Cover, Editor's Note, Table of Contents, Preface

This paper attempts to explore how integrationist immigration discourses play out in real life, by examining the different multilinguistic approaches used by Tibetan migrants as they adjust to life in Paris. I explore how social values become emotionally embodied over time as we learn language, meaning that those who speak multiple languages must negotiate multiple, simultaneously- felt realities on a day-to-day basis. An awareness of the mechanisms behind the acquisition of languages and their associated value systems can therefore help us to understand how acculturation happens within immigrant communities. I give a brief overview of the Tibetan and French sociocultural milieus, and highlight the complexity, variety and importance of multilingual narratives in the wider context of migration policy-making. Specifically, I examine instances of code-switching to reveal potentially “sticky” moments of emotional charge for a given term, indicating points of connection forged with the new country, or else maintained with the old.

Interactive projects from the National Film Board of Canada demonstrate how algorithm-driven storytelling can illuminate the structural tensions that define the Canadian aporetic condition. Through a close study of Bear 71, The Space We Hold, Biidaaban: First Light, and Do Not Track this paper demonstrates how code-based interfaces encourage participants to co-produce knowledge that challenges settler governance, data capitalism, and extractive ecological logics. The analysis blends media studies, public-sphere theory, and the aporetic framework to trace connections among wildlife surveillance, urban futurism, testimonial memory, and personalized data dashboards. Each project cultivates digital counterpublics in which Indigenous sovereignty, ecological interdependence, survivor authority, and data-justice activism gain discursive traction. The findings suggest that immersive design can promote epistemological justice – fair access to knowledge production and recognition of diverse ways of knowing – by redistributing representational power, visualizing previously hidden infrastructures, and expanding civic imagination within a publicly funded platform. These insights suggest practical pathways for cultural institutions seeking to align interactive media with democratic resilience and equitable futures.

This paper explores the relationship between music, events, and transformative experiences in urban environments, arguing that certain musical and social settings facilitate individuation through aesthetic experiences that momentarily exit from normalized daily rhythms. Drawing on the anthropologists Michael Taussig, Ernesto de Martino and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, it examines how aberrant forms of collectivity, such as the trance-inducing tarantella, suspend the strictures of contemporary capitalist norms, allowing for the release of hidden, entropic information. The collectivity of music can become a catalyst for transcending the quotidian, an aesthetic experience that might be identified as the ‘cybernetic sublime’. The experimental music events the author has organized in the Northeast Paris over the past 12 years have been attempts to put these strategies into practice, aiming to foster a resistant atmosphere that disrupts conventional concert venue settings. Strategic disorientation, efforts to demonetize, and the celebration of misunderstanding are key to encouraging an anti-colonial form of the cybernetic sublime, a collective experience of uncertainty across social, spatio-temporal, and technological systems, offering a brief but intensely collective potential for individuation that resists the dominance of capitalist experience.

This article explores how late 18th-century German fairy tales negotiate the boundaries between imagination and social reality. Through close readings of selected narratives, it traces how the construction of “alternative realities” enables critical approaches that reflect the tensions of the Enlightenment period. Focusing on the works of Christoph Martin Wieland (1733-1813) and Christiane Benedikte Naubert (1752-1819), the analysis demonstrates that marvelous elements in these tales serve as vehicles for philosophical and social reflection. By creating fictional alternatives, these Enlightenment narratives invite readers to critically engage with contemporary discourses and reimagine existing social arrangements. The article thus shows how the genre participates in a productive dialectic between reason and imagination, offering “experimental” – in the sense of tentative or exploratory – models for social critique and transformation. Employing close reading methodology, this analysis identifies three distinct modes of what can be termed “social imagining”: reformist approaches that seek to improve existing structures, transformative visions that envision radical alternatives, and diagnostic perspectives that reveal fundamental incompatibilities between different orders of knowledge.

