Investments in the imaginary: commercial drone speculations and relations

Drones are increasingly understood and imagined as important actors, inhabiting and transforming aerial space. From their entrenched establishment within battlefield operations, drones have spawned into a diverse ecosystem of platforms and applications, increasingly punctuating domestic urban airspace. While occupying a status as exemplars of urban innovation, the drone poses, and remains bound to, a range of techno-cultural contestations – from challenges around airspace integration, to concerns around privacy, safety and pollution. Thinking with commercial drone futures, and specifically the logistics sector, this article interrogates the role of speculation in this unfolding techno-landscape. In so doing we turn to two key sites through which the drone is anticipated – namely patents and adverts – as lenses through which to investigate projected visualisations underpinning the emergent, envisioned and anticipated drone. We argue that such drone speculations do not simply and solely envision new means of circulating goods, people and information, but rather embody and act to promote a particular set of aerial desires and social relations. Critically unpacking envisioned notions of frictionless mobility, instant consumption, and the appropriation of vertical spaces and spectra, we argue that such speculative sites and practices importantly participate in a techno-fetishist agenda positing drone technology as a privileged and panacea agent of futurity, while often eliding its implications.<br /><br />Key messages<br /><ul><li>Drones are increasingly understood and imagined as important actors, inhabiting and transforming urban airspace.</li><br /><li>Interrogating the domestic drone, we offer a critical visual analysis of key sites through which it is speculated.</li><br /><li>While envisioning convenience from the air, commercial drone speculations also embody and promote particular aerial desires.</li><br /><li>We argue that staying with speculation enables the critical unpacking of notions of frictionless mobility, instant consumption and the appropriation of vertical space.</li></ul>

Radical right populist entrepreneurs and the use of religious representations through popular culture: George Becali as the ‘Saviour of Romania’

While there are a few significant studies on the varieties of populism in post-socialist Romania, little scholarly work on populists’ ethos of religious inspiration exists. This article addresses this lacuna from a cultural studies perspective, exploring popular culture’s productions of religious inspiration employed by the radical right populist entrepreneur George Becali, and it argues that the diversity of religiously encumbered cultural productions provide a significant insight into fleshing out the mechanisms of his messianic neo-populism. By employing a critical visual analysis and hermeneutics, this article aims to illuminate how a populist entrepreneur attracts potential supporters by using the rhetoric of nativism and ‘neo-traditional, autochthonous culture and religion’, purporting to reveal a mutual cultural ground between the messianic leader and ‘the people’. His political strategies are oftentimes packaged in cultural formats and discourses emphasising local religious symbolism that turns him into a ‘Saviour of the Nation’. Yet, at the same time, the article demonstrates that popular culture can also constitute a foundation for resisting the populist’s kit of religiously loaded visual rhetoric.

Rising Ottoman Nostalgia in Turkish Popular Culture

This article contributes to the study of the relationship between popular culture and politics by analysing the reversal of Turkey’s Europeanization process after 2010. It explores how domestic dynamics can change social perceptions into foreign policy positions. Therefore, this article examines domestic dimensions and the current Turkish government’s identity reconstruction process by considering popular culture as an important dynamic in the relations between the EU and Turkey. The current reconstruction process from a European to a neo-Ottoman identity of Turkey is analysed via Gramsci’s cultural hegemony concept to understand the changes in Turkish politicians’ discourses and popular culture products more efficiently. Two famous Ottoman-themed soap operas are compared in terms of their content and government’s attitudes towards them. Moreover, discourse analysis and critical visual analysis are used to examine the representations of Turkish and European identities in the soap operas.

Sweden then vs. Sweden now

This article analyses 262 memes, the majority image-macros, posted to a large Swedish anti-immigration Facebook group in order to explore the memetic normalisation of far-right nostalgia. Through the application of an array of critical visual analysis methods it reveals that the nostalgia that disguises hateful far-right discourses in the group is not merely a reflection of that peddled by Sweden’s organised far-right political parties and movements but a complex crowdsourced amalgam involving different nostalgic modes and moods. Unpacking these modes and moods, the article also highlights some of the nostalgic tensions at play in the group, indicating the need to rethink broader understandings of far-right nostalgia and calling for further research into how it can be used to veil hate in digital settings.

#50+ fashion Instagram influencers: cognitive age and aesthetic digital labours

PurposeThis paper demonstrates how #50+ fashion Instagram influencers contribute to the social construction of cognitive age through their aesthetic digital labours.Design/methodology/approachNon-participative netnography was used in the form of visual and textual analysis of over 300 Instagram posts including images, captions and comments.FindingsFindings reveal how outfit selection, background choices and bodily poses redefine expressions of look age through forms of aesthetic labour. Post-construction, hashtag and emoji usage illustrates how influencers refrain from directly posting about the fashion brands that they endorse. Instead, image and personality work visually attracts followers to politically charged posts which directly impact upon the social and cultural contexts where influencers are active. This ties into present-day wider societal discourses.Practical implications50+ fashion influencers have high spending power. Fashion brands should refrain from using #brand and collaborate in more subtle ways and concentrate on challenging the negativity of the old-age cliché.Originality/valueThe study advances theory on the social construction of age in fashion studies by combining cognitive age with aesthetic labour to identify the characteristics of the social phenomenon of the 50+ Instagram influencer. It applies principles from critical visual analysis to digital context, thereby advancing the qualitative netnographic toolkit.

How brand visual aesthetics foster a transnational imagined community

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to investigate how visual aesthetic referents used in branding can help foster a transnational imagined community (TIC). The authors use brands embedded with Middle Eastern visual aesthetics as a research context. As such, the study aims to examine how Middle Eastern non-figurative art is used by non-Middle Eastern brands to foster an imagined Middle Easternness. Design/methodology/approach Through a critical visual analysis, the authors apply a visual social semiotic approach to Middle Eastern art canons to better understand the dimensions of transnational imagined communities. Findings The study finds and discusses six sub-dimensions of Middle Easternness, which compose two overarching dimensions of TIC, namely, temporal and spatial. These sub-dimensions provide brand managers and designers with six different ways to foster transnational imagined communities through the use of visual aesthetic referents in branding. Research limitations/implications This research identifies the specific visual sub-dimensions of brands that enable transnational communities to be imagined. Practical implications Understanding the visual aesthetic sub-dimensions in this study provides brand managers with practical tools that can help develop referents that foster transnational imagined communities in brand building to achieve competitive advantage and reach a transnational segment. Originality/value Prior studies have primarily focussed on how visual aesthetics help in understanding issues related to national identity. In contrast, this paper examines the use of visual aesthetics in branding from a transnational perspective.

Transgressive Rupture or Subversive Culture: A Semiotic Deconstruction of Staetopygia in West African Cinema

Based on a critical visual analysis of the scopophilia, body fetishism, and commodity culture, I attempt to deconstruct representations of the huge derrières of two actresses in Ghallywood and Nollywood. The analysis pays attention to how cinematographic elements of composition, color, and lighting in selected films the two actresses have starred reinforce the myth of the butt as a signifier of economic and socio/cultural capital. The article raises concerns over whether the hyper-sexualization of West African films points to a transgressive rupture of the industry or a subversive culture of the African ethos of decency.