Diggit magazine

14/09/2026

How can we successfully contest the far-right rise and metapolitical project? This essay analyzes a potential anti-fascist metapolitics as practiced by political streamer and activist Hasan Piker. It examines how Piker succeeds in contesting the far-right's messaging and in providing an ideological counterforce for a political audience within the hybrid media system.

The study of metapolitics in this essay entails the study of the right-wing project to establish a hegemonic ideology. While the far-right sees international cultural and electoral success, the left is failing electorally and losing momentum culturally. The left-wing political decline can be expl .....

11/09/2026

How can stereotypical representations based be analyzed? Using Hymes’ SPEAKING framework and multimodal analysis, this working paper examines how Indonesian television transforms light ethnic stereotypes into denser semiotic representations.

By Zane GoebelIntroductionEthnicity is now a ubiquitous social category in Indonesia, which is typically made up of a combination of person, place, and linguistic form. While we now have a good picture of the genesis and reproduction of ethnic stereotypes, we are only starting to understand how t .....

10/09/2026

How can studies of heritage, environment, and justice help us collectively work towards more enduring futures? In this podcast episode of Living Culture, Making Heritage, we brought together a panel of four experts in literary and cultural studies, law, and citizen science to explore these questions. This live-recorded podcast examines transnational heritages, tensions among national, local, and international heritage law, policy and legal considerations in heritage governance, and understandings of conservation in both environmental and heritage concerns. The interdisciplinary perspectives that unfold in this episode offer innovative approaches for tackling some of the most complex issues facing people and the planet today.

The world is rapidly changing. New technologies promise to fix everything from the climate crisis to geopolitical threats, but they often have unexpected effects on communities, culture, and material environments. To explore these effects and possible solutions, we invited four experts to partici .....

09/09/2026

Millions of women with conditions like PCOS turn to TikTok for answers their doctors never gave them. But who's really benefiting; us, or the algorithm? This article explores how wellness culture on TikTok shapes the way women understand their own bodies, and why the line between community and commodification is thinner than we think.

Women in their 20s have a lot to figure out, and in the digital age they often turn to platforms such as TikTok to search for answers. For me too, social media is a place that I feel like I can turn to when I have nowhere else to go. Because why turn to formal help when free advice is right there .....

08/09/2026

Mithu Sanyal is a German writer, journalist, and cultural scholar and the author of, among other works, the novels 'Identitti' (2021) and 'Antichristie' (2024). In July 2026, Anna-Lena Eick and Inge van de Ven spoke with her about her writing across different forms and the political and cultural debates it enters.

Mithu Sanyal is a German writer, journalist, and cultural scholar and the author of, among other works, the novels Identitti (2021) and Antichristie (2024). In July 2026, Anna-Lena Eick and Inge van de Ven spoke with her about her writing across different forms and the political and cultural deba .....

07/09/2026

Using the lens of anti-fandom, this article by Henry Roach examines contentious plagiarism accusations on BookTok related to two Young Adult novels, Red Queen by Victoria Aveyard (2015) and Powerless by Lauren Roberts (2023). In doing so, it demonstrates that comments are an influential, yet underexamined, component of the BookTok ecosystem, as BookTok research overwhelmingly prioritizes the analysis of videos. https://www.diggitmagazine.com/red-queen-plagiarized-powerless-anti-fandom-comments-and-warped-temporality-booktok

04/09/2026

This working paper examines the global rise of Gangnam Style to demonstrate how the Korean-language song and music video spread from South Korea to become a worldwide cultural phenomenon. Through this examination, this paper highlights the importance of studying non-Western celebrities.

By Mingyi HouAbstractIn academia, celebrity study remains an ever growing interest, especially in media and culture studies. However, few researchers have expanded their scope of exploration to the celebrities who gain stardom across national and cultural borders. The current study considers Psy ...

04/09/2026

Activists and academics regularly refer to colonialism and its ongoing impacts on communities, economies, and geopolitics. But how did modern forms of colonialism emerge? And how have histories of colonialism shaped today’s familiar technologies, landscapes, and policies? Kate Huber’s new book, Irish Ecomedia: Empire and Environmental Justice in the Modernization of Postcolonial Ireland examines the foundational connections between European colonialism and the environment in contemporary representations of progress through Britain’s first colonial testing ground: Ireland. On May 7, 2026, Huber presented Irish Ecomedia at Tilburg University, and Lucy Collins of University College Dublin offered a response to the book. Watch both lectures on Diggit Magazine.

Huber's new book, Irish Ecomedia: Empire and Environmental Justice in the Modernization of Postcolonial Ireland, examines changing technologies and media landscapes in the history of modernization in postcolonial Ireland and its relationship to the environment and cultural productio ...

29/06/2026

This paper presents "feedwork" as a distinct mode of digital ethnography, suitable for particular research practices on social media feeds. In this paper, Sonali Kulkarni builds on her lived experience of the messy and volatile 'feed' and contextualises it within the long tradition of ethnographic approaches. By proposing a new term, she intends to create a methodological shorthand to address the specific opportunities and challenges of the social media feed as a mutable research field.

What do Donna Tartt’s novel The Secret History, the French Open, Taylor Swift’s song ‘this is me trying’, a Donald Trump meme, being a girl’s girl, and the TV adaptation of The Summer I Turned Pretty all have in common? They were all the main subjects of videos that appeared in quick su .....

25/06/2026

This paper examines the adaptive reuse of Strijp-S in Eindhoven, focusing on how the site’s industrial heritage values have been preserved and transformed. The case of Strijp-S demonstrates that careful preservation of key elements, combined with the integration of contemporary functions, can sustain both tangible and intangible heritage.

The Netherlands has a rich industrial history, which is partially reflected by the many former factory sites that still exist today. While these industrial sites once played a crucial role in production and economic development, many of them are now vacant. While these factories stand vacant, the .....