Search Results (910)

Under the pressures of neoliberalism, in Australia, the Victorian senior Music curriculum has been diminished. Neoliberal reforms have prioritised accountability, employability, and standardised outcomes, leading to a re-prioritisation of musical content and knowledge. This has led to reductions in musically specific content and increased focus on non-musical transferable skills. Concomitant has been an emphasis on informal processes within formal curricula. Highlighting implications for creativity, cultural diversity, and pedagogical practice, we contextualise changes to the Victorian example with curricula in the UK and US. Findings reveal a global trend toward more balanced, hybrid models integrating formal and informal learning. The findings inform debates on curriculum design, pedagogical practice, and policy development, highlighting the need for balanced approaches that preserve musical depth while accommodating broader educational goals. Full article

The deepening of the “Belt and Road” Initiative urgently requires breaking through the dilemmas of symbolization, unidirectionality, and contextual de-embedding in the export of traditional cultural heritage. This paper takes the 2023 China-Germany “Tracing the Belt and Road” cultural heritage exchange project as the research object, employing a single-case exploratory research method to construct a theoretical model of “narrative carrier innovation—cultural heritage dimension adaptation” aimed at enhancing the effectiveness of cultural heritage dissemination. The study finds that international communication projects for cultural heritage can systematically deconstruct the cultural core (“Dao”) and innovatively adapt modernized, localized dissemination forms familiar to the audiences in the host regions (“Qi”), thereby achieving a paradigm shift from passive introduction to active resonance. The paper specifically elucidates how four types of innovative carriers-digital narrative, public participatory, competitive co-creative, and academic artistic-adapt to the dimensions of historical cognition, aesthetic experience, creative interaction, and value identification in Han Dynasty cultural heritage. This adaptation ultimately forms effective cross-cultural dissemination pathways. This research provides an operable theoretical framework and practical paradigm for “Belt and Road” humanistic exchanges, offering insights for the international dissemination of cultural heritage. Full article

This entry, which identifies nine paradoxes particular to popular culture in a digital society, begins by distinguishing art and culture, since scholars have historically relied on these terms to differentiate popular culture, mass culture, and mass art. Digital societies, which exist both online and offline, are awash in digital products such as LED signs, digital imagery, video games, film, podcasts, and social media. In a digital society, popular culture is effectively “mass art,” which exhibits five properties: (1) digital media’s low-cost products and low-skill tools are (2) created and distributed to appeal to as broad a cultural sector as possible (qualitative) and thus aim to (3) attract consumers (quantitative) who capably enjoy and deploy cultural content both (4) offline and online, yet “popularity” ultimately depends on (5) efforts to maximize unity and minimize fragmentation. Except for localized events, popular culture has largely disappeared, while mass art will likely flourish until human beings clamor once again for firsthand experiences or go extinct. The next frontier will be finding ways to prevent artificial intelligence from producing cultural products, not because they will be terrible, undesirable, or fake, but because the culture-making process itself engenders human wellbeing. Full article

Despite growing interest in transmedia edutainment, its limits—especially those experienced by students embedded in non-western educational cultural settings—remain underexamined. This article offers a theoretically grounded and empirically supported analysis of the cultural–pedagogical frictions shaping transmedia edutainment in Hong Kong higher education, focusing on students whose learning dispositions have been historically and institutionally formed by examination-oriented meritocracy and instrumentalist epistemologies. Using a mixed qualitative design combining focus-group interviews and classroom ethnographic observations, we show why implementation efforts frequently stalled and how they were ultimately absorbed by a prevailing neoliberal–Confucian educational culture that moralizes achievement and standardizes value recognition. Drawing on a Bourdieusian framework, we interrogate how students’ educational illusio—animated by content instrumentalism, grade-oriented compliance, and meritocratic time-discipline—recasted multimodal engagement as instrumentalized participation optimized for legibility, security, and risk minimization. Moving beyond prevailing emphases on technological access or digital divides, we foreground habitus–field incongruence as the mechanism structuring ambivalent participation and deculturation from the intended ethos of creativity, critical inquiry, and collaborative participation. We conclude by calling for culturally responsive pedagogical shifts necessary for cultivating more genuine participatory cultures in transmedia learning environments. Full article

