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Small-Store Utopianism

Jie Li

Theory, Culture and Society2026https://doi.org/10.1177/02632764261427661article
AJG 3
Weight
0.50

What the paper says

This article examines a utopian impulse in popular culture and activism through a reading of cultural objects disseminated from East Asia. It terms this impulse ‘small-store utopianism’, seeing it as a cultural imagination that anchors hope in small-scale retail spaces, and explores its emergence, characteristics, and potentiality. The article argues that: (1) this impulse emerges in response to various contexts shaped by intersecting forms of power and precarity that are entangled with forces such as neoliberalism and neostatism; (2) such a utopianism mythologizes small stores as having a capacity to deviate from their capitalist ‘storeness’ to shelter vulnerable bodies, memories, and experiments; and (3) such deviated storeness is enabled by storekeeping and storytelling – cultural practices which may foster infrastructures of hope in everyday life, grounding and disseminating other utopian visions such as convivialism and commoning.

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https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1177/02632764261427661

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@article{jie2026,
  title        = {{Small-Store Utopianism}},
  author       = {Jie Li},
  journal      = {Theory, Culture and Society},
  year         = {2026},
  doi          = {https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1177/02632764261427661},
}

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Small-Store Utopianism

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Evidence weight

0.50

Balanced mode · F 0.40 / M 0.15 / V 0.05 / R 0.40

F · citation impact0.50 × 0.4 = 0.20
M · momentum0.50 × 0.15 = 0.07
V · venue signal0.50 × 0.05 = 0.03
R · text relevance †0.50 × 0.4 = 0.20

† Text relevance is estimated at 0.50 on the detail page — for your query’s actual relevance score, open this paper from a search result.