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"This paper critiques recent research on innovation in the cultural and creative industries. In particular, this paper examines Paul Stoneman's idea of 'soft innovation' as a jumping off point for discussing theories of cultural innovation more broadly. Three critiques are advanced. Firstly, soft innovation is a theoretical perspective that has developed from neoclassical economics, and is therefore vulnerable to criticisms levelled at neoclassical explanations of economic behaviour. Secondly, the theory of soft innovation can be criticised for being contingently inaccurate: the observed reality of cultural industries and marketplaces may not reflect the theory's premises. Thirdly, because soft innovation defines the significance of an innovation in terms of marketplace success, it implies that only high-selling cultural products are significant, a difficult claim to substantiate. This paper concludes by arguing that our understanding of innovation in the cultural sphere can benefit from a multi-disciplinary approach grounded in the full gamut of human creativity."

Based on the Community Innovation Survey, this paper suggests new indicators of innovation adoption. The magnitude of innovation adoption is assessed for 22 EU countries and different industries. The most striking feature is the correlation between the innovation activities and the adoption rate. Countries with strong R&D and human resources and high innovation output exhibit the highest adoption rates. This supports the idea that innovation adoption requires an absorption capability. In addition, the specificities of each country regarding the prevailing types of innovation and adoption (product or process, cooperation-based adoption or internal adoption) allow us to draw up a typology of the EU countries, for which a specific geographical pattern is observed.

This article explores the upgrade and perpetual innovation economy of digital gaming as it informs understandings and practices of the 'self'. Upgrade is situated in terms of digital gaming as a globalized techno-cultural industry. Drawing on accounts of governmentality and cultural work, research with digital games design students is drawn on to explore the overlapping twin logics of technological upgrade and work-on-the-self. The games industry-focused higher education context is examined as an environment for becoming a games designer and involving processes of upgrading the self. Having examined processes and practices of upgrading the self in terms of technological skills and personal development/enterprise, the article turns to some of the critical issues around anxiety, industry conventions and working practices.

"At the roots of many travels to distant destinations, whether in the context of tourism or migration, are historically laden and socioculturally constructed imaginaries. People worldwide rely on such imaginaries, from the most spectacular fantasies to the most mundane reveries, to shape identities of themselves and others. These unspoken representational assemblages are powerful because they enact and construct peoples and places, implying multiple, often conflicting, representations of Otherness, and questioning several core values multicultural societies hold, by blurring as well as enforcing traditional territorial, social, and cultural boundaries. What are the contours of power, agency, and subjectivity in imaginaries of transnational mobility and the intersecting social categories those visions both reify and dissolve? Ethnographic studies of human (im)mobility provide an innovative means to grasp the complexity of the global circulation of people and the world-making images and ideas surrounding these movements. As a polymorphic concept, mobility invites us to renew our theorizing, especially regarding conventional themes such as culture, identity, and transnational relationships. This article critically analyzes some preliminary findings of an ongoing multisited research project that traces how prevalent imaginaries of transnational tourism to and migration from the "global South" are (dis)connected. I suggest anthropology has unique contributions to make to the current debate in the social sciences by ethnographically detailing how mobility is a contested ideological construct involving so much more than mere movement."

"In "Composition as Explanation," Gertrude Stein claims that people only appreciate contemporary works of culture retrospectively. Stein keenly quips, "the creator of the new composition in the arts is an outlaw until he is a classic, there is hardly a moment in between and it is really too bad very much too bad naturally for the creator but also very much too bad for the enjoyer." Kenneth Goldsmith's new collection of essays, Uncreative Writing, aims to lessen the lag, for this is a critical poetics that seeks to clarify. Donning his outlaw status as UbuWeb innovator, conceptual poetry provocateur (as evidenced in his Harriet blog posts for the Poetry Foundation, from which this collection is largely culled), and author of works including Soliloquy (2001), Day (2003), and The Weather (2005), Goldsmith, not quite making a claim to the classic, seeks to advance understanding of avant-garde work being done now."

This article investigates the complex relationship between digital media, religion, and politics in Egypt since the early 1990s. Charting the emergence of a new media landscape - one that is facilitated by technological innovations such as mobile telephony, high-speed Internet, and small digital cameras - this paper explores how a very strong Islamic revivalist trend is capitalizing on the power and reach of these new media practices in an effort to develop Islamically inflected models of citizenship. The paper argues that such a mediascape is contributing to the development of new models of nationalism and civic citizenship in Egypt - ones that are not orchestrated by the Egyptian State but are mediated through oppositional groups, mainly of the Islamist variety. The paper aims to chart a map of media practices in Egypt in the past two decades, and trace how these practices are informing the rise of new notions of citizenship, cultural policy, digital activism, and media consumption.

Urban centers across Canada are partitioned by racial geographies that circumvent and circumscribe the movements of aboriginal bodies. This article examines how aboriginal youth experience and engage these racisms that organize Canadian social spaces. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork undertaken at a drop-in recreational centre in the inner city of Edmonton, Alberta, it documents the different ways in which indigenous youth employ hip-hop as a means to contest their subjection to these immobilizing racisms. First, it shows how these youth employ hip-hop as a technology of self-transformation through which they recreate their selves as meaningful, efficacious political actors capable of disrupting their relegation to criminogenic places. Second, it documents how the practice of a distinctly indigenous hip-hop allows these youth to innovate an aesthetic space disruptive of the historicist racisms that otherwise subject aboriginality to anachronistic spaces. Finally, this article shows that, by performing a hybridized, distinctly indigenous breakdance, these practitioners of hip-hop dramatize the physical and cultural motility of aboriginal bodies.

One of the foundational aims of this journal is to enable articulations of globalisation other than those conceived of within a narrow, economistic modality. The articles that comprise this special issue, in our view, make a timely and innovative contribution to the plurality of analytical insights that have been published in this journal since its inception. Further, this issue represents the first issue of Globalizations that, in its entirety, takes seriously the claim that gender matters to global politics and therefore to globalisation. Ideas about gender are thoroughly bound up in the processes of integration, fragmentation, economic restructuring, and im/migration that characterise the sets of practices and politics described by the short-hand of 'globalisation', and in various ways the articles in this collection interrogate these practices to enrich our understanding of their particular and more general effects.

The life narratives of cô Nhựt, a former communist guerilla fighter and political prisoner during the American War in Vietnam, illuminate a dynamic politics of iteration and innovation at play within each act of remembering. Cô Nhựt lives in Ho Chi Minh City and is part of a women veteran's civic association called the Former Women Political Prisoner Performance Group. She is also a national and international advocate against the use of chemical warfare and a supporter of people living with Agent Orange-related disabilities in Vietnam. Historical and contemporary political contexts in Vietnam - such as decades of colonial rule, brutal wars and communist revolution and governance - dramatically affect the shape of official history and collective memory, including cô Nhựt's narratives.