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        <title>Cultural Science Feed</title>
        <link>https://sciendo.com/journal/CSJ</link>
        <description>Sciendo RSS Feed for Cultural Science</description>
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            <title>Cultural Science Feed</title>
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            <link>https://sciendo.com/journal/CSJ</link>
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        <copyright>All rights reserved 2026, Max Weber Centre for Advanced Cultural and Social Studies, Erfurt University, Germany</copyright>
        <item>
            <title><![CDATA[Bioethics in the Anthropocene: A powerful tool for sustainable development and planetary co-responsibility]]></title>
            <link>https://sciendo.com/article/10.2478/csj-2023-0011</link>
            <guid>https://sciendo.com/article/10.2478/csj-2023-0011</guid>
            <pubDate>Wed, 25 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
            <description><![CDATA[

Bioethics is inherent to scientific work, and it takes on particular relevance in the Anthropocene, where the interaction between science, culture, and nature intensifies under conditions of global socio-environmental crisis. In this context, cultural diversity and the valuation of ancestral and local knowledge are fundamental dimensions for rethinking scientific and technological development from an ethical perspective. This review article analyses the coevolution between science and culture based on bioethics conceived as a reflective and integrative bridge, which is not limited to the formulation of normative principles, but rather guides the processes of deliberation and decision-making, reconfiguring scientific practices toward a more just, responsible, and contextualised scientific culture. From a perspective that moves from global bioethics to pluralistic and inclusive bioethics, the work examines the bioethical dilemmas inherent in scientific practice, understood as a situated, socially and politically engaged activity whose implications transcend traditional disciplinary boundaries. Similarly, it emphasises the importance of incorporating values of environmental responsibility, social justice, and planetary co-responsibility into the training of professionals in the natural sciences, as part of a transformation of worldviews that allows scientific knowledge to be aligned with the protection of biodiversity and sustainable development, from a bioethical reinterpretation in line with the challenges of the Anthropocene.
]]></description>
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            <title><![CDATA[Metamodern Theory for the Study of More-than-Human Cultures]]></title>
            <link>https://sciendo.com/article/10.2478/csj-2023-0012</link>
            <guid>https://sciendo.com/article/10.2478/csj-2023-0012</guid>
            <pubDate>Wed, 25 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
            <description><![CDATA[

This article develops a metamodern framework for the study of more-than-human cultures by integrating a materialist semiotics (hylosemiotics), with a processual social ontology of agency. Against anthropocentric accounts that restrict culture to language and symbolic thought, I argue that culture emerges wherever social animals coordinate through materialized signs. Drawing on cases from corvid tool use to multispecies infrastructures, the article reconceptualizes meaning as situated inference rather than transmission. Agency is asymmetrically distributed across socio-material systems, not lodged in individual actors or flattened into universal actancy. The result is a framework that preserves normativity without either anthropocentrism or anthropomorphism and naturalizes meaning without reducing it to matter. By tracing how coordination, agency, and responsibility are routed through materialized signs and social kinds, metamodern theory provides an analytic for studying multispecies cultures as well as ethical accountability under conditions of planetary scale transformation.
]]></description>
            <category>ARTICLE</category>
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        <item>
            <title><![CDATA[Meta-Editorial: Artificial Intelligence à la LLM is more-than-human cultural science!]]></title>
            <link>https://sciendo.com/article/10.2478/csj-2023-0009</link>
            <guid>https://sciendo.com/article/10.2478/csj-2023-0009</guid>
            <pubDate>Tue, 23 Dec 2025 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
            <description><![CDATA[

The special issue ‘The Human Condition for the Anthropocene: Being more-than-human’ begins with an experiment: The editorial has been authored by an assemblage of a human and an AI agent, whose draft was subject to the journal’s open peer review process. This meta-editorial reflects on the experiment and argues that advanced Large Language models can be seen as more-than-human cultural science pursued by distributed agents comprising human and non-human components.
]]></description>
            <category>ARTICLE</category>
        </item>
        <item>
            <title><![CDATA[Editorial: Beyond the Human, With the Human: Cultural Science for the Anthropocene]]></title>
            <link>https://sciendo.com/article/10.2478/csj-2023-0010</link>
            <guid>https://sciendo.com/article/10.2478/csj-2023-0010</guid>
            <pubDate>Tue, 23 Dec 2025 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
            <description><![CDATA[

