A journal dedicated to the full breadth of humanistic scholarship — from literary criticism and art history to cultural theory, linguistics, film studies, and the critical exploration of human creativity and expression.
Journal of Art, Culture and Humanities is published by Airela Press as a peer-reviewed journal. We publish critical essays, theoretical studies, empirical research, and review articles spanning literature, the visual and performing arts, cultural studies, and humanistic inquiry.
We welcome contributions from scholars in literary studies, art history, musicology, film and media studies, cultural theory, linguistics, philosophy of art, history, and all adjacent disciplines. Interdisciplinary work that crosses the boundaries of these fields is especially encouraged.
Our conviction is simple: the study of human creativity and cultural expression is among the most important forms of scholarship, and it deserves a dedicated, freely accessible home.
Literary criticism, comparative literature, world literature, postcolonial studies, narrative theory, genre studies, and the cultural history of texts across all traditions.
Art history, aesthetics, visual culture, architecture, music, theatre, dance, film and media studies, and the critical study of art objects, practices, and institutions.
Cultural theory, linguistics, anthropology of culture, memory and heritage studies, identity and representation, digital humanities, and the history of ideas.
We invite submissions from scholars in any humanities or social science discipline whose work advances understanding of human creativity, cultural expression, or humanistic inquiry.
Manuscripts should be submitted by email with the subject line "Submission — [Paper Title]". Please attach your manuscript as a PDF or Word document.
All submissions undergo double-blind peer review. Authors can expect an initial decision within four to six weeks of submission. We accept original research articles, review articles, theoretical essays, and empirical studies.
Airela Press and the Journal of Art, Culture and Humanities are committed to the highest standards of publication ethics. We follow the guidelines established by the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE).
All submissions are screened for plagiarism prior to peer review. Fabrication, falsification, and misrepresentation of data or results will result in immediate rejection and may be reported to the authors' institutions.
Authors are required to disclose any conflicts of interest relevant to their submission. Funding sources should be acknowledged transparently in all published work.
Reviewers are expected to maintain strict confidentiality regarding manuscripts under review and to disclose any conflicts of interest to the editors before undertaking review.
Corrections and retractions will be issued promptly and transparently whenever errors are identified in published work. The journal maintains a permanent public record of all corrections.
Authors retain copyright to their published work under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY 4.0) licence, which permits free reuse with appropriate attribution.
This article offers a systematic normative analysis of the relationship between the commercialization of sport and the notion of corruption. By distinguishing between moral corruption, practical corruption, and normative corruption, and by conceiving sport as a social practice centered on fair competition and the pursuit of excellence, the paper argues that commercialization is not inherently corrupting. Corruption arises when market logic comes to systematically override the internal goods that constitute sport's distinctive normative structure, thereby reshaping its purposes and standards. More specifically, the article identifies three principal pathways through which commercialization generates normative corruption. Structural corruption undermines competitive balance by allowing economic resources, rather than athletic excellence, to become the decisive determinant of outcomes. Motivational corruption transforms what is characteristically an autotelic form of sporting participation into instrumentalized athletic labor. Aesthetic corruption subordinates forms of excellence defined by a practice's internal standards to considerations of entertainment value and marketability. In response to the practical necessity of commercialization in contemporary sport, the article advances a position of conditional commercialization, according to which commercial arrangements are normatively legitimate only insofar as they remain subordinate to, and supportive of, sport's internal goods.
This study examines foot whipping as a gendered and ritualized form of corporal punishment in South Korean educational and familial contexts, focusing on its operational mechanisms and the subjective experiences of female students. Drawing on over thirty online narrative posts, a crowdsourced encyclopedia entry, and a parental account from the 2000s to 2010s, this qualitative study employs an integrated framework of Humiliation Theory and a Trauma Informed Perspective, analyzed through qualitative content analysis and online narrative analysis. The findings reveal that foot whipping operates through a mechanism of "delayed somatic persistence of punishment," which consists of three progressive layers: ritualized humiliation through enforced bodily exposure, delayed reactivation of pain through walking, and the somatic consolidation of punishment related responses. The study further identifies a system of justificatory discourse that includes gendered logic, health discourse, effect logic, and perpetrator self defense strategies. Victims' narratives, in contrast, report experiences of acute pain, shame, a sense of injustice, dissociation, and conditioned avoidance responses. The findings indicate that within these sampled online narratives, foot whipping emerges as a culturally encoded punitive practice directed at female students, sustained by cultural narratives that frame pain as pedagogical and female bodies as requiring shame based correction. This study contributes to the literature by introducing the concept of delayed somatic persistence, highlighting the gender dimension of corporal punishment, and offering a trauma informed reading of how educational violence is perpetuated through bodily practices. It concludes that legal prohibition alone is insufficient and that meaningful change requires a fundamental cultural shift in how pain, discipline, and bodily integrity are understood in educational and familial settings.
Against the backdrop of growing mental health needs in contemporary society, public libraries, as public cultural service institutions, are facing the pressure of transforming from traditional document services to emotional support services. The rapid development of artificial intelligence technology offers new possibilities for this transformation. This paper proposes the concept of "AI Reading Companion," defining it as an intelligent reading assistance system in public libraries, based on artificial intelligence technologies, with the core objective of providing emotional support services. The article first reviews the theoretical lineage of bibliotherapy and the evolution of emotional support services in public libraries, revealing the limitations of traditional service models in terms of personalization, immediacy, and accessibility. It then analyzes the technical logic by which an AI Reading Companion achieves emotional support from the technological dimensions of affective computing, recommendation algorithms, and natural language processing, with particular attention to technical difficulties in accuracy and cultural adaptability of affective computing. Through case studies of the Capital Library's "Reading Companion," Guangzhou Library's "Intelligent Reading Companion Robot," and Hubei Provincial Library's "Emotion Library," the paper examines the practical forms and service efficacy of AI Reading Companions. On this basis, it constructs a four-stage service model of "Perception–Matching–Companionship–Feedback," drawing on the theory of emotion regulation and the psychological mechanisms of identification–catharsis–insight in bibliotherapy to explain the intrinsic logical connections among the stages, and proposes implementation pathways from four dimensions: technical architecture, librarian role transformation, ethical norms, and evaluation systems. The research argues that the AI Reading Companion is not meant to replace the central role of "human" in traditional bibliotherapy, but rather to expand the depth and breadth of emotional support services through technological empowerment, promoting the role transition of public libraries from "resource providers" to "emotional companions." Its core innovation lies in introducing the theory of emotional value into the analytical framework of library services, constructing a technology-driven closed-loop emotional support service, which both continues the humanistic tradition of bibliotherapy and responds to the public's demand for immediate and personalized emotional support in the digital age, providing a new direction for service innovation in public libraries.
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