This article argues for a pluralization of the "platform capitalism" framework, suggesting we should think instead in terms of "platform capitalisms." This pluralization opens the way to a better account of how platforms work in different geocultural contexts, with our focus being on China, India and Japan. The article first outlines several roles the state has taken on in mediating platform capitalisms. We then signal three main axes around which to consider the implications of platform capitalisms for cultural production: state-platform symbiosis; platform precarity; and the informal-formal relation in cultural production. This short provocation, we hope, will help foreground the crucial role of the state in platform capitalisms, such that the state-culture-capitalism nexus might be better acknowledged in research on platforms and cultural production now and into the future. This is particularly important as states themselves increasingly become platform operators.

Has China become a neo-colonizer, exporting its cultural and economic power to the world based on its agenda of building soft power? Existing scholarship on neocolonialism and data colonialism largely focuses on how China's infrastructural expansion and increasingly platformised cultural sectors can achieve its ambitious platformised cultural sectors overseas. Yet, how China's cultural power is manifested, negotiated, or resisted in people's daily lives in a South-South setting remains under-researched and under-theorised. This article uses everyday fashion in Kenya as a case study to investigate China's cultural and economic power expansion in the Global South. We examined how cultural differences are negotiated and mediated on two Chinese(-invested) e-commerce platforms. Through focus groups and platform walkthrough method, our findings serve to enrich existing theories of cultural production-platform relationships applicable in the study of various cultural and creative sectors, to offer new understandings of how symbolic, sociopolitical and cultural meanings of fashion are constructed through divergent platform affordances, and to reveal the various forms of cultural negotiations and resistance in different contexts, multiplying our frames of reference.

The concept of the Synthetic is developed to trace and trouble the prevailing popular mythology of Alberta's oil sands and place the omnipresence of petro-hegemony into focus in a time of crisis and transition. The Synthetic is theorized as a period of petroculture beginning in the late 1960s with the rise of Alberta's oil sands industry together with a rise in oil sands narratives, docudrama, and the emergence of mediated or synthetic politics reliant upon processed images. Attention focuses on three mediated moments within the Synthetic beginning with the banned 1977 CBC docudrama and the reaction of Premier Peter Lougheed. This signals the power and grip of oil's hegemony. Second, the short film produced for Expo 86 captures the thickening of synthetic culture and oil's saturation of the public imagination. Finally, the controversy manufactured by Alberta's Canadian Energy Centre over the animated film suggests petro-hegemony's loosening grip.

This article investigates sound practices in home video. Home video manuals and magazines recommended specific strategies for dealing with sound, often with the goal of gaining control over the openness and unpredictability of the situation being filmed. The subject of home video discourse (addressed in handbooks primarily as white, male, and the father of a family) was ideally the one that has image and sound well under control. But while manuals promised the possibility of (re)gaining control over home video, examples of recordings show the ultimate failure in realizing such a possibility. The article argues that listening to home videos can give insight on how media practices inscribe themselves into everyday life and are, therefore, linked to power relations, attempts to control, and scopes of action within the domestic sphere.

Building on theories of cultural trauma, this research examines engendered by the pandemic in relation to journalism and public health in the US and Brazil. The trauma stemming from Covid-19 marks a transformational crisis not only in terms of global public health but also collective confidence in institutions writ large. To probe these issues, this article takes advantage of a vibrant digital discussion among Americans and Brazilians hosted by three flagship newspapers in the two countries: , , and The analysis reveals that both groups experience Covid-accelerated trauma that undermines Brazilians' and Americans' faith in foundational institutions' ability to adequately respond to the pandemic. Comparing these interpretations of the Covid-19 crisis in the US and Brazil allows us to see how the acute health crisis triggered by the virus morphs into a form of institutional trauma, with deep implications for collective confidence in public health, journalism, and democracy.

