Encoding Cultural Narratives to Produce Meaningful Worlds

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Enculturation: Meaning-making, Materialism, Dissemination, and Reception

“Culture,” notes Raymond Williams, “is one of the two or three most complicated words in the English language” (87). Its etymological root in cultivation—the tending and propagation of life—signals a resistance to being contained. Classroom pedagogy encompasses various elements into it—mythology, rituals, religion, tradition; movies, songs, literature; fashion, food, art—classifying it as ‘a whole way of life.’ Yet, culture outstrips being merely a way of life; it represents a method of understanding life and saturating existence with meaning. In the 19th Century, Matthew Arnold viewed culture as a framework supporting liberal humanist ideology, which aimed to prescribe a universal definition of excellence.  The emergence of Cultural Studies as a discipline in the 1960s England advocated for a pluralized understanding under the purview of cultural discourse and prioritized the need to study ‘cultures’ in the plural.

The CFP of LLIDS’s Volume 8 invites interdisciplinary contributions on cultural studies, focusing on the shaping and reshaping of social relations, spaces, practices, identities, and politics. This comprehensive CFP focuses on how meanings within these plural ‘cultures’ are generated, materialised, disseminated, and received. The rhetoric surrounding cultural studies as a self-reflexive domain in dialogue with itself, includes: the production of cultural meaning, the tangible materiality of cultural elements, the forms of their dissemination in society, and eventually their reception. These are not sequential components of cultural studies but are integral to their analytic architecture. Each component of the CFP illuminates a unique cultural dynamic, and submissions to this Volume are encouraged to explore across these components rather than confining themselves to any single one.   

PART I: Encoding Cultural Narratives to Produce Meaningful Worlds

The first part of this four-part series invites contributions to examine the cultural, political, and epistemic significance of rituals, festivals, and narrative traditions as sites of cultural meaning-making. The cultural meanings generated by these practices function as living repositories of a community’s memories, anxieties, pride, and aspirations.

Cultural creation evolves into a vibrant area wherein language usage goes further than being a mere conduit for thought. Acts such as naming, categorizing, and using metaphors go beyond mere description, but serve as cultural tools that construct our reality. These acts of cultural production derive their legitimacy from cultural institutions such as schools, archives, religious practices/texts, scientific establishments, and digital platforms which generate their own sanctioned versions of the real. Consequently, the encoding of cultural meaning is never neutral but is shaped by relations of power that provoke critical enquiry: who holds the epistemic or political authority to encode meaning, under what conditions meaning-making operates, what resources are employed by authorised agents, and which meanings are endorsed or marginalised? Disputes between knowledge systems are essentially battles over cultural authority, with the suppression of alternate knowledge forms being a lasting consequence of power. 

The sanctioned versions of culturally accepted “real” serve the purpose of promoting a particular kind of cohesiveness by structuring individual lives. This cohesiveness is formulated through rites of passage like birth, marriage, and death, providing a chronological framework for human existence. Knitting individuals into religious and ethical fabric from birth, these ritualistic acts reproduce cultural norms and myths across generations to shape communal existence. Oral traditions passed down through families and communities then allow myths to adapt to local conditions and maintain the fluidity of communal stories. The mutations of myths into multiple sprouting off-shoots as folktales and fairy tales extend beyond mere entertainment, transforming them into epistemological frameworks that a culture uses to understand the sacred, the causality of self and time, and established social norms. Although writing brings a degree of fixity to these fluid narratives through modern print capitalism, this fixity is continually undermined both internally by deconstructive writing practices and externally by postmodernity’s experiments with mass media and digital platforms, where myriads of deconstructed cultural variations, counter-narratives, and retold versions circulate through local and global narratives.

The first part this Issue explores ways of encoding cultural meaning through myths, epics, folk and fairy tales, and translation practices. Among other things, it encourages scholars to ask questions such as: How are these mythical narratives created and for what purpose? How do they gain their cultural authority? How do they circulate, transform, and enter into popular discourse?

  • Epistemology and knowledge creation in cultures
  • Ancestral legacy and belongingness
  • Intangible cultural heritage
  • Sanctity and the Sacred (vs the Profane and taboo?)
  • Cultural memory and identity
  • Community life and festival culture
  • Indigeneity: Lived and performed
  • Hegemonic powers in indigenous being and becoming
  • ⁠⁠Indigenous Knowledge systems
  • Tellings and re-tellings of myths, folklores, epics, fairy tales
  • Festivals, Rituals, and Traditions within and without religion
  • Adaptation of religious rituals in secular state
  • Modern myths and urban legends
  • Mythology in a neoliberal world
  • Meaning making in the Information Age
  • ⁠Knowledge Creation and AI
  • Globalisation of local cultures
  • Class formation and role of rituals
  • ⁠Narratives and narratology
  • ⁠Cultural signs, symbols, and semiotics

Submission Process:

Submission Criteria Checklist:

    • Only complete papers along with a 150 words abstract, list of keywords, and Works Cited will be considered for publication.

    • Word limit for submissions (excluding Title, Abstract, Keywords, Footnotes, and Works Cited list): 3,500–10,000 words

    • The papers need to be formatted as per MLA guidelines.

    • LLIDS has Zero plagiarism and AI policies. The Similarity Index of the submissions (Quote percentage) needs to be under 20%, unless absolutely required by the research. The similarity index is a calculation of the percentage of quotes from the word count (excluding title, abstract, keywords, footnote, works cited list)

Submission deadline: 30th November, 2026

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