This paper examines some conceptualizations of Japanese cosmologies and sacred spaces within the Buddhist tradition. It first outlines how spaces and landscapes were perceived before the arrival of Buddhism and then explores their subsequent transformation in the medieval period through the use of mandalas, which were used to bridge the gap between the earthly realm and the Other World. This is connection is exemplified through the Womb World represented in mandalas, that can still be symbolically accessed through a sensory experience at multiple temples even today. Such entrances to the Other World are marked not only by symbolic spatial boundaries but also by temporal thresholds, during calendrical rites and liminal times. These cosmologies continue to exert a lasting influence on contemporary society, as evident in the remnants of geomancy in urban planning and frequent inclusion of Other Worlds in Japanese literature and popular culture. On the basis of fieldwork findings and existing research, the author concludes that the Other World is still present in contemporary Japan, being experienced as proximate to, and intertwined with, everyday life.

Born in 1983, at the tail end of Chile’s dictatorship (1973-1990), and becoming prominent as an artist in Chile in 2003 and later well-known across Latin America and worldwide, Mon Laferte’s career has been marked by its dynamic relationship with retro-futuristic aesthetics. Covering a range of genres, from futuristic Latin-Pop, the retro-Latin ballads of the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, to Latin America’s folkloric traditions including Mexican regional music, bolero and even salsa, Laferte’s work combines the nostalgic sounds of the popular music of Latin America’s recent past with a set of intensely personal narratives. Utilizing Mark Fisher’s and Bifo Berardi’s theorizations of hauntology and lost futures, Simon Reynolds’ insights into the retro, and combining these with Ahmed’s insights on feminism, this article proposes that Mon Laferte’s work as a musician, lyricist, cover-artist, and producer of visual media, functions towards overcoming the dual traumas of Chile’s dictatorship and Latin America’s machismo, by producing an aesthetic territory that privileges feminine and traditionally feminized spaces, experiences, affects and discourses. In this way social traumas are enmeshed with personal ones, and a retro-futurist voice emerges, which side-steps masculine visions of the social and the political, proposing instead an introspective vision that is filtered through the feminine experience.

This paper experiments with the functional and imaginal possibilities of Deleuzian “fabulation” as a strategy and methodology for ontological resistance and speculative world-building. Like many Indigenous communities around the world, the Khoisan people of South Africa grapple with the contemporary precariousness caused in part by historical erasure. The present study utilizes John L. Jackson Jr.’s notion of “sincerity” to re-conceptualize identity as relational rather than essential, incorporates Sara Ahmed’s “stickiness” to explain the circulation and anchoring of emotions within collective memory, and demonstrates how “fabulation” serves as a pragmatic approach to navigating marginality. “Fabulation” is framed as a method of speculative ontology that reconfigures reality rather than escaping it. Critical analyses of performances, digital expressions, and quotidian rituals focus on ecologies where official histories, legal structures, and institutional classifications fail to represent lived experiences adequately. These practices, illustrating how small, repeated acts of defiance and creativity can lead to a restored existence, are linked to broader discussions in Indigenous studies, Black studies, and speculative theory.

This paper examines the ways in which the Takarazuka Revue negotiates and reshapes cultural identity in late-modern Japan by reconfiguring the relationship between producers and consumers of popular culture. Drawing on more than two decades of fieldwork – combining phenomenological observation, audience and performer interviews, and archival research –, I analyze the mechanisms through which Takarazuka Revue productions stage and market broader narratives of nationhood, gender, and power. The guiding question addresses Takarazuka Revue’s adaptations of well-known Western stories and their function as cultural mirrors: not simply reproducing imported material, but re-inscribing it with Japanese neo-nationalist and increasingly post-nationalist sensibilities. As case studies, the analysis focuses on three high-profile productions derived from Hollywood cult movies: Ocean’s Eleven (performed by the star, flower, and cosmos troupes in 2011-2012, 2013, and 2019, respectively), Once Upon a Time in America (snow troupe, 2020), and Casino Royale (cosmos troupe, 2023). These performances, while situated within the commercial logics of musical theatre, also reflect shifting socio-political currents. During the 2010s, they projected conservative messages of masculinity, national pride, and hierarchical order, often couched in aesthetics of glamour and romance. In contrast, post-2020 stagings reveal a subtle but significant re-orientation: a move towards envisioning a pluricentric world characterized by cooperation, compassion, and courage – an imaginative response shaped in part by the global pandemic and its cultural aftermath. By situating these productions within Japan’s wider mediascape, this study shows Takarazuka Revue’s strategies of simultaneously preserving, contesting, and re-imagining the cultural scripts through which national identity and collective belonging are performed.

