On joining the editorial team of European Journal of Cultural Studies in its 25th year

Siao Yuong Fong (Rong) and Jian Lin joined the editorial team of EJCS in 2023 as Co-Editors of Cultural Commons and Book Reviews. The following is a conversation, conducted over email in late 2023 and early 2024, between the two editors to introduce themselves to the journal. Who we are and our relationship to Cultural Studies and EJCSRong (11th November 2023, Lancaster):My relationship with Cultural Studies started quite late. My academic background is in communications, and I spent a good part of my twenties working in television and theatre. I was introduced to Cultural Studies by accident when I took an optional module at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) whilst doing an MA in Film Studies and I credit it for eventually sending me down my later path towards a PhD and an academic career.I think my attraction to Cultural Studies perhaps stems from my background in Singapore where, in my opinion, research is often depoliticized, or perhaps, where

Envisioning cultural commoning: New Cultural Commons editors’ dialogue on Global South perspectives, inclusivity and Cultural Studies

Fong,

Lin

2024

Crisis

Hoff,

Happer

2024

Owing to its prominence in everyday life, media, culture, economy and politics, we follow the lead of Marie Moran in taking a keywords-as-method approach to ‘crisis’. In doing so, we explore its changing meaning from a decisive moment to something more permanent. We argue this change is because of the proliferation, proximity and visibility of numerous interlocking, converging crises that are being experienced by a greater number of people across a range of spatiotemporal scales which produces a political imagination defined by incipience. Taken together, these illuminate how the changed meaning of ‘crisis’ is both a response to, and constitutive of the material conditions of lived experience, as well as our social, cultural and political imaginaries in the contemporary moment.

Aligning to ambivalence: White petty bourgeois masculinities, leisure and the contemporary cultural politics of gender in the UK

Hoff

2024

Drawing on an ethnography of 12 white, young, petty bourgeois, heterosexual men between the ages of 20–26 from Leicester, UK, and utilising Raymond Williams concept of ‘structure of feeling’, this article will critically explore how their masculinities are performed, constituted and articulated in games of five-a-side football and house parties. This will further understanding of white masculinities, the intersecting gendered, classed and racial identities of the petty bourgeoisie, and the gender politics of the current conjuncture in the United Kingdom in three ways. First, it will make an explicit link between the broader cultural politics of gender in the United Kingdom and petty bourgeois masculinities through leisure. Second, it will critically build upon recent insights into the ‘both ways’ politics of the petty bourgeoisie in the United Kingdom by focussing on how gender and race factor into this. Finally, it will show how ‘aligning’ to this broader politics of gender is enabled by intersecting social locations of advantage, primarily in terms of class, race and sexuality, showing how alignment to ambivalence can articulate and reinforce inequalities between men, while feeding into broader gendered inequalities.