The editorial introduces the Cultural Science Journal special issue “The Human Condition for the Anthropocene: Being more-than-human” as an intervention in how culture is understood under planetary-scale anthropogenic change. Treating the Anthropocene as a contested but pragmatic shorthand for a socio-ecological condition, it foregrounds culture as an operating system of planetary change rather than an epiphenomenon. Drawing on a systemist sensibility, it frames societies, technologies, and ecosystems as open, interdependent systems whose emergent properties are shaped by cultural techniques. Seven exemplary “gateways” (waters, urban heat, AI, agro-techno-biospheres, blue and brown technospheres, plural knowledges, planetary metrics) illustrate where cultural formations and Earth-system processes are tightly coupled. Methodological pluralism and explicit normativity are invited to examine, critique, and reconfigure Anthropocene cultural infrastructures for more just, livable futures.
]]></description>
            <category>ARTICLE</category>
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        <item>
            <title><![CDATA[Alvar Aalto in Yyteri: Naturecultural quest for organic land use planning in the City of Pori, Finland]]></title>
            <link>https://sciendo.com/article/10.2478/csj-2023-0008</link>
            <guid>https://sciendo.com/article/10.2478/csj-2023-0008</guid>
            <pubDate>Tue, 12 Aug 2025 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
            <description><![CDATA[

Alvar Aalto’s regional plan for the Kokemäenjoki river valley (1943) became a naturecultural plan of its time. In his planning approach, Aalto blurred the boundary between nature and culture. Aalto emphasised the everyday nature of human activities and the organicity and rhythm of the landscape. I will think with one area – Yyterinniemi – at the mouth of the Kokemäenjoki river about the effects and timeliness of Aalto’s planning approach. I will discuss how the organic complexity, unity and dynamic patterns of doing and undergoing are indeed present in Yyterinniemi, and how the city of Pori, local landowners and other actors have tried to, spontaneously and intentionally, maintain and develop Yyterinniemi as a multispecies assemblage and enable it to fulfil its short-term functions and long-term coevolutionary potential.
]]></description>
            <category>ARTICLE</category>
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        <item>
            <title><![CDATA[Being bound in a fieldsite: Cross-cultural methodological notes on doing digital ethnography on TikTok]]></title>
            <link>https://sciendo.com/article/10.2478/csj-2023-0007</link>
            <guid>https://sciendo.com/article/10.2478/csj-2023-0007</guid>
            <pubDate>Tue, 12 Aug 2025 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
            <description><![CDATA[

Digital ethnography requires attention to ethical processes, data complexity, and social interactions, particularly on emerging platforms like TikTok. This paper draws on our research in Australia and South Korea, examining the challenges of defining a ‘fieldsite’ within a platform that is both segmented and fluid. In Australia, issues of settler-colonialism and multiculturalism complicate the concept of an ‘Australian TikTok,’ necessitating a focus on minority voices. In contrast, South Korea’s cultural homogeneity and language create a more bounded data environment, yet the global rise of K-pop complicates data sampling as elements from Korean culture often lose their context. We discuss methodological insights for conducting digital ethnography on TikTok, considering researcher positionality and the influence of global research cultures.
]]></description>
            <category>ARTICLE</category>
        </item>
        <item>
            <title><![CDATA[Key Concepts and Research Methods to Analyze TikTok Journalism]]></title>
            <link>https://sciendo.com/article/10.2478/csj-2023-0005</link>
            <guid>https://sciendo.com/article/10.2478/csj-2023-0005</guid>
            <pubDate>Tue, 20 May 2025 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
            <description><![CDATA[

In this paper, we propose a mixed methodological approach to frame journalism research on the emerging platform TikTok. We define the parameters and objects of study that can be analyzed in the framework of TikTok journalism and adapt the most commonly used methods in social media research, designing qualitative and quantitative methods to build mixed methodologies that are necessary to address complex objects of study. We present a phased method for data collection, a multidimensional analysis of content and messages on TikTok, and the implementation of user studies, qualitative interviews and surveys. Finally, we propose a framework for the development of future lines of research in TikTok journalism, from the perspectives of content, audiences, technology and platform, and business and strategy. All this occurs at an early stage in which TikTok journalism is dealing with adaptation to trends, social media logic and journalism values.
]]></description>
            <category>ARTICLE</category>
        </item>
        <item>
            <title><![CDATA[Commentary &amp; Reflections from the TikTok Methodologies Discussion Forum]]></title>
            <link>https://sciendo.com/article/10.2478/csj-2023-0004</link>
            <guid>https://sciendo.com/article/10.2478/csj-2023-0004</guid>
            <pubDate>Tue, 20 May 2025 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
            <description><![CDATA[