This paper is the result of the analysis of six fictional writings from the 17th and 18th centuries from the library of Samuel von Brukenthal (1721-1803), the governor of the Principality of Transylvania between 1777 and 1787. The research was conducted in order to search and extract aspects concerning the political imaginary of the time. These writings are fantasy and science-fiction novels and they comprise Description de l´Isle des Hermaphrodites by Thomas Artus, Andrew Michael Ramsay’s Voyages de Cyrus, L´Espion Turc à Francfort, Ludvig Holberg’s Voyage de Nicolas Klimius dans le Monde Souterraine, Lettres d´une peruvienne by Françoise de Graffigny and L’An 2440 by Louis-Sébastien Mercier. The first literary duet, Isle des Hermaphrodites and Voyages de Cyrus, illustrates, among other things, the concept of anti-utopia, the need for social and political change that was increasingly appearing in the writings of the time, the ideas of kingship and enlightened despotism. The second literary pair, L´Espion Turc and Voyage de Nicolas Klimius, brings forward another political desideratum of fantasy writers of the time, namely the establishment of an internal and international equitable jurisprudence, but also the birth of a new, non-Eurocentric, perspective on the world. The third duet, Lettres d’une peruvienne and L’An 2440, emphasized what in the Modern Age would be radical political ideas, such as women’s emancipation, but also exemplifies the idea of a perfect society, envisioned by the Enlightenment-Age author Louis-Sébastien Mercier far in the future, in 2440. The analysis of these novels reveals both some similarities between the writings, but also specificities and emphases on different political, social and cultural issues that the authors saw as problematic in real life.

This paper investigates the articulations between metal music and fantasy fiction as a form of cultural cross-fertilization, focusing on the creation of narratives grounded in magical themes. Within this trend, there are two distinct creative processes: bands that draw on existing literature and those that create original stories. This study focuses on the latter, particularly on the album Saberlight Chronicles (2022) by Fellowship, which exemplifies how metal bands craft concept albums narrating original fantasy stories. Despite the existing scholarship addressing laterally the contacts between metal and fantasy, there is no relevant discussion exploring their relationship. This paper aims to fill a gap in the literature by analyzing how metal’s fantastical narratives address both contemporary anxieties and historical continuities, offering a lens to speculate on alternative realities. Hence, the paper argues that modern metal’s engagement with fantasy mediates long-standing cultural tensions of the enchantment of modernity that gain nuances when sedimented in the music record form. Therefore, metal and fantasy are shown not merely as escapism but as active tools for reimagining cultural processes, illustrating the influence of alternative realities in music expression. By examining the lyrics and musical structures that evoke fantasy, this paper aims to show how these strategies operate within a dialectic between freedom and control, reification and utopia. Consequently, metal music (particularly the subgenre known as power metal), in this context, becomes a site where cultural meaning is negotiated.

This paper explores the concept of “skinning” in educational virtual reality (VR) environments, reframing it as a dramaturgical and pedagogical act rather than a mere visual overlay. Through comparative analysis of The World of Hugo Simberg and C!ao: Piazza Navona Experience, the study investigates how design decisions shape user identity, agency, and the performance of learning. Drawing on performance theory, it examines how avatars – or their absence – guide learners through curated paths, subtly influencing perception and interaction. While both applications strip away overt self-representation, they open space for subversion, reflection, and imaginative engagement. The paper argues that skinning encodes the boundaries of presence and the architecture of knowledge, inviting critical analysis of who learners are allowed to be and what ways of knowing they are offered. Ultimately, it positions skinning as a vital design principle for crafting immersive educational futures where learners not only consume content but perform new ways of understanding