Cultural tourism has emerged as a key factor in destination development, but moving from growth-oriented expansion to sustainability necessitates a better comprehension of the psychological processes influencing visitor involvement. Existing studies insufficiently integrate destination-level diversification with tourist psychological identity, particularly within emerging economies. Drawing on a diversified development framework, this study constructs a theoretical model linking economic, cultural, social, and environmental dimensions with tourist psychological identity and sustainable destination development. Questionnaire data from 300 respondents were analyzed using regression analysis to examine direct and indirect effects across influencing factors. Economic development (β = 0.45), government policy support (β = 0.23), and investment orientation (β = 0.32) significantly strengthen sustainable cultural tourism development. Cultural resources (β = 0.51), cultural exchange (β = 0.27), and creative industries (β = 0.18) also exhibit strong positive effects. Tourist psychological identity is shaped by personal economic status (β = 0.42), cultural experience (β = 0.33), and social recommendations (β = 0.35). Moreover, psychological identity exerts a substantial influence on sustainable development (β = 0.56), indicating a reinforcing mechanism between destination diversification and long-term sustainability. Findings demonstrate that diversified development pathways enhance both destination sustainability and tourists’ psychological attachment, offering actionable implications for destination marketing and management. This study contributes to shifting tourism development from a growth paradigm toward a sustainability paradigm, supporting SDGs 8, 11, and 12. Full article

The integration experiences and vulnerabilities of migrants in host states are a critical area of study. This qualitative research, grounded in a human rights and social justice framework, investigates the systemic injustices and integration challenges faced by Zimbabwean migrants in Johannesburg, South Africa. Through in-depth interviews with 16 participants and six key informants, the study employs thematic analysis to uncover the socio-cultural, economic, and political barriers that impede successful integration. The findings reveal pervasive issues such as prejudice, discrimination, xenophobia, and language barriers, which exacerbate the migrants’ vulnerabilities and make it difficult to support their families. They, at times, fail to buy food and pay school fees for their children. Despite these challenges, the resilience and creativity of Zimbabwean migrants are evident. The study’s unique contribution lies in its widening of the genealogy of theories of migration by incorporating African-centred migration perspectives, which are grounded in social justice perspectives. This critiques the Global North-dominated narratives that have historically sidelined the lived experiences of migrants from the Global South. The study offers a comprehensive examination of the interplay between systemic barriers and migrant resilience, offering new insights into how migration involves and affects families. This research calls for the development and implementation of rights-based integration frameworks to address systemic issues and enhance the well-being of migrants so that they can better support their families and kinsmen. Full article

This entry explores the implications of generative AI for the underlying foundational premises of copyright law and the potential threat it poses to human creativity. It identifies the gaps and inconsistencies in legal frameworks as regards authorship, training-data use, moral rights, and human originality in the context of AI systems that are capable of imitating human expression at both syntactic and semantic levels. The entry includes: (i) a comparative analysis of the legal frameworks of the United Kingdom, United States, and Germany, using the Berne Convention as a harmonising baseline, (ii) a systematic synthesis of the relevant academic literature, and (iii) insights gained from semi-structured interviews with legal scholars, AI developers, industry stakeholders, and creators. Evidence suggests that existing laws are ill-equipped for semantic and stylistic reproduction; there is no agreement on authorship, no clear licensing model for training data, and inadequate protection for the moral identity of creators—especially posthumously, where explicit protections for likeness, voice, and style are fragmented. The entry puts forward a draft global framework to restore legal certainty and cultural value, incorporating a semantics-aware definition of the term “work”, and encompassing licensing and remuneration of training data, enhanced moral and posthumous rights, as well as enforceable transparency. At the same time, parallel personality-based safeguards, including rights of publicity, image, or likeness, although present in all three jurisdictions studied, are not subject to the same copyright and thus do not offer any coherent or adequate protection against semantic or stylistic imitation, which once again highlights the need for a more unified and robust copyright strategy. Full article

This study investigates the perceptions of Greek sixth-grade students regarding Artificial Intelligence (AI). Understanding students’ pre-instructional conceptions is essential for developing targeted interventions that build on existing knowledge rather than assuming conceptual deficits. A qualitative design was employed with 229 students from seven elementary schools in Athens, Greece. Data were collected through open-ended questions and word association tasks, then analyzed using Walan’s AI perceptions framework as an integrated set of analytical lenses (cognitive, affective, behavioral/use, and ethical considerations). Findings revealed that students hold multifaceted conceptions of AI. Cognitively, they described AI as robots, computational systems, software tools, and autonomous learning programs. Affectively, they expressed ambivalence, balancing appreciation of AI’s usefulness with concerns over potential risks. Behaviorally, they identified interactive question–answer functions, creative applications, and everyday assistance roles. Ethically, students raised issues of responsible use, societal implications, and human–AI relationships. This study contributes to international research, highlighting that primary students’ understandings of AI are more nuanced than is sometimes assumed, and offer empirical insights for designing culturally responsive, ethically informed AI literacy curricula. Full article

Generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) tools are transforming art education by enabling instant creation of textual, visual, audio, and multimodal outputs. This systematic review synthesizes research on GenAI applications in art education from January 2019 to August 2025. Following PRISMA 2020 guidelines, 19 peer-reviewed empirical studies across six databases (Web of Science, ScienceDirect, Springer, Taylor & Francis, Scopus, and ERIC) met inclusion criteria, which required clear pedagogical implementation with students or educators as active participants. Research accelerated from two studies in 2023 to 14 in 2025, with most studies examining higher education and East Asia contexts through mixed methods approaches and grounded in constructivist and cognitive learning theories. Text-to-image generation models (DALL-E, Midjourney, Stable Diffusion) and conversational AI (ChatGPT) were most frequently implemented across creative production, pedagogical scaffolding, and instructional design applications. Findings from this emerging body of research suggest that GenAI has the potential to improve learning achievement, creative thinking, engagement, and cultural understanding when integrated through structured pedagogical frameworks with intentional instructor design. However, these positive outcomes represent early-stage implementation trends in well-resourced contexts rather than broadly generalizable conclusions. Successful integration requires explicit instructional frameworks, clear ethical guidelines for human-AI collaboration, and evolved assessment methods. Full article

This article undertakes a cross-cultural comparative inquiry into the motif of “women’s weaving” in medieval Daoism and Christianity. Although the two traditions developed with minimal historical contact, both elevate women’s textile labor into a central metaphor for cosmogenesis, sacred order, and individual salvation. Nevertheless, their hermeneutic trajectories diverge in essential ways. Working within a tripartite analytical framework (intellectual roots, artistic images, ritual practices) to argue that Daoism interprets “women’s weaving” as a proactive technique of transformation and nurture, based on a cosmology of immanent huasheng lun. In this reading, the image is affiliated with the cosmic creativity of nüxian, the inner transformation of their body, and the autonomous pursuit of transcendence. By contrast, within Christianity’s transcendent theological horizon of creatio ex nihilo, “women’s weaving” is configured primarily as an ethical discipline of responsive obedience, closely tied to the mystery of the Incarnation, the imitatio Dei, and communal spiritual exercises and charity under monasticism. The cross-cultural resonance of this motif, I contend, is grounded in the “men’s ploughing and women’s weaving” economic formation, patriarchal gender order, and shared symbolic cognition; its decisive bifurcation arises from contrasting deep cultural structures—namely, cosmology, conceptions of the body, soteriology, and church–state arrangements. Through this micro-case, the article further argues that the sacralization of secular gender roles constitutes an agentic cultural choice, one that indexes distinct civilizational pathways in understanding creation, nature, the body, and freedom. Full article

Traditional villages are integral to the broader context of global socio-economic transition. This study developed a resilience evaluation model centred on built-environment indicators. This model integrates the community, economy, ecology, and culture dimensions. Clarifying the typology and key driving factors of traditional village built environment resilience can effectively activate the inherent potential of villages. The study provides a holistic approach to identifying traditional village built environment resilience types and analysing the key influencing factors. Utilising a method combining the SOM-K-means clustering model and the interpretable XGBoost-SHAP model, the study provides a holistic analytical framework for identifying traditional village built environment resilience types and quantifying the nonlinear action characteristics of various indicators across different types. Taking the Yangtze River Delta (YRD) region as an example, the study demonstrates that traditional villages can be categorised into six potential resilience types, with differentiated key indicator combinations across these types. Furthermore, the nonlinear action characteristics and operational thresholds of the same key indicator differ significantly across various traditional village types. For instance, at medium-to-high threshold levels, the accessibility of cultural buildings contributes significantly to the sustainability of culture–service-driven villages but, conversely, becomes a detriment in ecology-cultural composite archetypes. Similarly, in industry–creative driven villages, once the density of cultural and creative spaces reaches a specific threshold, it exerts a significant positive effect on traditional village development and stabilises into a sustained positive state. However, in ecology–agriculture–organisation-driven villages, exceeding a certain threshold in the density of cultural and creative spaces has a significant negative influence. The results provide an analytical framework for the resilience typology and influencing factors of traditional village built environments, consequently offering a scientific basis for formulating refined, differentiated policies for traditional villages. Full article

