Twenty-Second International Conference on Environmental, Cultural, Economic & Social Sustainability

Typography is usually seen simply as a tool for conveying textual meaning, yet its power as a visual language capable of telling stories is often overlooked. This research challenges traditional views by showing how typography can go beyond just conveying words, becoming a medium for emotional expression that crosses language and cultural boundaries. Using Sylvia Plath’s “The Bell Jar”as a case study, the project explores how a single sentence – five words and eleven letters – can be reimagined through typography to express the emotional journey of the novel. Through a combination of analog and digital techniques, these visual treatments offer new ways to interpret and experience the text, challenging conventional literary practices. Typography here becomes more than just text; the emphasis on its visual aspects allows the meanings embedded in the forms to tell their own story, connecting across languages and cultures. The findings show how typography can reshape communication, allowing for deeper emotional understanding and enriched literary interpretation. This research opens new avenues in the humanities, highlighting typography’s potential to evolve and engage in an increasingly interconnected world.

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Analyzing the Absence of Malice Movie, Focusing on Facts Vs. Assumptions

Sonika Lamichhane
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session

This study examines the interplay between facts and assumptions presented in the movie Absence of Malice 1981. A reporter, Megan Carter, writes a news story on the front page of the newspaper that links Michael Gallagher, a businessman, to a murder investigation without verifying the information. The movie has shown how the reporter, Megan Carter, wrote the story without seeking confirmation and how a lack of verifying the information and premature reporting harm the people. Through visual analysis, this study considers the characters, plot, dialogue, and facial expression of the movie to analyze the importance of fact in the news story and how assumptions, prioritizing speed to cover the story, and a lack of verification of news can hamper the people and break the journalistic principles, i.e., accuracy, balance, and credibility. Furthermore, this study also draws connections to real-world instances of journalistic practices. This study highlights responsible journalism and the importance of cross-verification of information to safeguard the trust of the public and to maintain the credibility of the media houses.

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Decolonizing Museum Narratives

Samavia Zia
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session

The Lahore Museum stands as a poignant site for interrogating the colonial legacy embedded in its narratives and displays. This study explores the process of decolonizing the museum's narratives, focusing on how they shape and mediate collective memory formation. Engaging with decolonial theory, the narrative perpetuates the politics of amnesia by silencing indigenous epistemologies and disassociating artifacts from their cultural and historical contexts. The study situates the Lahore Museum within the broader framework of memory politics, investigating how colonial-era curatorial practices continue to influence contemporary interpretations of South Asia’s past. By introducing counter-narratives that reclaim indigenous perspectives, the research highlights the potential of the museum as a space for resisting Eurocentric hegemony and fostering decolonial memory formation. Central to this analysis is the concept of epistemic disobedience proposed by Mignolo, which challenges the universality of Western knowledge systems. Similarly, Fanon’s critique of the colonial psyche underscores the imperative to dismantle the cultural alienation perpetuated by colonial institutions. Through a critical analysis of exhibitions, archival practices, and visitor engagement, the research seeks to illuminate the museum's role in either perpetuating or disrupting the colonial matrix of power. It advocates for a participatory curatorial approach that foregrounds marginalized voices, contextualizes artifacts within their lived histories, and addresses the erasures inherent in colonial historiography. By doing so, this study contributes to the ongoing efforts to decolonize cultural institutions, offering a framework for reconstructing memory politics in ways that counteract Eurocentric biases and promote a pluriversal understanding of South Asia’s rich and diverse heritage.

