Search Results (501)

Sports-based television formats combining competition, cooperation, and physical confrontation have long attracted large audiences. Since the 2000s reality television has increasingly adapted these elements, particularly through wrestling- and boxing-themed programs. This study examines the genre of celebrity boxing within the broader context of contemporary media culture, with the aim of interpreting its popularity through perspectives from communication and media theory. The analysis applies a qualitative approach drawing on concepts such as the media violence and Carey’s and Couldry’s ritual model of communication and includes an empirical case study of the Hungarian television program Sztárbox. The findings suggest that celebrity boxing operates as a pseudo-sporting spectacle that combines media violence with celebrity culture to maintain audience attention, while its dramaturgy—following Barthes’ and Jenkins’ interpretations—relies heavily on simplified moral oppositions and dramatized role-playing. These elements function as micro-rituals that structure viewer engagement and contribute to collective meaning-making beyond mere entertainment. The study concludes that the appeal of celebrity boxing lies not only in the display of physical confrontation but in its ritualized narrative framework, which reinforces social and cultural interpretations of conflict, identity, and spectacle within the logic of contemporary media environments. Full article

This paper offers a theoretical reinterpretation of the groundbreaking Greentown study using Pierre Bourdieu’s Theory of Practice. Rather than presenting new empirical findings, it examines previously published research to study children’s involvement in organised crime networks through a relational, practice-based lens. Dominant approaches to youth offending and gang participation tend to focus on individual risk factors, programme effectiveness or structural indicators and can struggle to account for the enduring social logics through which criminal authority is reproduced across generations. Drawing on Bourdieusian concepts of field, capital and symbolic power, the paper interprets Greentown as a localised social field in which a core family network accumulates and deploys social, cultural, economic and symbolic capital to secure compliance, cultivate loyalty and sustain informal forms of governance. Attention is paid to the role of symbolic narratives and mythmaking in minimising the visible presence of the state and normalising participation for young people and residents. The analysis illustrates how such symbolic orders can persist even where individual agents desist, contributing to the relative stability of networked harm. The paper argues that Bourdieu provides a coherent and theoretically disciplined framework for understanding organised criminal networks as socially embedded fields and suggests that interventions attentive to symbolic power and misrecognition may complement existing criminal justice responses. While explicitly interpretive in scope, the paper points towards the value of theory-led re-readings of empirical research for addressing the complex and ‘wicked’ nature of organised networked offending. Full article

Research on contemporary Chinese comprehensive material painting has long focused on aesthetic qualities or relied on Western modernist frameworks, leaving the mechanism of material-to-symbol transformation under-theorized. This study investigates the generative logic of material meaning through a qualitative cross-case analysis of forty-eight works by twelve Chinese artists, integrating in-depth interviews and visual analysis. Through systematic analysis of images, material operations, and artists’ interpretations, the study proposes a three-stage semiotic mechanism: anchoring, exemplification, and differentiation. Findings demonstrate that material meaning is formed through continuous negotiation between bodily technique and material resistance, mediated by cultural techniques guided by pre-textual schemata. Material attributes are first filtered and anchored, reinforced through embodied operations, and eventually stabilized into stylistic structures articulating cultural identity. This research argues that Chinese comprehensive material painting constitutes a localized mode of cross-cultural symbolic production rooted in indigenous cultural experience and material praxis. Ultimately, it supplies a mechanism-based interpretive framework for this art form while contributing a localized perspective to global discussions on the relationship among subjectivity, materiality, and cultural identity. Full article

Medieval liturgical exegesis presents a striking interpretative paradox: Advent, the opening season of the liturgical year, falls within the autumn–winter period and yet is frequently understood as a tempus renovationis, a time of renewal analogous to spring. This study argues that such an association is not merely a poetic metaphor, but the result of a liturgical and theological reconfiguration of time grounded in the adventus Domini. Focusing especially on the liturgical commentaries of Prepositinus of Cremona and related exegetical traditions, the article examines how the symbolic code of spring, widely attested in medieval cultural and poetic sources, is assumed and transformed within the liturgical sphere. It then considers chant as one of the principal media through which this renewed temporal condition becomes perceptible in ecclesial practice. Particular attention is given to the introit Ad te levavi, read as the sung threshold of the liturgical year, in which prophetic promise, ecclesial response, renewed breath, and ascensional movement converge. The analysis is finally extended to manuscript culture, where enlarged initials, figural programs, and the notated shaping of the incipit contribute to the visual and aural articulation of the same theological logic. The study concludes that the “spring” of Advent is best understood not as a merely seasonal analogy, but as a coordinated symbolic and liturgical phenomenon articulated across exegesis, chant, and manuscript mediation. Full article