This article uses the concept of the 'imaginative dimension of digital disinformation' to explore how inter-Asian racism in a postcolonial city matters to the way people engage with racially tinged Covid-19 digital disinformation. It pays attention to two key socialities that fake news and political trolling online seek to weaponise: people's existing social narratives as well as their relationally embedded practices of media consumption. Drawing on 15 life story interviews with locals from the Philippines capital of Manila, this article characterises their interpretations of online disinformation campaigns that aim to amplify their shared social narrative of resentment towards China and bank on their communicative practices surrounding this. It also aims to show the value of empirical research that possesses a transnational sensibility in assessing the interpretive and social dynamics surrounding such racist Covid-19 digital disinformation.

This article charts the pandemic-engendered configurations of moviegoing cultures, leisure, and collective spectatorship in the Indian subcontinent and locates it within the discourses of personal risk, public anxiety, and industrial exclusion that have historically permeated the cinema hall. The pandemic marks a significant moment in the remaking of collective spectatorship and must be contextualized within the two-decades-long transition from single screens to multiplexes already under way in the Indian exhibition landscape. Through an account of the industrial developments in film exhibition in the last year and a half of pandemic time across two catastrophic waves of Covid-19, I offer some preliminary insights into the ways in which these shifts signal towards the cultural production of a new spectatorial body amenable to novel forms of bio-surveillance and datafication of self.

This article compares the conjunctions of emergency resilience and ecological resilience that underpin the creative cultural industry (CCI) crisis. It first introduces three characteristics that socially construct the CCI crisis and its hegemonic practice of emergency resilience (time, disaster discourse, and the adaptation of aesthetic digitalization) and exposes multiple discourses - from the technologies of cultural statistics to corporate financial modelling - that construct an ideology of 'resilience-as-deficit'. In contrast to this approach, the article develops three characteristics of ecological resilience: a focus on transition and the long term; resilience as a decentred strategy and networked resource; and aesthetic digitization as a radical praxis of adaptability. Examining arts impact and cultural policy reports, drawing on ecological, feminist and cultural resilience studies, and analysing a digital cultural event in Asia (the Singapore LGBT cultural festival, Pink Dot), the article argues that ecological resilience offers new capacities towards a cultural ecology that can nurture fair work, artistic innovation, economic growth and cultural vitality.

Notions of 'race' and disease are deeply imbricated across the globe. This article explores the historical, complex entanglements between 'race', disease, and dirtiness in the multicultural Chilean context of Covid-19. We conducted a quantitative content analysis and a discourse analysis of online readers' comments (n = 1233) in a digital news platform surrounding a controversial news event to examine Chileans' cultural representations of Haitian migrants and explore online racism and anti-immigrant discourse. Drawing on a decolonial approach, we argue that Covid-19 as a crisis has been fabricated at the expense of a constructed 'other'. We show how colonial racist logics not only endure in digital spaces, but are made viral in new ways by representing Haitian migrants as 'filthy' and 'disease carriers'. We identified two contemporary forms of racism - and - through which people construct imaginaries of racial superiority in digital spaces.

This article defines 'carewashing' as commercial branding strategies which commodify care and attempt to increase corporate profit, and provides the first theorisation and historicisation of the term. The first section of the article situates 'carewashing' in relation to longer-term strategies of corporate 'social responsibility' and cause-related marketing. The second shows how established corporate practices are being reinvented in an era of Covid-19 and amidst profound neoliberal instability. The third section focuses on specific examples of contemporary carewashing, showing their variation and pinpointing three tendencies: 'opportunistic branding'; 'community resourcing'; and 'reputational steamrolling'. The concluding section argues that carewashing also needs to be understood as a political act which is involved in wider social struggles. It argues that, in the Gramscian sense, carewashing is part of a 'passive revolution' in that it is attempting to claim and demarcate the realm of care for corporate capitalism and against social democracy.