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Virtual National Islands in the Cosmopolitan Ocean of Digital Dreams

Jan Waligórski
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session

The dream of a post-national reality is rooted in the advent of the Internet and resurfaces with each new immersive realm of cyberspace, including social virtual reality (VR) platforms. Social VR platforms consist of thousands of interconnected, user-created 3D virtual worlds, which serve as spaces for various socio-cultural activities, such as gatherings, games, and work Social VR is often viewed by researchers as a site for forming post-national communities that transcend physical borders. However, this view is rooted more in the methodological assumptions of existing studies (methodological cosmopolitanism) than in the actual nature of these virtual cultures. First, field research has predominantly been conducted in English, thus privileging users fluent in international communication. Second, these studies often rely on “digital dualism,” a framework that treats physical and digital spaces as distinct. While some argue that the primary constraint of social VR is users’ imagination, this ethnographic inquiry seeks to question whether we can genuinely envision a post-national (virtual) reality. Social VR platforms offer a opportunity to pose anthropological questions: when users are given the freedom to create a new reality, what image of reality is deeply rooted in the human imagination? The aim of this paper is to present my findings from ethnographic studies on the reproduction of national identities in subtle ways within social VR. It describes how banal nationalism is unconsciously replicated in virtual landscapes and territories—often visualized as national islands surrounded by a virtual ocean—in conflicts, game narratives, and the very structure of social VR platforms.

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Queerness in the Depths

Cathryn Stevens
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session

Water is ever changing—it moves between, it reaches out, it touches disparate continents and concepts. Through the focused application of Queer theory and gender theory to visual and textual sources, I investigate the image of water as an embodiment of and backdrop for Queer stories. I employ Dr. Kathyrn Stockton’s work on cis/trans surface and Dr. Amy Jeffery’s work on queer liminal spaces, among other sources, to analyze three Queer, ocean-centric texts: Moonlight (2018), Yanyi’s The Year of Blue Water, and Jean Genet’s Querelle. I take an intersectional approach, also considering the impact of racial and cultural histories on the role of the ocean in each text. I expect to find that, in these works, the ocean takes on a role similar to that of the established concept of liminal space; it allows for impossible contradictions—between male/female, gay/straight, surface/depth—to exist. Through this analysis, I highlight how the symbolic ocean opens avenues for LGBTQ+ people to think, dream, and explore. I flow between the three texts, using each to illustrate a new dimension of the Queer(ed) ocean. I visualize showing screencaps and micro-excerpts from these texts as well.

Room 2 : 2025-06-27 12:35

Europe and Nomadism in the Travel Journals of Andrzej Stasiuk

Malgorzata Fabrycy
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session

Nowadays considered as one of the most important Polish writers, Andrzej Stasiuk is an author of numerous travel journals in which he describes his journeys to the countries of Eastern Europe. The writer’s fascination with the nomadic lifestyle of the gypsies and the countries he travelled through, characterized by a certain economic delay, become an opportunity to ask important questions regarding the changes that have taken place in the contemporary world, driven by the capitalism, about differences and similarities and finally about the national identities (his own et the others’). Firstly, this work analyses the role that travels play in Stasiuk’s prose, as well as the role of the mythology he creates around the lifestyle of the nomads and the meanings he attributes to them (freedom, space, independence of the concept of nationality, lack of borders). In second place, the author focuses on the geographical areas visited by the Polish writer and their way of functioning, standing in opposition to the way of life and the values of Western countries. The author will show, based on Milan Kundera's essay, that an East-West opposition of identities is being created in the works of Stasiuk. Finally, the present paper introduces the effects of such constructed literary world on the concept of national identities, among others on the image of Polish identity created by Stasiuk, built at the same time on opposition and similarity to the Other.

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Development of Technology Empowerment Language Teaching

Shuo Zhao
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session

This paper takes the innovative teaching method proposed in the Innovative Teaching Report (2023 edition) of the Open University of the UK as a reference, and uses journal articles related to blended learning mode, remote collaborative learning and corpus-based learning in China National Knowledge Infrastructure(CNKI) as data sources. The bibliometric visualization analysis software iteSpace (6.1. R3) is used to conduct co-occurrence analysis of authors and keywords, draw clustering diagrams, reveal their research overview and development trend, analyze frontier research dynamics in order to provide reference for the development of technology-empowered language teaching.