As an important medium for conveying rich historical and cultural information, the decorative elements of ancient Chinese timber architecture still lack a systematic understanding of their intrinsic cultural logic in current research and conservation practices. Guided by the cultural gene theory, this study systematically analyzes the wooden decorations of the Luzhai complex in Dongyang, Zhejiang, and constructs a “tangible–intangible” gene map comprising 24 relevant factors, including form, craftsmanship, and symbolic meaning. Through AHP-FCE (Analytic Hierarchy Process- Fuzzy Comprehensive Evaluation) quantitative analysis, 126 typical components from 427 decorative samples (including 165 from the Ming Dynasty and 262 from the Qing Dynasty) in the Ming and Qing Dynasty Luzhai in Dongyang were coded and quantitatively evaluated. The results indicate that the Ming-dynasty wooden architectural decorations in the Luzhai complex are characterized by botanical patterns, relief carving, and Confucian ethics, embodying restraint and ritual order; whereas Qing-dynasty decorations are characterized by animal patterns, round carving, and status symbols, reflecting sociocultural and economic transformation. This study provides a methodological framework for interpreting regional architectural decoration and offers theoretical and practical support for the conservation and digital preservation of traditional architectural heritage. Full article

Moroccan ICH is a rich domain that remains difficult to structure formally due to the heterogeneity of textual descriptions and the diversity of documented cultural practices. This article proposes a semi-automatic and adaptable methodological framework for constructing an ontology-driven knowledge graph from unstructured texts, applied to Moroccan ICH. The approach begins by classifying documents into the five predefined UNESCO categories using lexical, semantic, and hybrid methods, followed by intra-category semantic clustering to identify thematic substructures that inform ontological modeling. The results show that hybrid approaches achieve the best performance in document classification, while clustering requires an adaptive strategy for each category. Building on these stages, ICHOnto was generated as a CIDOC CRM-aligned ontology enriched with UNESCO categories, expert-validated subcategories, and entities and relations extracted from the texts. The resulting resource was evaluated through logical consistency, SHACL compliance, and functional assessment using Competency Questions. The evaluation confirms that ICHOnto provides a coherent, exploitable, and interoperable semantic resource for representing, organizing, and querying Moroccan ICH. Its modular structure also supports adaptation to other heritage corpora or domains based on unstructured textual data. Full article

Post-war Aleppo is often framed through destruction, legal constraints, and the technical demands of reconstruction. This article challenges that assumption by re-reading Aleppo’s pre-2011 municipal vision as an analytical resource for post-war recovery. The study adopts a qualitative interpretive methodology based on municipal archival material, including the City Council work programme, strategic planning presentations, project documents, and materials related to the City Development Strategy, Madinatuna initiative, the old city, Bab Antakiya, and major public-space and service initiatives. The analysis followed three steps: identifying repeated municipal priorities and planning concepts; organizing them into thematic axes; and interpreting flagship projects as spatial expressions of a broader municipal vision. To assess post-war relevance, the archive is also read against evidence of damage, displacement, urban functionality, and heritage loss. The results show that Aleppo’s pre-2011 municipal vision can be reconstructed through six interrelated axes: strategic urban development and managed growth; the old city as a living urban fabric; urban repair in the city centre; mobility and accessibility; culture and social development; and development partnerships and international cooperation. The findings reveal that these axes formed a partially integrated municipal urbanism rather than isolated projects, while flagship interventions such as Bab Antakiya, the Green Path, the river corridor, and the Citadel surroundings materialized this logic. The study also finds that this vision remained institutionally vulnerable because of political centralization and limited municipal autonomy. It concludes that post-war recovery should build on critical continuity rather than reconstruction from scratch. Full article

Adaptive reuse has become a central strategy for extending the cultural, environmental, and functional life of industrial heritage, yet the ways in which intervention logic becomes legible in multilayered heritage complexes remain insufficiently formalized. This article examines the Cibali complex in Istanbul, a former tobacco and cigarette factory reused as a university, cultural, and museum setting, in order to explain how document-based analysis can reconstruct patterns of continuity, loss, re-construction, contemporary addition, and layer articulation. Methodologically, the study develops a multi-scalar reading protocol based on the cross-matching of historical maps, aerial photographs, plans, sections, elevations, restoration proposals, and post-implementation visual material across parcel, block, courtyard, façade, structural-system, and archaeological-layer scales. The findings show that continuity was preserved primarily at the levels of parcel structure, waterfront relation, massing, façade rhythm, and silhouette, whereas more intensive transformation occurred in interior spatial organization, void re-definition, structural re-configuration, and archaeological musealization. The study concludes that adaptive reuse at Cibali operated not as a uniform conservation process, but as a differentiated and selective regime of legibility in which some historical layers were foregrounded while others were transformed, displaced, or made secondary. The significance of the article lies in proposing a case-tested analytical protocol for reading document-rich, multilayered industrial heritage sites, while recognizing that its broader transferability requires further validation through comparative application to additional cases. Full article

