Culture, Volume 2, Issue 3 (September 2026) – 7 articles

Community-based leisure may support newcomer women’s well-being and belonging, yet its role within settlement practice remains underexamined. This manuscript presents findings from a larger community-based research project that explored Iranian newcomer women’s (aged 30–55) experiences navigating leisure, community life, and well-being during their settlement in Ottawa, Canada. In this manuscript, the discussion focuses on data collected from virtual feedback consultation sessions with two women who participated in co-designed leisure activities, and an executive from a non-profit settlement service organization serving Iranian and Farsi-speaking newcomers. Data coding, translation, verification and reflexive thematic analysis guided our qualitative methodological approach, and findings were interpreted within an intersectional feminist framework. Our findings revealed the challenges the participating women faced in balancing employment, caregiving, and household labour while acclimatizing to Canada. The women in this study described leisure as a vital interruption of their layered responsibilities and a chance to connect with others who shared their migration experience. Leisure did not replace formal settlement supports but addressed dimensions of settlement that 33 conventional indicators often miss, including identity loss, unfamiliarity with the city, and 34 the need for connection in a shared language and cultural setting. In this case, the settlement organization functioned as a cultural infrastructure that made participation in public and cultural life accessible for the women who took part. Full article

How do cultural participants legitimate engagement in situations where cultural participation is experienced as substandard? Drawing on pragmatist approaches to valuation, this article conceptualises justification as valuation-in-action. It maps the situated axiological work through which actors render suboptimal participation worthwhile despite experiential disincentives. Specifically, this study examines divergent sites of cultural participation: a museum makerspace in Belfast and a variety of London-based choirs, all of which were compelled to migrate online to comply with pandemic lockdown restrictions. This digitally mediated participation was experienced as inferior to co-present practice, but participants nonetheless engaged. Using inductive analysis based on interviews and focus groups, we identify six shared value repertoires mobilised to legitimate digitally mediated participation: Emotional Regulation, Socialisation, Identity, Time, Capabilities, and Indexical Continuity. These repertoires organise participants’ value talk legitimising online participation based on socio-emotional coping, connection/communitas, temporal anchoring, identity continuity, skill maintenance/development, and indexical links to the felt qualities and sociality of pre-pandemic co-presence. These findings provide scholars and policymakers with a pragmatic language for diagnosing what audiences treat as valuable in digital and hybrid cultural provision, enabling the creation of evaluation infrastructures that reflect participants’ value criteria rather than relying on access metrics or assumed hierarchies of cultural value. Full article

Concerns about digital determinism loom large in popular culture, where advanced predictive systems are frequently portrayed as capable of forecasting, shaping, and controlling individual and societal futures. From Foundation and Minority Report to Black Mirror and Westworld, the assumption that human trajectories can be reduced to data points and scores has become a recurring cultural narrative. Similar concerns have recently gained momentum in the academic literature on artificial intelligence in education, employment, healthcare, and talent identification, where algorithmic systems are increasingly used to evaluate individuals, predict future performance, and allocate opportunities. While such systems may influence developmental pathways and create self-fulfilling loops through early classification and differential access to resources, the assumption that human behavior and societal trajectories can be predicted and controlled with sufficient precision remains open to challenge. This perspective article examines whether contemporary visions of digital determinism are compatible with complexity science by drawing upon motor variability, an inherent source of randomness in human movement, and emergence, whereby interactions among individuals give rise to unpredictable system-level properties that cannot be reduced to the behavior of individual agents. We argue that these inherent properties impose fundamental constraints on algorithmic prediction and control. At the same time, we emphasize that algorithms in educational, occupational, and healthcare systems may substantially shape developmental trajectories and life opportunities insofar as individuals and institutions choose to delegate such power to them. Full article

Reflective practice is crucial for deepening learning in Intercultural Collaborative Learning (ICL), yet how students’ cultural backgrounds shape these reflections remains under-explored. This study examines how Japanese, Chinese, and Vietnamese students differently conceptualize the same ICL experience. Short reflective reports of approximately 400 Japanese characters were collected from 32 students enrolled in an “Intercultural Collaborative Discussion” course at a Japanese university. Using KH Coder for text mining, the study applied Correspondence Analysis and Co-occurrence Network Analysis to visualize latent structures in student discourse. The results suggested three distinct reflective orientations within this specific classroom context: Japanese students tended to emphasize emotional and interpersonal aspects, navigating the tension between “fun” and “difficulty”; Chinese students tended to frame the course as a cognitively “valuable” opportunity, focusing on knowledge acquisition; and Vietnamese students tended to prioritize the instructor’s facilitation and class structure, suggesting a teacher-centered interpretation. These findings demonstrate that even concise reflective tasks can reveal culturally shaped differences in processing shared classroom experiences. This study highlights text mining as a valuable tool for faculty development and suggests that educators should design reflection activities that accommodate diverse reflective styles in multicultural higher education. Full article