Room 2 : 2025-06-25 15:40

Narrative Strategies in Email Advertising

Rima Jamil Malkawi
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session

Storytelling has long been recognised as a potent tool for persuasive communication in broader email marketing and, precisely, email advertising. This study aims to bridge the gap in the literature by examining how Denning’s narrative patterns are used in marketing emails to attract customer’s attention and persuade them of products or services. Drawing on Aristotle’s persuasion theory and Denning’s framework of narrative patterns, we conducted a qualitative and descriptive quantitative analysis on a corpus of 200 marketing emails authored by email copywriting expert Ben Settle. This exploratory study, which examines the persuasive nature of the narrative strategies of storytelling within advertising emails, reveals that the most effective emails incorporate testimonials, utilise third-party narratives, and feature credible characters. In addition, the findings indicate that crafting stories that align with target customers' interests may increase engagement and sales, as observed in Settles’ emails. These strategies may also enhance the authenticity and credibility of the advertised products, thereby increasing the brand’s selling potential. These findings have practical implications for marketers, highlighting the importance of incorporating storytelling techniques, such as testimonials and third-party narratives, into advertising emails to enhance their effectiveness.

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Hawaiian Plantation Employee Records

Sonia Pacheco, Catherine Titzer
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session

The Alexander & Baldwin Sugar Museum and the Ferreira-Mendes Portuguese-American Archives partnered in the mid-2010s in the only known effort to digitize and make available to the public a substantial collection of Hawaiian plantation employee records. This paper features a multi-disciplinary approach to these records and includes a discussion on the necessity of a comprehensive historical and sociological contextual understanding of the populations that the records document; the digital humanities work that has been done using the raw data from the records; and the digital future of the records.

Room 1 : 2025-06-26 11:55

Oceanic Journeys

Alvin Joseph
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session

Yann Martel’s novel "Life of Pi" recounts the extraordinary survival story of Pi Patel, a young boy stranded on a lifeboat in the Pacific Ocean with a Bengal tiger as his companion. While the novel’s premise is grounded in a literal journey of survival against the ocean’s unpredictable elements, this paper explores how Pi’s oceanic voyage becomes a metaphorical and philosophical journey. The paper argues that the ocean functions as a dual symbol: it reflects both the external struggle for survival and an inner quest for meaning, faith, and transformation. Through his time at sea, Pi undergoes profound physical, mental, and spiritual transformations, facing the duality of reality and illusion, reason and belief, as represented by his two versions of the story. Drawing on theories of survival literature, postcolonialism, and the metaphysical, this paper examines how the oceanic setting in 'Life of Pi" functions as a space for the exploration of human resilience, existential inquiry, and the interplay between narrative and truth. Ultimately, the ocean in "Life of Pi" becomes a symbolic arena where Pi confronts both the forces of nature and the profound depths of his own being.

Room 2 : 2025-06-26 15:50

“Thoughts Are Thinkers”

Jovana Isevski
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session

William James famously said that “thoughts are thinkers,” implying that it is not always individuals who produce thoughts but that, conversely, thoughts produce thinkers. Biologist Michael Levin builds on James’s assertion, proposing that memories are not passive imprints but semi-autonomous agents that actively shape a system’s future behavior rather than merely reflecting past experiences. Levin’s lab has shown that memories are not stored in any fixed physical space but emerge as patterns of bioelectrical signals, challenging the substantialist view that only material structures can be agents. I extend this perspective to political-cultural contexts, arguing that cultural-ideological patterns function as self-sustaining agents that operate through human bodies and behaviors. Politics, therefore, is not only an abstract set of externally imposed symbols but an embodied process reproduced through bioelectric networks. However, rather than being passively encoded, external symbols are differentially and dynamically internalized, shaped by context and prior experience. Moreover, ideological systems persist not merely through repetition but through the affective salience of memories, such as nationalist myths or traumatic historical events. Additionally, old memories do not simply fade—their strength is diminished by new repeated and/or affectively charged experiences. And crucially, thinkers are not reducible to thoughts; meta-cognition itself functions as another emergent and self-organizing agent capable of producing new memories and altering the topology of memory networks. By reconceptualizing ideology as bioelectrically mediated and affectively anchored, this framework illuminates how political transformation depends not just on counter-narratives but on interventions that restructure memory, perception, and behavior at the deepest neurophysiological levels.

