistic, and epistemic resources youth accumulate through experiences across borders and mobilize in different contexts. Diasporic community saberes, meanwhile, emerge from collective, place-based knowings shaped by migration histories, kinship, and communal struggle. Inspired by the ways our parents used letters to remain connected across borders, we approach letter-writing as both remembrance and resistance—an act that allows us to inscribe our stories and challenge the containment of diasporic lives. Through this process, we propose epistolary diasporic saberes as both a theoretical contribution and a methodological possibility for understanding the epistemic power of letters. Ultimately, we offer our letters as spaces of reflection and healing, and as a collection of consejos for transnational youth navigating the complexities of diaspora. In sharing these reflections, we hope to sobar las cicatrices donde había una herida and offer words that might reach those who need them.

Racialised violence against Asian communities, (re)illuminated and (re)amplified during events like COVID-19 and the 2021 Atlanta massacre, reflects global patterns of anti-Asian racism. In Australia, Asian communities face similar everyday racisms rooted in Orientalist fears of the invading Other. This critical co-constructed autoethnography by two Asian Australian educators examines the entanglement of anti-Asian racism and the metaphor of breath to interrogate the suffocating nature of Australia’s race relations. Through collaborative embodied vignettes, we explore how racism restricts belonging and movement, acknowledge entanglements with ongoing colonial violence against First Nations peoples, and seek solidarities through a politics of hope.

In this paper, Helen and Mary share writings that emerged from a week in which the two found themselves, as Moten and Harney write, both in and of the university. Lured by the promise of a stolen space to explore what Manning refers to as the ‘fugitive elsewhere’ and ‘the conditions for new ways of encountering study’ with a scholar they had so longed to meet, somehow they are appointed the reluctant guardians of a hastily arranged doctoral conference, held in their visitor’s honour. Sooner and later, the writing wakes. They write as Deleuze describes with Guattari, ‘not ... together, [but] between the two ... never in the same rhythm, ... always out of step’. The writings divert on ‘lines of flight’ from the event/ful week and, excited by the layerings, a text begins to emerge ….

This paper is the child of a community where brave hearts and souls chose to come together, and have conversations of a provocative nature. We are a community of students and staff who come together to think about how to be together in difference and in true, deep and right relationship with each other inside the troubling container of an old British university. Five of us, (now four) chose to explore the question of how we might think through the same question through writing together and exploring what it means to write collaboratively in 2025.

This paper theorizes Sankofa—the Akan principle of “return and retrieve”—as a decolonial praxis of ontological healing, memory, and African radical insurgence. Writing from a Ghanaian diasporic standpoint shaped by the crossings, frictions, and possibilities of U.S. academic life, I recount racial and ontological harms across my academic trajectory and examine how practices of Sankofa became literacies of healing. These literate acts include (a) traveling back to Ghana as a transnational re-education on Blackness, (b) witnessing African Americans’ somatic and sartorial rituals of healing at historic slave sites, (c) engaging Indigenous knowledge through encounters in a chief’s palace, and (d) enacting everyday literacies of cultural pride—such as wearing Ghanaian clothing—as somatic and symbolic resistance. Drawing on Critical Race Theory, Sankofa, and Global Black Rhetorics, I advance an interpretive heuristic in which Sankofa narrativization functions as a method, and the burdens of my racialized memories become the archive through which I theorize harm and healing. This work contributes to qualitative inquiry and Global Black Rhetorics by positioning African epistemologies not as mere cultural repositories but as methodological heuristics that expand how we understand healing, literacy, and decolonial research practice.

During the 1970s, Planned Parenthood (PP) went from an established, well-funded birth control provider in the political mainstream to a controversial organization associated with abortion. As abortion rights mobilized both feminists and a conservative opposition, the agenda and rhetoric of PP had to expand and adjust accordingly. This project explores the ways PP’s mission and the political terrain in which it operated became more complicated in this decade, focusing on the strategies it adopted to survive. There is much to be learned from how the organization sought to weather the unique tensions experienced by the legalization of abortion, the energy of the women’s movement, and the emerging backlash against perceived liberal excesses as it navigated the often oppositional demands of being both a service provider and advocate. As abortion access enters a new era of vulnerability and contestation, the role of PP remains uncertain. In exploring a key moment in the organization’s past, we also ponder the role of PP in the Dobbs era and whether it has either the capacity or political will to serve its constituents given its complicated history and still complicated present.

Through direct encounters with the more-than-human world (MTHW) I encounter otherness. Practices of oil painting, slowing down, shapeless listening, and gazing afford distinct ways of seeing that resist comprehension, naming, or control. This research affirms that much of the planet remains mysterious and likely indifferent to me. Respecting enduring mystery runs counter to empirical research doctrine, which through seeking to understand, quantify, and name, often entails destroying the source of wonder. Eschewing enclosure and control, I accept unknowability. Themes of coherence, complexity, mattering, and indifference emerge. This inquiry offers loose prescriptions for encountering otherness and invites researchers to practice humility.