Inclusive Exclusion: The Labubu Model of Contemporary Interculturality

This book renews our understanding of contemporary interculturality and today’s intercultural world through an illuminating case study of the Labubu phenomenon.

Why do we queue for hours, shake blind boxes and refresh screens at 10 p.m. just for the privilege of buying something we did not even want yesterday? What does our hunger for a grinning monster reveal about how we connect, belong and exclude in today’s divided world? Beneath these questions lies an ultimate search for the driving force behind the mania: What are we really chasing? The authors offer a surprising answer: ourselves. Drawing on critical interculturality, the sociology of consumption, media studies and discourse analysis, this interdisciplinary work examines media coverage, social media conversations and ethnographic fieldwork from countries such as China, Finland and France. It unpacks the hyper-capitalist machinery of artificial scarcity, emotional commerce and strategic emptiness, introducing the Labubu Model of Interculturality (LMI) – a framework for understanding how consumption has become the primary language of belonging in a glocalised world.

Written for scholars, students and curious readers alike, this book offers an intriguing and thought-provoking study for those drawn to the Labubu vogue, as well as researchers engaged in intercultural studies, business and marketing and postmodern studies.

Ning Chen is Lecturer at the Tianjin Academy of Fine Arts, China, and Visiting Researcher/Professor at the University of Helsinki, Finland. His work focuses on critical and reflexive approaches to interculturality in education and beyond.

Fred Dervin is Professor of Multicultural Education at the University of Helsinki, Finland. With over 300 publications, he aims to disrupt conventional understandings of identity and global interaction.