As methodologies for studying TikTok continue to develop, deliberation among research communities can offer valuable insights to incorporate different approaches and iterate on emerging research designs. In July 2021, the TikTok Cultures Research Network held a public research forum on TikTok methodologies that was attended by over two-hundred researchers and members of the public from around the world. The discussion-based event featured two panels and a vibrant open question and answer session that highlighted many of the complex issues that TikTok researchers are facing. In this short piece, the two discussion moderators and one of the event’s organisers reflect on some of the unanswered questions from our forum. Topics that were brought up by researchers in the audience included ethical considerations to protect research participants, particularly younger TikTok users, as well for researchers, particularly when studying problematic or extreme content. Audience members raised technical questions about how to collect and store large quantities of video data or extract and analyse qualitative elements such as video text or hashtags. Audience members also raised questions about how to avoid biases when studying a platform that caters experiences to users’ individual cultural preferences.
]]></description>
            <category>ARTICLE</category>
        </item>
        <item>
            <title><![CDATA[Introduction to TikTok Methodologies]]></title>
            <link>https://sciendo.com/article/10.2478/csj-2023-0003</link>
            <guid>https://sciendo.com/article/10.2478/csj-2023-0003</guid>
            <pubDate>Tue, 20 May 2025 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
            <description><![CDATA[

This editorial introduces the collection of papers in the Cultural Science Journal Special Section on ‘TikTok Methodologies’. Based on a Symposium of the same name that was hosted by the TikTok Cultures Research Network in July 2021, this collection includes three journal articles outlining the practice, praxis, and pragmatics of conducting research on and about TikTok, and a research commentary reflecting on the challenges in conceptualizing and operationalizing a TikTok project. The editorial opens by reflecting on some recent trends in TikTok scholarship, and closes with a brief introduction to the Special Section.
]]></description>
            <category>ARTICLE</category>
        </item>
        <item>
            <title><![CDATA[(Re)coding TikTok: The Memetic Interactivity Codebook for content analysis]]></title>
            <link>https://sciendo.com/article/10.2478/csj-2023-0006</link>
            <guid>https://sciendo.com/article/10.2478/csj-2023-0006</guid>
            <pubDate>Tue, 20 May 2025 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
            <description><![CDATA[

TikTok is one of the fastest-growing short-video platforms in the world. Its unique format and interaction possibilities make it a prime space to understand contemporary creators, their practices and strategies. This social medium has been described as structurally memetic, promoting imitation and interaction through its affordances and configurations. The range of creation possibilities enables TikTokers to curate, re-signify and generate content of interest. Traditional research methods such as content analyses require adaptations to effectively decode the features of complex social media such as TikTok. In response to this, we introduce the Memetic Interactivity Codebook (MIC), which is a flexible method that facilitates the analysis of the diverse connections, grammars and affordances of the platform. This paper fills the gap in the consideration of social media content as static objects to acknowledge their evolving nature by offering additional analytical dimensions that adapt to TikTok.
]]></description>
            <category>ARTICLE</category>
        </item>
        <item>
            <title><![CDATA[The Matrix of Authenticity in Influencer Cultures]]></title>
            <link>https://sciendo.com/article/10.2478/csj-2023-0002</link>
            <guid>https://sciendo.com/article/10.2478/csj-2023-0002</guid>
            <pubDate>Wed, 12 Mar 2025 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
            <description><![CDATA[

