César Albarrán-Torres
Biographic Data
| ID | 3047447 |
|---|---|
| NAME | César Albarrán-Torres |
| GIVEN NAMES | César |
| FAMILY NAME | Albarrán-Torres |
| SIGNATURE | ALBARRÁN-TORRES C |
| AFFILIATIONS | Swinburne University of Technology |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-1285-0147 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 18 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 19 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 18 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2013 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 2 |
A24’s brand aura: Commodifying “alternative” cinephilia
Representing Marichuy Online: Digital Listening And Indigenous Voice In The Latin American Political Periphery
In 2018, Nahua healer and activist María de Jesús Patricio Martínez, Marichuy, launched a campaign to become an independent candidate for the Mexican presidency. Marichuy’s campaign is a key precedent to understand the 2024 political juncture of presidential campaigns in Mexico, resulting in the election of the country’s first female president. Although Marichuy did not gather enough signatures to have her name on the ballot, her unprecedented ef…
La Coreañera” plays cumbia: Reimagining “Asianness” in Latin American visual social media cultures
Postcolonial Superheroes: Unmasking Black Panther: Wakanda Forever and Namor, Its Mesoamerican Antihero
Netflix's high-end global telefantasy: Conspicuous and virtual localism
Netflix has commissioned and released an increasing number of high-end international series that tap into the genres of science fiction, fantasy and horror. These follow one of two strategies: (1) local productions that engage with local folklore and myths, or (2) productions centred in the 'West', where international talent is brought in to create cosmopolitan 'global' TV events such as 1899 (2022). The first strategy brings together local story…
Salad Fingers: Pre-YouTube digital uncanny and the ‘weird’ future of animation
In 2004, artist David Firth launched the lo-fi animation Salad Fingers in the user-generated content sharing platform Newgrounds. The series, focused on a strange, unsettling narrative about a character that acts as a child but commits unhinged violent acts, went on to become viral in the earliest days of YouTube. Created with the software Flash (launched by Macromedia and then acquired by Adobe), which generates vector images, Salad Fingers is a…
Migrant arrests and deportations on fictional television during the Trump era (2017–2021): From tokenistic storytelling to narrative activism
This article is a comparative analysis discussing the representation of migrant deportations, apprehensions, and raids by ICE in contemporary US television and streaming. The depiction of migration issues was a narrative and rhetorical constant in some fictional US television shows during the Donald Trump presidency (2017–2021), dramatizing the struggles of undocumented and newly arrived migrants and their families. These shows, which range from …
Predator's Prey: Reframing indigenous representation and Hollywood franchise cinema in the age of SVOD
Hulu's Prey (2022), the fifth installment of the Predator franchise, is set in 1719 and features a Comanche female protagonist. The setting is unlike the 1987 Predator and its sequels, with their hardbody machismo and conservative politics. We argue that Prey is a small but significant step in Hollywood, but its inclusivity comes at a price. Though praised as progressive, it perpetuates a worldview in which Native Americans are ‘noble savages’ an…
Cartels, memes, and digital platforms: The digital myths of ‘El Chapo’ Guzmán
Since the late 1970s, the Mexican government has been embroiled in an armed conflict with the drug cartels, and criminal organisations have engaged in violent confrontations with each other. Violence escalated in 2006 under the presidency of Felipe Calderón Hinojosa, and since then killings have become spectacular and highly mediatised. An often-overlooked front of the cartel wars is the use of non-official networked media that generates and sust…
Addressing the accountability gap: Gambling advertising and social media platform responsibilities
This commentary reports on gambling advertisements served to Australians on Facebook in 2021-2022 that we discovered through a research project that uses novel data donation infrastructure to improve the observability of platform-based advertising. Preliminary findings show that advertisements for online casinos appear on social media and are served to people tagged as located in Australia despite laws that prohibit both the operation and adverti…
The emergence of autolography: The 'magical' invocation of images from text through AI
In mid-2022, AI systems automatically translating text into evocative original images became an internet sensation. People compared it to magic: invoking an uncannily competent artist-magician. We call it 'autolography' from the Greek 'automatos + logos + graphos' (self + word + drawing). Following a discourse analysis of online publications comparing autolography to magic, we analyse its enthusiastic reception from some and critique from others.…