This study investigates whether spa settlements can be analytically interpreted through a relational spascape framework that reveals structural and configurational patterns beyond conventional typological classifications. In the context of increasing interest in therapeutic landscapes and heritage-sensitive development, spa settlements represent complex spatial systems shaped by the interplay of natural resources, urban form, and socio-cultural practices, yet they remain insufficiently understood through existing analytical models. The methodology is based on a structured analytical design combining three urbanization dimensions (material transformation, territorial regulation, and everyday life) with six thematic fields, operationalized through graded cross-affiliation scoring. The empirical research is conducted on a sample of 12 spa settlements in Serbia, selected to reflect diverse geographical, morphological, and developmental conditions. Statistical calibration was performed using Principal Component Analysis (PCA) and hierarchical clustering to identify underlying structural relationships and configurational groupings. The results indicate that spa settlements operate as multi-affiliated relational entities rather than fixed typologies, exhibiting dimension-specific structural logics and forming distinct configurational families depending on the analytical perspective applied. PCA reveals differentiated internal structures across dimensions, while clustering confirms the absence of a single stable typology. The findings support a relational understanding of spa settlements as dynamic spatial systems characterized by shifting alignments of material, regulatory, and experiential factors. Beyond the Serbian context, the study offers a transferable methodological framework that connects qualitative urban interpretation with quantitative spatial analysis, contributing to heritage-sensitive planning, territorial governance, and the management of spa systems as relational clusters. Full article

Co-authored by a French humanitarian anthropologist and a South Sudanese refugee and environmental activist, both writers situated across the Global North and South, this article argues that artistic practices in displacement operate as infrastructures of survival, whose conditions of existence are both enabled and constrained by external actors. Drawing on a case study of Tongogara Refugee Settlement, it argues that the arts—and, more broadly, knowledge production—constitute key survival mechanisms across psychological, psychosocial, and identity-related dimensions. This article further shows that artistic practices in displacement are not only autonomous expressions of resilience but also mediated cultural forms whose visibility and meaning are co-produced through humanitarian, institutional, and epistemic regimes—including the regimes of academic writing itself. First, we examine art’s three interrelated survival dimensions: psychological (personal coherence amid uncertainty and symbolic mobility), psychosocial (collective bonding and mutual support), and identity (cultural representation, memory, heritage, and self-definition in displacement). Second, we examine how these functions are shaped by interactions with external actors—including humanitarian organizations, donors, cultural platforms, and academic institutions—that may increase visibility while favoring curated representation over sustained artistic development, reflecting broader donor-driven logics of accountability. Third, drawing on reflexive notes from the co-authorship process, we show how academic narration can reproduce these asymmetries, thereby positioning co-creation as both an ethical practice and an epistemic condition of equitable knowledge production. Drawing on humanitarian anthropology, aesthetics, and decolonial epistemologies, we argue that processes of symbolic and cultural reconstruction remain structurally under-institutionalized, circulating across humanitarian, developmental, and epistemic regimes without being fully claimed by any of them. Rather than offering normative prescriptions, the article traces how co-production itself becomes a site where these asymmetries are reproduced and made visible. Full article

Science, technology, engineering, math and medicine (STEMM) disciplines often have academic cultures shaped by institutional logics that privilege prestige and competition. In contrast, some STEMM departments are taking up “opportunity-centered institutional logics” or student-centered organizational frameworks that emphasize inclusion, expansive opportunity, and student success over prestige and elitism. Building upon Núñez’s framework, this qualitative study examines how undergraduate students perceive themes of inclusivity, talent development, and culturally responsive educational practices in a computer science department at a minority-serving urban research university in the northeastern United States. The study asks: (a) How do students perceive opportunity logics in their CS learning environment? (b) What departmental structures and norms align with opportunity-centered logics values and goals? Data were collected via semi-structured interviews with 25 undergraduate students participating in a federally funded scholarship program. Interviews were transcribed and analyzed using iterative thematic coding focused on opportunity-centered themes. Findings indicate that students experienced their department as highly supportive and opportunity-oriented through inclusive communication practices, visible and accessible academic support systems, strong peer and faculty relationships, normalization of help-seeking and struggle, and intentional efforts to connect students to research, internships, career development, and institutional resources. By centering student perspectives, this study extends the conceptualization of institutional logics to the interactional level by demonstrating how opportunity-centered values are enacted through everyday departmental practices and relationships. Full article

