Category: English

Shanghai is invariably used in film sets and popular discourse as an image of the future. But what sort of future can be found here? Is it a qualitative or quantitative advance? Is there any trace in the landscape of China’s officially still-Communist …

No abstract available.

The state-sanctioned Shanghai International Film Festival (SIFF) is the only film festival accredited by the Fédération Internationale des Associations de Producteurs de Films (FIAPF) in the Greater China region. This paper intends to explore the perce…

This essay is an allegorical reading of Shanghai futures through a fictive woman, Wang Qiyao, in Wang Anyi’s novel, The Song of Everlasting Sorrow: A Novel of Shanghai (1996). The novel is about her life in China from the 1940s to the 1980s. Using Benj…

This paper deals with the development of ’art clusters’ and their relocation in the city of Shanghai. It first looks at the revival of the city’s old inner city industrial area (along banks of Suzhou River) through ’organic’ or ’alternative’ artist-led…

No abstract available.

This article presents a case study of the development of a local cultural form – Shanghai Yueju – caught up in the rapid urban redevelopment of post-socialist China. Using Pierre Bourdieu’s concepts of ’habitus’ and ’distinction’, it analyses the proce…

After decades of fierce political struggles in the Mao era, the People’s Republic of China has strived economically under the open-door policy since the end of the 1970s. However, the still firm national monuments that weathered the social vicissitudes…

This paper examines the firms in Shanghai’s official “Creative Industry Clusters (CICs)”. It aims to contribute to the creative city debate by unveiling the relationships between the production of new economy firms and the reconstruction of urban space…

When people say Shanghai looks like the future the setting is almost always the same. Evening descends and the skyscrapers clustered on the eastern shore of the Huangpu light up. Super towers are transformed into giant screens. The spectacular skyline,…

This article examines different types of queer spaces in contemporary Shanghai together with the various same-sex subjects that inhabit these spaces. In doing so, it discusses the impact of transnational capitalism, the nation state and local histories…

Explanations of the causes of war fall roughly into two schools: those arguing for the primacy of environment and technology, and those arguing for the primacy of sociopolitical factors. We re-examine two hypotheses from the former school, vi…

Multilevel selection is a powerful theoretical framework for understanding how complex hierarchical systems evolve by iteratively adding control levels. Here I apply this framework to a major transition in human social evolution, from small-scale egali…

This paper calls for Norden to be understood as a metaframe. Related formulations like “Nordic art” or “Nordic welfare” function as mesoframes. These trigger multiple framing devices. A cache of related framing devices constitutes a framing archive. Fr…

No abstract available.

This essay argues that the disruption of the routine ways we engage with our cities is necessary for democratic activity and public participation. Building on research that examines the relationship between public spaces and democratic action, I explor…

Social scientists investigating the attributes associated with creativity have for the most part confined their research to the study only of creative people. This research attempts to compare creativity with non-creativity by comparing creative with n…

This article addresses children, food and body, and introduces a Deleuzian and Childhood Studies-inspired use of the concept of foodscape. The data draws on a transdisciplinary project on children as co-researchers of foodscapes. In this article we do …

This article compares the histories of two museums of polar exploration, both founded in the 1930s but based on well-known expeditions dating back to the decades around 1900. The first is the Fram Museum in Oslo, centered around the famous Norwegian po…

In the twentieth century Lithuania emerged from the crumbling Russian Empire as a post-colonial nationalising state. Its short-lived independence (1918–1940) featured attempts to assemble the material foundations for an imagined community of Lithuanian…

Ever since the emigration from the Nordic countries the Old world and the New world have maintained an exchange of ideas, customs, and material culture. This cultural heritage consists of more than remnants of the past. Drawing on theories of material …

The fall of the Berlin Wall and the dissolution of the Soviet Union completely transformed the military-political situation in the Nordic countries. The movement from invasion defence to input defence in Sweden has made many of the subterranean modern …

This article takes a closer look at how interwar supporters of modernism sought to overcome the opposition they had to face. It does so by looking at the usage of history and Swedishness at the Stockholm Exhibition in 1930 and contrasting this experien…