Of Sea, Space and Self-Reflexivity

Abhirami Ajith Kumar
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session

In the labyrinthine depths of S., a contemporary experimental fiction, the Ship of Theseus serves as a vessel of self-discovery. Beyond a metaphor, sea is an idea, a medium and a space in the novel where the proverbial “ship” is occupied. Theseus, the mythical hero, after killing the Minotaur, is on an expedition on his ship and “Ship of Theseus,” the inner text of the novel, accommodates the conversations of the characters of the outer text, S., on its margins. In “Ship of Theseus,” the central character S. is an amnesiac who is trying to learn more about himself. S. copes with his memory loss by recreating his true disposition, only to be overshadowed by the remnants of the things he used to be, representing the metaphysical puzzle of the Ship of Theseus. The undercurrent that holds the narrative complexities, including the detachable paratextual elements in the text, is its characteristic self-reflexivity. The paper semiotically analyzes the experimental manifestation of the oceanic journey, while examining how the Ship of Theseus, both a physical object and a conceptual construct, embodies the paradoxes of identity, memory, and consciousness. It also looks at sea as a boundary, particularly between the known and unknown and several other binaries. The primary motive of the paper is to investigate the metaphorical, literary and symbolic significance of the ship in S. and its correlation to self-reflexivity as a narrative strategy.

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From Tradition to Modernity

Rika Ohira
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session

This research examines how literature, including poems and folk songs from the Satsunan Islands, reflects changing perceptions toward aging and gender in the transition from tradition to modernity. By analyzing gerontological themes in these texts and comparing them with real-world experiences, the study explores how traditional values and modern influences shape the aging process. The research integrates literary analysis of works such as Toryu Nikki with ethnographic fieldwork, including interviews with elderly residents and community members. Through narrative analysis, this study aims to uncover how caregiving norms, gender roles, and social well-being are negotiated in rural island communities. The findings will contribute to discussions in gerontology, cultural studies, and Japanese literature by illustrating the interplay between historical traditions and contemporary societal transformations. This research aims to provide insights into the resilience of traditional caregiving practices and the evolving identity of aging populations in Japan’s remote islands.

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Broadening Belonging Without Othering

Marianne Ingheim
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session

A problem that lies at the core of much of the world’s violence and inequality is the idea of separateness, and with it, the demonization of what is considered the Other and the dividing of people into a “good us” versus a “bad them.” As humans, we have a deep desire for belonging, but this often comes at the expense of othering and hardening of borders. Narratives of belonging can connect us to each other, but they can also separate us. This study examines and complicates what is meant by belonging and borders, and it explores ways of expanding our horizons so that we include more and more of humanity and living systems in our fields of concern. It presents various concepts and strategies for broadening belonging, such as “intraconnection” and “identification with all humanity,” and it emphasizes the role that the humanities can play in providing narrative alternatives to the idea of separateness.

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The Effects of Patriarchy on Familial Connections in Nuclear Family

Xailea Anderson Iopa
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session

This research paper analyzes the novel Nuclear Family by Joseph Han from a feminist critical lens. One of the largest themes in Nuclear Family is that of division, which this paper expands upon by highlighting the ways in which patriarchal influence has created division throughout the family. Throughout the novel, there are numerous examples of the patriarchal effects on a multitude of characters, from expected gender roles to the expectations placed on each individual due to their position within the family. Incorporating the impact of patriarchy on both the male and female characters, this paper demonstrates the complexity of the influence of patriarchy on people across the gender spectrum. Also of importance to this essay are the effects of immigration in changing and reinforcing gender roles, shown through the immigration of the main and side characters from their home countries to Hawaiʻi. Through a feminist interpretation of Joseph Han’s novel, the influence of patriarchy on families and how it negatively affects their ability to connect, as well as how immigration and the decentralization of the nuclear family shifts patriarchal expectations becomes apparent. Through this analysis, another layer of complexity is added to Nuclear Family’s portrayal of an immigrant family in Hawaiʻi.

Room 1 : 2025-06-25 15:40

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