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