This brief retrospect on the matrix of authenticity in Influencer cultures considers the ‘What’, the ‘How’, and the ‘So What’ of being authentic online. Firstly, it traces the changing parameters of what constitutes Influencer authenticity over almost two decades, looking at ‘the real’, ‘the template’, and ‘the juxtaposition’. Secondly, it queries the qualities used to benchmark and assess authenticity performance as ‘ordinariness and intimacy’, ‘opinion leadership and community building’, and ‘self-branding techniques’. Thirdly, it contemplates the enduring significance of authenticity fault lines, where the elements of visual, embodied, and communicative performance are constantly remade and challenged across the fast-changing eras of the industry including ‘professionalization’, ‘monetization’, ‘platformization’, ‘post-humanism’. Drawing from longitudinal traditional and digital ethnography rooted in anthropological epistemology, this piece offers ways of thinking about what we really mean when we talk about ‘authenticity’ and ‘Influencer cultures’ today.
]]></description>
            <category>ARTICLE</category>
        </item>
        <item>
            <title><![CDATA[Editorial postscript]]></title>
            <link>https://sciendo.com/article/10.2478/csj-2024-0018</link>
            <guid>https://sciendo.com/article/10.2478/csj-2024-0018</guid>
            <pubDate>Wed, 05 Feb 2025 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
            <category>ARTICLE</category>
        </item>
        <item>
            <title><![CDATA[Propagation of interspecies sexual behaviour between Japanese macaques and Sika deer: First evidence]]></title>
            <link>https://sciendo.com/article/10.2478/csj-2023-0001</link>
            <guid>https://sciendo.com/article/10.2478/csj-2023-0001</guid>
            <pubDate>Tue, 24 Dec 2024 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
            <description><![CDATA[
This naturalistic note presents a series of observation of interspecies sexual behaviour involving Japanese macaques (Macaca fuscata yakui) and Sika deer (Cervus Nippon yakushimae) on Yakushima Island, Japan. The initial observation in 2015 revealed a male macaque’s attempt to engage in sexual activity with female deer, displaying mate-guarding behaviour. Subsequent observations in 2020, 2021 and 2023 showed the continuation of this behaviour and potentially the propagation to other macaques. We categorised this rare behaviour as a case of reproductive interference and explored hypotheses regarding its functionality. While some suggest nutritional benefits for the deer, others propose learning, incomplete species recognition, or mate deprivation hypotheses. This behaviour may also be selectively neutral, offering no direct fitness benefits, but rather represents a behavioural by-product of other interactions between these two species, which may themselves be adaptive. Furthermore, we hypothesise that the observed propagation may underlie social transmission and highlight the potential cognitive capacities of Japanese macaques involving social learning mechanisms and the willingness to adopt noninstinctual behaviours.
]]></description>
            <category>ARTICLE</category>
        </item>
        <item>
            <title><![CDATA[Culture and the much-more-than-human: the case of colloids]]></title>
            <link>https://sciendo.com/article/10.2478/csj-2024-0016</link>
            <guid>https://sciendo.com/article/10.2478/csj-2024-0016</guid>
            <pubDate>Mon, 09 Dec 2024 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
            <description><![CDATA[

In this paper I try to identify a minimal definition of culture that might be applicable in the much-more-than-human realm that extends beyond organic matter and human involvement. I speculate that culture conceived in this broad way might be a metapattern or ‘machinic solution’ available to matter of diverse kinds, organic and inorganic. I explore how this idea might apply this to colloids – hybrid forms of matter such as sols, foams and gels that are mixtures of matter in different phase states, some continuous and some discontinuous, and which can behave in complex ways that mix features of solid and fluid behaviour. I conclude by suggesting that attending to both the similarities and differences between ‘culture’ in the organic and in the inorganic realms might force us to rethink our understanding of both.
]]></description>
            <category>ARTICLE</category>
        </item>
        <item>
            <title><![CDATA[More-than-human in the garden: Living with Homo hortensis]]></title>
            <link>https://sciendo.com/article/10.2478/csj-2024-0017</link>
            <guid>https://sciendo.com/article/10.2478/csj-2024-0017</guid>
            <pubDate>Mon, 09 Dec 2024 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
            <description><![CDATA[

In contrast to Homo faber, Homo hortensis does not side with technical production. He is dependent on dealing with inhomogeneous, ‘impure’ ensembles and can thus offer an interesting approach of acting in the age of the Anthropocene. Dealing with the interweaving of the natural and the artificial, craftsmanship and mechanization, local traditional and scientific knowledge is inherent in gardening practice and has been this way for centuries. Homo hortensis is a genuinely technoscientific person for whom the garden is an ecotechnical product of co-produced knowledge and material. The garden is a counterpart and demands attentive perception, and in this sense offers a model for a convivial mode to live with many others. The garden demands a sense of situatedness and requires the gardener to constantly position himself in his gardening work. This is where Homo hortensis differs dramatically from other forms of horticultural management, for example in geoengineering, industrial agriculture and many sustainability industries.
]]></description>
            <category>ARTICLE</category>
        </item>
        <item>
            <title><![CDATA[Technologies of the Anthropocene]]></title>
            <link>https://sciendo.com/article/10.2478/csj-2024-0014</link>
            <guid>https://sciendo.com/article/10.2478/csj-2024-0014</guid>
            <pubDate>Mon, 21 Oct 2024 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
            <description><![CDATA[