In 1926, a group of younger Black artists produced Fire!!, a short-lived but generative publication that sought to interrupt dominant scripts of racial uplift, citizenship, and cultural recognition. Refusing incrementalist visions tethered to Western and U.S. centered norms of belonging, the editors desired an otherwise form of cultural production, one generated outside prevailing regimes of representation. This essay reads Fire!! as a model of breach and mobilizes it to interrogate the contemporary (anti-)diversity, equity, inclusion, and access (DEIA) landscape. Drawing on interdisciplinary system literature, I first trace the narrative logics that organize DEIA discourse, attending to how retrenchment operates through recursive patterns that normalize anti-Black constraint across policy and practice. I then theorize “reading against the grain” as a method for apprehending what exceeds these loops. Through a close reading of Fire!!, I argue that Black cultural production formed outside dominant registers functions as a mechanism for interrupting coherence, exposing the epistemic architectures that structure society and the Human while gesturing toward other modes of existence. Full article

The regulatory conditions present regarding anthropogenic pollution of two large Chilean Northern Patagonian lakes, Llanquihue and Villarrica, are analyzed. Taking the risk-based approach (RBA) as a reference framework, the study addresses three relevant dimensions of the socio-environmental risks present in the regulatory regimes of each ecosystem: (1) the reflexive components of the institutions involved, (2) the deployment of organizational processes regarding regulatory norms, and (3) the modalities for addressing change and complexity in the regulatory field. Developing a qualitative multiple-case study with criterion-oriented maximum variation sampling, 40 individual interviews conducted with participants who perform tasks in both cases are analyzed, examining their regulatory configurations according to the investigated dimensions. The most important findings account for: (1) an institutional attenuation that bureaucratically minimizes socio-environmental risks, hindering the transition towards preventive approaches marked by a political culture that prioritizes formal compliance over territorial management; (2) a profound institutional fragmentation and centralization of regulation that dilutes responsibility, operating under logics of minimal efforts that prevent the watershed perspective from achieving normative legitimacy; and (3) a regulatory field overwhelmed by wide-ranging phenomena of difficult regulatory management, where the binary classification of saturation proves insufficient to address diffuse pollution and risks of difficult reversibility. It is concluded that strengthening the regulatory capacities of emerging nations regarding the socio-environmental protection of large lakes requires gradually integrating risk as an organizing criterion and prospecting watershed governance based on multiple regimes complementary to the regulatory effort of the already atomized and centralized normative instruments available. Full article

In recent decades, the fashion industry has attracted mounting attention due to its considerable social, environmental, and cultural impacts. A substantial corpus of academic research has examined these issues, employing terms such as “ethical,” “sustainable,” and “responsible fashion” to describe models that transcend a solely profit-driven logic. These labels, however, are not inherently fixed in meaning and are subject to continuous evolution through public and professional discourse. What, then, do these terms mean? To address this question, the study examines how responsible fashion is defined and framed, drawing on 34 qualitative biographical interviews with Italian fashion communicators. The findings indicate that they ascribe divergent meanings to the concepts of “sustainable” and “responsible” fashion. Sustainability is commonly depicted as an unattainable or utopian objective, whereas responsibility is characterized as more pragmatic and achievable. It is linked to reflexivity and gradual enhancement rather than comprehensive transformation. Even though certain critical viewpoints have called into question the compatibility of fashion with responsibility in itself, the analysis indicates that communicators predominantly construct and negotiate responsibility through specific discursive repertoires. In this regard, responsibility is framed as a compromise, that is, a way of resolving competing demands. Full article

Nature-based solutions (NBSs) involving tree-based interventions deliver multiple community benefits, yet evidence linking these benefits to underlying socio-ecological vulnerabilities remains limited. This study synthesised metadata from 131 European treescape NBS case studies spanning eight biogeographical regions using reverse-logic, thematic qualitative analysis. Case studies were identified via adapted PRISMA guidelines from open-access repositories, with community benefit themes categorised and mapped spatially across bioregions. The analysis revealed eleven principal community benefit categories and distinct region-specific patterns: Mediterranean interventions primarily mitigated extreme heat and drought vulnerabilities, whilst Alpine projects addressed slope stability and hazard reduction. The Continental and Atlantic regions emphasised social cohesion, recreational access, and the preservation of cultural heritage. The reverse-logic methodology successfully identified underlying socio-ecological vulnerabilities through systematic analysis of observed benefit profiles across diverse European contexts. This approach provides evidence-based guidance for designing location-sensitive treescape NBS that advance environmental research and public health objectives. The findings establish a methodological foundation for future assessments of NBS effectiveness and for refining location-specific treescape interventions that address community vulnerabilities and enhance adaptive capacity. Full article