The accelerated expansion of telework, driven by the COVID-19 pandemic, has transformed global work dynamics. Despite this, limited research exists on the implications of Indoor Environmental Quality (IEQ) on home workspaces. Factors like thermal comfort, lighting, air quality, and noise significantly influence the well-being, productivity, and health of teleworkers. Home spaces are often not designed to meet the environmental quality standards of traditional offices, altering indoor conditions. This scoping review investigates the IEQ–telework relationship, analyzing 41 studies from 18 countries. Findings show that elevated noise levels and insufficient lighting increase stress and fatigue, while inadequate air quality reduces cognitive performance and creativity. Conversely, access to natural light, pleasant views, and thermal comfort improves overall satisfaction and productivity. The study identifies a fragmented and poorly connected research network, with few active global groups studying IEQ in home workspaces. These results underscore the need for interdisciplinary research to address the societal and environmental challenges of teleworking and develop equitable, healthy remote environments. Future studies must consider cultural diversity and underrepresented regions to bridge existing knowledge gaps. Full article

Fractured fairy tales are adaptive retellings of traditional stories that employ humor, irony, and narrative innovation to transform established meanings. As a distinctive literary genre, these works combine entertainment with subversion, reshaping familiar plots, characters, and morals to engage readers in both imaginative and critical reflection. The genre gained prominence in the mid-twentieth century, when classic tales began to be rewritten to reflect modern cultural values and shifting audience expectations. Through techniques such as parody, reversal, and alternative endings, fractured fairy tales challenge inherited norms while offering renewed interpretive possibilities. Beyond their literary appeal, they have been recognized for their pedagogical importance: their familiarity lowers barriers to reading, while their inventive variations foster creativity, analytical reasoning, and language development. Collectively, these attributes affirm fractured fairy tales as a genre of lasting significance, uniting artistic reinterpretation with educational relevance in ways that continue to enrich both literary and literacy learning. Full article

Regarding Judah’s exilic realities and forced migration experience, this article proposes that the sage responsible for this poem functioned as a carrier group in articulating a narrative of collective trauma. The paper begins by summarizing key components of cultural trauma theory as developed by Jeffrey C. Alexander. It also situates the shared socio-historical context of the final textual forms of Jeremiah and Proverbs within the exilic/post-exilic realities of the Judahite community. It next traces the trope of wine inebriation across several Jeremiah texts, focusing especially on Jeremiah 25:15–29 to show how this motif is integrally woven into the book’s overarching themes of indictment, judgment, and exile. A conventional wisdom reading of Proverbs 23:29–35 yields a moralistic warning about the self-destructive cycle of wine intoxication of the fools in the book of Proverbs. But a cultural trauma hermeneutic of the poem—when paired with intertextual echoes of Jeremiah 25:15–29—opens the poem to a deeper reading. Within this framework, the sapiential poem emerges as a creative, dramatic and theologically rich act of trauma storytelling, depicting foolish Judah’s metaphorical intoxication as an embodiment of exilic indictment, woes and suffering, yet gesturing toward the possibility of healing and restoration through wisdom reflection and re-narration of their past. Full article

Set in the vocational education and training sector in England, this article draws attention to how top-down, centre–periphery approaches to curriculum design and development in vocational education fail for at least three reasons. First, they misconstrue the nature of knowledge. Second, they lead to perfunctory and fragmented approaches to curriculum design, coupled with mechanistic measures of quality and achievement, which often require little more than “one-off” and superficially assessed demonstrations of performance. Finally, they underplay the role and importance of the teacher as researcher and artist in putting the cultural resources of society to work in creative curriculum design and pedagogy. Teacher artistry is pivotal in animating and heightening the vitality of vocational curricula. It is through this artistry that teachers make theories, ideas and concepts in vocational subjects and disciplines accessible and meaningful to all learners in coherent ways in the contexts of their learning and their lives. The consequences of the epistemic faux pas underpinning centre-to-periphery models of curriculum design and development are highlighted in this article in vocational tutors’ accounts of experiences of problems and issues in curriculum design, development and assessment encountered in their practice. Participants in the research teach in a variety of vocational education settings, including Apprenticeships and Higher-Level Technical Education; English Language at General Certificate of Secondary Education (GCSE) level; Health and Social Care; Information and Communications Technology; Construction (Plumbing); Digital Production, Design and Development and High-Tech Precision Engineering. Data are analysed and reported through systematic, thematic analysis This article draws upon qualitative data derived from a study funded by the Education and Training Foundation (ETF) in England over a two-year period from 2021 to 2023. The research population consists of a group of eight practitioner–researchers working in three colleges of Further Education (FE) and one Industry Training Centre (ITC) in England. All of the teachers of vocational education reported here volunteered to participate in the study. Research methods include semi-structured interviews, analysis of critical incidents and case studies produced by practitioner–researchers from across the FE and Skills sector in England. Full article