This paper explores the complex interplay between spatiality, emotional suppression and authoritarian ideology in Wimmer’s 2002 science fiction film Equilibrium. As a key example of early 21st-century dystopian cinema, this work reflects deep-seated cultural anxieties about the ethical consequences of unchecked biotechnological progress and totalitarian control. The story unfolds in Libria, a strictly regulated city where citizens are compelled to take Prozium, a drug designed to eradicate all emotional experience in order to prevent social unrest. Opposition to this regime is ruthlessly crushed by the Grammaton Clerics, an elite enforcement unit. Through the story of John Preston, a high-ranking Cleric who begins to feel again and ultimately rebels against the state, the study explores how chemical suppression serves as both a literal and symbolic mechanism of dehumanization. The paper equally argues that Equilibrium constructs two primary spatial imaginaries: the synthetic inner city of Libria, characterized by architectural homogeneity and affective sterility, and the subversive colorful urban area of the Nethers, that preserves fragments of human affect, memory and cultural expression. Through an interdisciplinary framework drawing from spatial theory and dystopian critique, the current research illuminates how these contrasting environments not only structure the narrative but also articulate a broader sociopolitical commentary on the cost of engineered harmony.

Murakami Haruki’s literary production can be associated with oneirism from different perspectives. The liminal boundary that in authorial works divides ‘his world’ (kocchi no sekai) from the ‘other world’ (acchi no sekai) constitutes the focus of a narrative between truth and fiction, facts and dreamlike visions. This impairment in reality testing can thus be interpreted as a multifaceted psychotic disorder, in which the delusions, hallucinations and mnestic dysfunctions to which the protagonists are subjected find manifestation in the “double world” that characterizes the authorial production, undoubtedly influenced by magic realism. It is the identity crisis of the contemporary era, in which the mind is tormented by the freneticism of daily life, social pressures and the present insecurity. Murakami’s most recent novel, The City and Its Uncertain Walls (2024), indulges in the author’s most common literary tropes by adding to the psychological distress of the protagonists the influence of the COVID-19 pandemic that saw the genesis of the work. The novel explores the sense of loss, regret, and social withdrawal provoked by urban barriers in the claustrophobic context that compels the search for a dreamscape in which to take refuge. Through an interdisciplinary approach that brings into dialogue literary criticism and an interest in psychopathological sequelae related to the fluidity of the present and the social anxiety that permeates the contemporaneity, this paper aims to explore how Murakami’s alternative realities are manifestations of hallucinatory psychosis reflective of social turmoil and political chaos, a split, if not an actual dissociative disorder of the individual unable to integrate into the society of which he or she is a part.

Science fiction has long served as a dynamic platform for examining humanity’s future, technological innovation, and profound existential questions. By mid-2010s, the genre of science fiction action cinema had matured into a complex and sophisticated form, merging intellectually ambitious story-telling with visually breathtaking, technologically advanced cinematography, often anchored by compelling performances from prominent actors. During this period, audiences were captivated not only by the sheer entertainment value of such movies, but also by their capacity to provoke deeper contemplation on philosophical and existential themes, particularly concerning humanity’s evolving relationship with technology. In a mixed methodological approach (ethnographic description, media discourse analysis, hermeneutic interpretation), this paper examines two recent live action blockbusters within the science fiction category, both featuring Tom Cruise in the lead role – Oblivion (2013) and Edge of Tomorrow (2014) – which re-define the genre by adopting a philosophy of pragmatic exploration and hands-on experimentation through intricate visual-auditory constructions. In doing so, they challenge the foundational principles which have traditionally underpinned the global cinematic production and distribution model: despite their distinct aesthetic approaches, thematic compositions, and ideological underpinnings, both movies engage critically with themes of individual self-awareness, historical consciousness, and the protagonist’s role in his own transformation as a necessary precondition to saving the world. Through the lens of male central characters, these narratives explore the multifaceted process of personal growth against the backdrop of fractured historical events and a progressively eroded sense of identity, purpose, and orientation within the contexts which shaped them. By delving into Oblivion’s and Edge of Tomorrow’s cinematic mechanisms, the study aims at revealing the ways in which science fiction action movies can serve as blueprints for resilient, liberated individuals – capable of courage, dedication, and compassion as they strive to lead purposeful lives.

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