Global Trafficking Networks on Film and Television: Hollywood’s Cartel Wars
This book draws on a multi-method study of film and television narratives of global criminal networks to explore the links between audiovisual media, criminal networks and global audiences in the age of digital content distribution. Mapping out media representations of the ongoing war on drugs in Mexico and the United States, the author delves into the social, cultural and geopolitical impacts of distribution and consumption of these media. With …
Creed: Legacy franchising, race and masculinity in contemporary boxing films
This article explores the ways in which director Ryan Coogler’s 2015 film Creed reactivates the Rocky franchise and provides an actualization of the themes of race and contemporary masculinity inherent in American boxing cinema. By defining Creed as a legacy film, a method of franchise nostalgia concerned with inheritance, we explain how the movie constitutes a passing-of-the-torch ritual in Hollywood. If Stallone’s Rocky gave audiences a glimpse…
Poker avatars: Affective Investment and Everyday Gambling Platforms
This article examines the use of player-controlled avatars on digital gambling platforms and apps. Through a discussion of the influential, but now defunct, online gambling platform PKR 'The Second Life of gambling' the article illustrates how the avatar has a key role in the routinization of online gambling and cultivating affective investment from gamblers. The process of creating, maintaining and updating avatars promotes spending winnings in-…
Digitally Mediated Iconoclasm: The Islamic State and the war on cultural heritage
This paper puts forward the new analytical framework of ‘Digitally Mediated Iconoclasm’ (DMI) to analyse and interpret iconoclastic acts that are experienced through the propaganda (videos, social media, photographs, and other media) that the actor perpetrating the destruction makes available in global information networks for its consumption, duplication, and distribution. DMI captures three stages of the destruction (before, during and after th…
Smartphone Cultures
Social betting apps, (e.g. Tedbets, Youbetme, Betable and BuddyBet) are new mobile platforms that mediate wagering among friends by providing a system through which the parameters of the bet are established and a payout guaranteed. Accessed via smartphones, these apps fall into the category of what we have previously termed ‘mobile social gambling’, an evolving set of techno-social assemblages. In this chapter the authors conduct a techno-cultura…
Political and mobile media landscapes in Mexico: The case of #yosoy132
While mobile media, such as low-cost mobiles, smartphones, tablets, and mobile Internet, are being taken up widely around the globe, we have little understanding about their implications for media geographies. In this paper, we take up the question of mobile media geographies via a case study of the 2012 Mexican election – and the student movement called #yosoy132. In this paper, we examine the political and cultural stakes of online and mobile m…
Mobile social gambling: Poker’s next frontier
In this paper, we provide a history, analysis, and theorization of the emergence of mobile social gambling—a new form of media and cultural practice that fuses “social gambling” and “social gaming,” with the affordances of mobile platforms and social networking sites. Through the use of apps in mobile devices, the consumption of risk is experiencing a shift from space-bound betting to itinerant practices that open new spaces for leisure and socia…
Digitally Mediated Iconoclasm: The Islamic State and the war on cultural heritage
This paper puts forward the new analytical framework of ‘Digitally Mediated Iconoclasm’ (DMI) to analyse and interpret iconoclastic acts that are experienced through the propaganda (videos, social media, photographs, and other media) that the actor perpetrating the destruction makes available in global information networks for its consumption, duplication, and distribution. DMI captures three stages of the destruction (before, during and after th…
Global Trafficking Networks on Film and Television: Hollywood’s Cartel Wars
This book draws on a multi-method study of film and television narratives of global criminal networks to explore the links between audiovisual media, criminal networks and global audiences in the age of digital content distribution. Mapping out media representations of the ongoing war on drugs in Mexico and the United States, the author delves into the social, cultural and geopolitical impacts of distribution and consumption of these media. With …
Mobile social gambling: Poker’s next frontier
In this paper, we provide a history, analysis, and theorization of the emergence of mobile social gambling—a new form of media and cultural practice that fuses “social gambling” and “social gaming,” with the affordances of mobile platforms and social networking sites. Through the use of apps in mobile devices, the consumption of risk is experiencing a shift from space-bound betting to itinerant practices that open new spaces for leisure and socia…
Postcolonial Superheroes: Unmasking Black Panther: Wakanda Forever and Namor, Its Mesoamerican Antihero