Archive studies have traditionally conceptualized archives as documentary repositories and memory institutions, whereas territorial studies have examined territorialities as processes through which social groups produce, signify, and contest space. Although both fields address the social production of meaning, the constitutive relationship through which archives participate in the political–cultural production of territoriality remains insufficiently theorized. This article advances the hypothesis that every archive possesses an Implicit Territoriality as a constitutive property and, by virtue of this condition, contributes to the political–cultural production of territory. To develop this hypothesis, it proposes a theoretical framework in which Implicit Territoriality constitutes the central analytical category. As a constitutive property of every archive, Implicit Territoriality becomes analytically observable through three interdependent constitutive dimensions: the Mode of Differential Documentation (collections), the Territorial System of Site (spatial infrastructures and locations), and the Condensed Informational Potential (contents). The interaction among these dimensions gives rise to the deployment of Implicit Territoriality through two complementary processes—Territorialized Subjectivity and the Regime of Expansibility—which explain how territorial meanings become socially embodied and projected across different spatial and social scales. Its empirical recognition is achieved through a system of Inference Devices, understood as analytical operators that establish the relationship between empirical evidence and its implicit territorial dimension. Together, these components provide an integrated explanatory framework for understanding how archives actively participate in the political–cultural production of territory. Beyond preserving documents, archives implicitly contribute to the production of territories. They organize, stabilize, circulate, legitimize, and project memories and territorial meanings across different social and spatial scales. By conceptualizing Implicit Territoriality as a constitutive property of every archive, this article situates archives within the dynamics of territorialization and provides a coherent framework for analyzing their territorial dimension. Full article

This study re-examines the literary rivalry between Xu Ling 徐陵 (507–583) of Liang and Wei Shou 魏收 (507–572) of Northern Qi through a political lens. Analyzing Wei’s “A Beautiful Woman” (Meinü pian 美女篇) poems alongside southern counterparts, it argues that Wei deliberately embraced classical allegorism and didacticism to construct Northern cultural legitimacy, contrasting with Xu Ling’s ornate palace-style aesthetics. While Xu’s dismissal of Wei’s anthology reflected southern literary supremacy, Wei’s works embodied a strategic northern archaism that prioritized political utility over aesthetic refinement. The paper further contextualizes this conflict within broader North–South diplomatic tensions, musical traditions, and Tang historiography’s moral judgment of Wei Shou. Ultimately, it reveals how the northern political agenda, literary culture, and the contemporary reflection of the southern poetic style influenced Wei Shou’s study of the southern palace-style poetry. Full article

This essay discusses feminist ideas in connection to the occulture—Christopher Partridge’s term for the re-enchantment of art, popular culture, and everyday life through esoteric and spiritual currents—present in opera, musical theater, and film, focusing on femmes fatales, tricksters and ‘wicked women’ in a transcultural approach to religion, (Western) esotericism, and the performing arts. The spiritual–scientific embodiment of Afro-Brazilian traditions is explored through the figure of Pombagira—a Brazilian occultural creation of a female enchantress with mystical powers connected to healing and sex, often placed in patriarchal opposition to her male counterpart, Exu. Drawing on Partridge’s notions of occulture and Walter Mignolo’s understanding of decoloniality, the Western gendering imposed on Pombagira as a purveyor of evil is discussed as both mythology and potential epistemicide. The thesis statement presented here is that the Pombagira episteme is an underlying emblem throughout art and scholarship invested in queering essential binary categories of womanhood, as seen in staged adaptations of Verdi’s La forza del destino (1862), Bizet’s Carmen (1875), and numerous cinematic Lola incarnations—Marlene Dietrich’s in Der blaue Engel (1930), Gwen Verdon’s in Damn Yankees (1958), and Almodóvar’s in Todo sobre mi madre (1999). This indisciplinary reading connects Gloria Anzaldúa’s queer feminist practice of spiritual mestizaje with the Pombagira as an occultural anti-patriarchal force. Full article