In this article, we examine during the pandemic, with a particular focus on the conditions it creates or constricts for engagement, solidarity and collective action. We interrogate the intensive publicness of the crisis to reflect on its assumed and established equation with progressive political possibility - transparency, accountability and democratic procedure. Theoretically, we cut into the contemporary ambiguity of publicness by putting it into conceptual dialogue with the idea of , a notion that speaks to the resources and political consequences of coming together, and publicness not as coexistence and speech acts but as a domain of struggle. By considering the intersection of publicness and commoning, we aim to provide one way of thinking about how and when public revelation can be oriented towards material and political change. We propose three lines of examination: ; ; and .

National governments have played a key role in constructing the Covid-19 pandemic through their communications. Drawing on thematic, discursive and visual analyses of Covid-19 campaigns from 12 national contexts, we show how the pandemic has presented governments with unique conditions for articulating and reinforcing nationalism and neoliberalism. The campaigns frame the pandemic as a force that brings the nation together and conjure up notions of national 'solidarity lite' while relentlessly authorizing the crisis-ready responsible citizen. In so doing, they reproduce neoliberal rationality by shifting the locus of responsibility from the state and social structures to the individual and re-inscribing gendered and classed notions of responsibility, care and citizenship. Mobilizing national neoliberal narratives enables governments to render the pandemic legible as a crisis while obscuring both the structural injustices that exacerbate the crisis and the structural changes required to address it.

Posthuman is a social condition of humans losing control, especially to technological forces, and a cultural framing beyond Enlightenment modernity. Building on the posthuman critique, this article examines digital labour and food delivery platforms during Covid-19 in Asian contexts. The main argument is that, while reinforcing inequalities through algorithm-based discrimination and control, the pandemic also creates openings for progressive change towards the humanizing of the posthuman, through human-non-human assemblage as well as 'sticky labour'. As such, Covid-19 is more than a crisis that signifies the end of the 'old normal'. It is, more importantly, another moment when existential crisis triggers innovation in working-class network society, leading to novel discourses, practices, and networks. How and why did this happen? What are the implications for pandemic-era cultural shaping of the digital? These questions will be discussed.

In the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic, images of the virus molecule and 'flatten-the-curve' line charts were inescapable. There is now a vast visual repertoire of vaccines, people wearing face masks in everyday settings, choropleth maps and both bar and line charts. These 'generic visuals' circulate widely in the news media and, however unremarkable, play an important role in representing the crisis in particular ways. We argue that these generic visuals promote banal nationalism, localism and cosmopolitanism in the face of the crisis, and that they do so through the symbolic reiteration of a range of visual resources across news stories. Through an analysis of three major news outlets in the UK, we examine how generic visuals of Covid-19 contribute to these banal visions and versions of belonging and, in doing so, also to foregrounding the role of the state in responding to the crisis.

In response to Covid-19, media industries have increasingly relied upon insurance to manage risks to health and productivity loss surrounding creative labor. Analysis of contemporary trade journals reveals how the pandemic prompted new urgency around the question of who could get coverage, both by health plans protecting individual workers and cast insurance policies protecting employers. While Covid-19 risks are global in nature, the lack of universal health care exacerbated precarity in US media industries especially, where these two insurance practices overlap: medical coverage depends on the ability to work, which can depend on whether employers can insure their investment in that creative labor. Thus, struggles over insurance must be contextualized within historical discourses that made insurability legible within professional media work cultures. Ultimately, this analysis reveals how corporate media cultures calculate loss and mortality, marking some, but not all, as worthy of status, investment, or protection.

This is the Introduction to the special issue on Covid-19 and the cultural constructions of a global crisis. Contextualizing understandings of the pandemic in relation to the concepts of 'event' and 'crisis', especially to the idea that modernity is itself a condition of perpetual crisis, it proposes that the pandemic is a crisis-event that catalyses new possibilities for making visible endemic inequalities and injustices across highly variable cultural and social domains, from the personal to the global. Always open to containment and appropriation, this crisis of visibility and invisibility is discussed as it pertains to the body, to space and social proximity, and to media and mediation. The individual contributions to the special issue are introduced in relation to these topics.