The emergence of autolography: The 'magical' invocation of images from text through AI
In mid-2022, AI systems automatically translating text into evocative original images became an internet sensation. People compared it to magic: invoking an uncannily competent artist-magician. We call it 'autolography' from the Greek 'automatos + logos + graphos' (self + word + drawing). Following a discourse analysis of online publications comparing autolography to magic, we analyse its enthusiastic reception from some and critique from others.…
Creed: Legacy franchising, race and masculinity in contemporary boxing films
This article explores the ways in which director Ryan Coogler’s 2015 film Creed reactivates the Rocky franchise and provides an actualization of the themes of race and contemporary masculinity inherent in American boxing cinema. By defining Creed as a legacy film, a method of franchise nostalgia concerned with inheritance, we explain how the movie constitutes a passing-of-the-torch ritual in Hollywood. If Stallone’s Rocky gave audiences a glimpse…
Poker avatars: Affective Investment and Everyday Gambling Platforms
This article examines the use of player-controlled avatars on digital gambling platforms and apps. Through a discussion of the influential, but now defunct, online gambling platform PKR 'The Second Life of gambling' the article illustrates how the avatar has a key role in the routinization of online gambling and cultivating affective investment from gamblers. The process of creating, maintaining and updating avatars promotes spending winnings in-…
Political and mobile media landscapes in Mexico: The case of #yosoy132
While mobile media, such as low-cost mobiles, smartphones, tablets, and mobile Internet, are being taken up widely around the globe, we have little understanding about their implications for media geographies. In this paper, we take up the question of mobile media geographies via a case study of the 2012 Mexican election – and the student movement called #yosoy132. In this paper, we examine the political and cultural stakes of online and mobile m…
Mobile social gambling: Poker’s next frontier
In this paper, we provide a history, analysis, and theorization of the emergence of mobile social gambling—a new form of media and cultural practice that fuses “social gambling” and “social gaming,” with the affordances of mobile platforms and social networking sites. Through the use of apps in mobile devices, the consumption of risk is experiencing a shift from space-bound betting to itinerant practices that open new spaces for leisure and socia…
Political and mobile media landscapes in Mexico: The case of #yosoy132
While mobile media, such as low-cost mobiles, smartphones, tablets, and mobile Internet, are being taken up widely around the globe, we have little understanding about their implications for media geographies. In this paper, we take up the question of mobile media geographies via a case study of the 2012 Mexican election – and the student movement called #yosoy132. In this paper, we examine the political and cultural stakes of online and mobile m…
Smartphone Cultures
Social betting apps, (e.g. Tedbets, Youbetme, Betable and BuddyBet) are new mobile platforms that mediate wagering among friends by providing a system through which the parameters of the bet are established and a payout guaranteed. Accessed via smartphones, these apps fall into the category of what we have previously termed ‘mobile social gambling’, an evolving set of techno-social assemblages. In this chapter the authors conduct a techno-cultura…
Digitally Mediated Iconoclasm: The Islamic State and the war on cultural heritage
This paper puts forward the new analytical framework of ‘Digitally Mediated Iconoclasm’ (DMI) to analyse and interpret iconoclastic acts that are experienced through the propaganda (videos, social media, photographs, and other media) that the actor perpetrating the destruction makes available in global information networks for its consumption, duplication, and distribution. DMI captures three stages of the destruction (before, during and after th…
Creed: Legacy franchising, race and masculinity in contemporary boxing films
This article explores the ways in which director Ryan Coogler’s 2015 film Creed reactivates the Rocky franchise and provides an actualization of the themes of race and contemporary masculinity inherent in American boxing cinema. By defining Creed as a legacy film, a method of franchise nostalgia concerned with inheritance, we explain how the movie constitutes a passing-of-the-torch ritual in Hollywood. If Stallone’s Rocky gave audiences a glimpse…
Poker avatars: Affective Investment and Everyday Gambling Platforms
This article examines the use of player-controlled avatars on digital gambling platforms and apps. Through a discussion of the influential, but now defunct, online gambling platform PKR 'The Second Life of gambling' the article illustrates how the avatar has a key role in the routinization of online gambling and cultivating affective investment from gamblers. The process of creating, maintaining and updating avatars promotes spending winnings in-…
Global Trafficking Networks on Film and Television: Hollywood’s Cartel Wars
