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    The glowy: the aesthetics of transparency in postfeminist "wellness" culture
    (Taylor and Francis Group, 2025-02-21) Duncan P
    Over the past ten years or so, across the physical and virtual spaces of postfeminist culture, a novel aesthetic category has quietly but insistently taken hold: the glowy. In this article, I contextualise the glowy as the archetypal aesthetic of what has become known as “wellness culture,” an outgrowth of postfeminist culture that promotes the pursuit of an optimized state of physical, mental and spiritual wellbeing. At the same time, I make an argument about the glowy that challenges one of the central assumptions of scholarship on wellness culture. This is the assumption that wellness culture marks a turn, across postfeminist culture more broadly, from “outside” to “inside,” such that new forms of psychic discipline now flourish alongside longer-standing forms of bodily discipline. Resisting this reading, I argue that the rise of the glowy reflects not a turn from the cosmetic domain to the psychic domain but a collapse of the boundaries between these two realms. To sustain this argument, I draw on wellness content from prominent international fashion and lifestyle publications Elle and Vogue, as well as from the promotional material of key wellness brands and products.
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    No time for fun: the politics of partying during a pandemic
    (Taylor and Francis Group, 2021-05-04) Holm N
    In 2020, in the face of the unparalleled epidemiological threat posed by Covid-19, multiple governments around the world sought to contain the spread of the virus by imposing strict lockdown measures that dramatically limited the movement and gathering of citizens. Not only did these restrictions severely curtail the regular patterns of economic, political and cultural life, they also made it very hard to have fun. While this last point may appear flippant, this article proposes that a proper accounting for fun is absolutely necessary if we are to understand not just the challenges passed by lockdown measures, but also the legal and biomedical risks people were willing to take to engage in activities like hosting parties, surfing and attending raves, during a pandemic. Arguing against the idea of fun as a form of displaced political practice, I instead suggest that fun is best understood as an example of contingent, non-transcendent aesthetic value that is absolutely central to everyday desire and the appeal of popular culture. Often easy to overlook, the experience of lockdown brought the appeal and importance of fun into sharp relief in ways that point towards the powerful role fun plays in shaping our lives both during a pandemic and (hopefully) after.
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    The aesthetics of creative activism: Introduction
    (Oxford University Press, 2023-06-01) Holm N; Tilley E
    In this introduction to The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism special issue on the aesthetics of creative activism, we canvas influential scholarship of political aesthetics to sculpt a broad typology of six interconnected mechanisms by which art might intervene in the world. We label these: Documentation, Disruption, Recognition, Participation, Imagination, and Beauty. Each has a compelling tradition of theory and application, augmented, extended, and sometimes challenged by the thirteen fresh and provocative contributions in the special issue. Yet, we ask, if both politically minded artists and culturally minded activists are convinced of the power of art to provoke social change, and if we live a world that by almost all measures is now saturated with politically inclined, aesthetically informed practices, interfaces, objects, and texts, why does art not seem to be making a difference? Clearly, we need to think harder about the relationships between art and action, a task the articles assembled here call upon us to take seriously.
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    The Eldritch Portal : an analysis of ludonarrative immersion & user experience in interactive weird fiction : an exegesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Creative Enterprise at Massey University, Wellington, New Zealand
    (Massey University, 2021) Knight-Devlin, Liam Patrick Colin
    This research exegesis functions as a companion piece that contextualises the principles expressed within the creative work, ‘Project: Mystic’. In this research I contend that the role of user experience design has not been closely studied or documented when discussing the relationship between atmospheric spatial design and ludonarrative principles inside interactive digital environments. The purpose and aim of this research is to determine how the aesthetics of atmosphere influence the principles of ludonarrative immersion and user experience design in the context of weird fiction and the sublime. Using a pragmatic methodological approach I use interactive demonstrations accompanied with qualitative surveys to determine the effectiveness of atmosphere design in a players experience and engagement. Using these results I form a discussion around the concepts of aesthetic experiences, non-euclidean narratives, and Burke’s notions of sublimity and the role of the ‘Deity’ figure in weird fiction.