Rather than a levelling-down of the human to the standing of a biological machine, technologies of the Anthropocene have tended towards sensibilities which level-up a variety of non-humans. In simpler terms, these technologies (such as AI, robotics and the technologies of space exploration) have tended to promote new animistic sensibilities. However, it is important to avoid any assumption that sensibilities entail ontological commitments. In this paper, our basic claim that technologies of the Anthropocene are a driver for animistic sensibilities (the sensibilities claim) is set out and supported by an appeal to the case of space technologies. It is then qualified by appeal to the contrasting case of botanical fieldwork, where a sense of working with the non-human also holds.
]]></description>
            <category>ARTICLE</category>
        </item>
        <item>
            <title><![CDATA[The Ladder of More-than-Human Participation: A Framework for Inclusive Design]]></title>
            <link>https://sciendo.com/article/10.2478/csj-2024-0015</link>
            <guid>https://sciendo.com/article/10.2478/csj-2024-0015</guid>
            <pubDate>Mon, 21 Oct 2024 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
            <description><![CDATA[

The accelerating environmental crises necessitate a shift in design and management, prompting a move beyond anthropocentric frameworks that prioritize human needs and expertise. This article explores more-than-human participation in design, arguing for an approach that recognizes expertise, innovation, and the rights of nonhuman beings. By integrating nonhuman contributions, design collectives can overcome limitations of human-centric governance and foster more just, resilient, and sustainable ways to live. Starting with Sherry Arnstein’s (1969) influential Ladder of Citizen Participation, this article proposes a structured way to understand degrees of more-than-human participation and discusses the implications. Through this approach, design becomes a more-than-human endeavour with a better chance of responding to the needs of all stakeholders within a living Gaian system.
]]></description>
            <category>ARTICLE</category>
        </item>
        <item>
            <title><![CDATA[Embeddings]]></title>
            <link>https://sciendo.com/article/10.2478/csj-2022-0012</link>
            <guid>https://sciendo.com/article/10.2478/csj-2022-0012</guid>
            <pubDate>Thu, 05 Sep 2024 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
            <description><![CDATA[

I argue here that the concept of embedding (understood in the mathematical and computer science sense) provides a general way of understanding the relation between generative AI, written language and semiotics, and animal cognition when understood recursively. I propose this framing as an application of cultural science and suggest that this offers a new way to understand the alignment problem between humans and increasingly intelligent machines.
]]></description>
            <category>ARTICLE</category>
        </item>
        <item>
            <title><![CDATA[Comparative Cognitive Science and Convergent Evolution: Humans and Elephants]]></title>
            <link>https://sciendo.com/article/10.2478/csj-2022-0011</link>
            <guid>https://sciendo.com/article/10.2478/csj-2022-0011</guid>
            <pubDate>Thu, 05 Sep 2024 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
            <description><![CDATA[

Comparative cognitive science of humans has tended to overwhelmingly emphasize similarities and differences between humans and other living hominids, particularly chimpanzees and bonobos. In thus under-emphasizing convergent evolution, this skew systematically misidentifies several crucial explanatory targets, particularly where cultural evolution is concerned. While concentration within the hominid and wider primate lines can tell us much about genetic constraints on human culture and cognition, at least as much attention should be paid to species in which patterns of evolved social cognition respond to problems faced by ancestral hominins. Elephants furnish a first and closest example.
]]></description>
            <category>ARTICLE</category>
        </item>
        <item>
            <title><![CDATA[Non-human animal cultures, co-cultures and conservation]]></title>
            <link>https://sciendo.com/article/10.2478/csj-2022-0013</link>
            <guid>https://sciendo.com/article/10.2478/csj-2022-0013</guid>
            <pubDate>Thu, 05 Sep 2024 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
            <description><![CDATA[

Animal culture involves the transmission of behaviours through social learning, which plays a crucial role in species’ survival and adaptability to changing environments. Co-cultures, which describe the mutual cultural evolution between species, underscore the importance of interspecies interactions in maintaining ecological balance and resilience. The loss of these cultural practices can lead to a decline in population viability, reduced genetic diversity, and destabilised ecosystems, ultimately impacting the services these ecosystems provide to human health and well-being. The preservation of cultural traits is essential for maintaining biodiversity, ensuring species’ adaptive capacities, and supporting the overall health of ecosystems, which are critical for the survival of both non-human animals and humans. Integrating the conservation of animal cultures and co-cultures into broader conservation and One Health strategies is necessary to protect the delicate balance of life on Earth and ensure the well-being of all species.
]]></description>
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