This book draws on a multi-method study of film and television narratives of global criminal networks to explore the links between audiovisual media, criminal networks and global audiences in the age of digital content distribution. Mapping out media representations of the ongoing war on drugs in Mexico and the United States, the author delves into the social, cultural and geopolitical impacts of distribution and consumption of these media. With …
Cartels, memes, and digital platforms: The digital myths of ‘El Chapo’ Guzmán
Since the late 1970s, the Mexican government has been embroiled in an armed conflict with the drug cartels, and criminal organisations have engaged in violent confrontations with each other. Violence escalated in 2006 under the presidency of Felipe Calderón Hinojosa, and since then killings have become spectacular and highly mediatised. An often-overlooked front of the cartel wars is the use of non-official networked media that generates and sust…
Addressing the accountability gap: Gambling advertising and social media platform responsibilities
This commentary reports on gambling advertisements served to Australians on Facebook in 2021-2022 that we discovered through a research project that uses novel data donation infrastructure to improve the observability of platform-based advertising. Preliminary findings show that advertisements for online casinos appear on social media and are served to people tagged as located in Australia despite laws that prohibit both the operation and adverti…
The emergence of autolography: The 'magical' invocation of images from text through AI
In mid-2022, AI systems automatically translating text into evocative original images became an internet sensation. People compared it to magic: invoking an uncannily competent artist-magician. We call it 'autolography' from the Greek 'automatos + logos + graphos' (self + word + drawing). Following a discourse analysis of online publications comparing autolography to magic, we analyse its enthusiastic reception from some and critique from others.…
Salad Fingers: Pre-YouTube digital uncanny and the ‘weird’ future of animation
In 2004, artist David Firth launched the lo-fi animation Salad Fingers in the user-generated content sharing platform Newgrounds. The series, focused on a strange, unsettling narrative about a character that acts as a child but commits unhinged violent acts, went on to become viral in the earliest days of YouTube. Created with the software Flash (launched by Macromedia and then acquired by Adobe), which generates vector images, Salad Fingers is a…
Migrant arrests and deportations on fictional television during the Trump era (2017–2021): From tokenistic storytelling to narrative activism
This article is a comparative analysis discussing the representation of migrant deportations, apprehensions, and raids by ICE in contemporary US television and streaming. The depiction of migration issues was a narrative and rhetorical constant in some fictional US television shows during the Donald Trump presidency (2017–2021), dramatizing the struggles of undocumented and newly arrived migrants and their families. These shows, which range from …
Predator's Prey: Reframing indigenous representation and Hollywood franchise cinema in the age of SVOD
Hulu's Prey (2022), the fifth installment of the Predator franchise, is set in 1719 and features a Comanche female protagonist. The setting is unlike the 1987 Predator and its sequels, with their hardbody machismo and conservative politics. We argue that Prey is a small but significant step in Hollywood, but its inclusivity comes at a price. Though praised as progressive, it perpetuates a worldview in which Native Americans are ‘noble savages’ an…
La Coreañera” plays cumbia: Reimagining “Asianness” in Latin American visual social media cultures
Postcolonial Superheroes: Unmasking Black Panther: Wakanda Forever and Namor, Its Mesoamerican Antihero
Netflix's high-end global telefantasy: Conspicuous and virtual localism
Netflix has commissioned and released an increasing number of high-end international series that tap into the genres of science fiction, fantasy and horror. These follow one of two strategies: (1) local productions that engage with local folklore and myths, or (2) productions centred in the 'West', where international talent is brought in to create cosmopolitan 'global' TV events such as 1899 (2022). The first strategy brings together local story…
A24’s brand aura: Commodifying “alternative” cinephilia
Representing Marichuy Online: Digital Listening And Indigenous Voice In The Latin American Political Periphery
In 2018, Nahua healer and activist María de Jesús Patricio Martínez, Marichuy, launched a campaign to become an independent candidate for the Mexican presidency. Marichuy’s campaign is a key precedent to understand the 2024 political juncture of presidential campaigns in Mexico, resulting in the election of the country’s first female president. Although Marichuy did not gather enough signatures to have her name on the ballot, her unprecedented ef…
Political science (12 works) · Sociology (12 works) · Law (9 works) · Art (8 works) · Media studies (8 works) · Computer Science (7 works) · Digital Games and Media (7 works) · Law (6 works) · Literature (6 works) · Business (5 works)