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The (Im)possibility of Blackness in the Classroom
No full textThe (Im)possibility of Blackness in the Classroom is a multimedia installation by Kevin J. Brazant that marks the curatorial launch of his signature pedagogy, Lounge Akademics™ a platform that archives, amplifies, and disrupts learning from the margins. The work explores Black presence, identity, and resistance as radical acts of cultural authorship. Drawing on his Disrupt the Discourse (DtD) research in co-creation, the installation blends moving visuals, ambient sound, and sonic excerpts to embody “sonic pedagogy.” A live Lounge Akademics™ session with artist Karla Cornwall extends this work as storytelling, archive, and act of radical listening
Global Fashion: Unequal Exchange Between the Capitalist Center and Periphery
No full textGlobal fashion refers to the worldwide system of clothing production, distribution, and consumption, driven above all by capital’s imperative to expand. This expansion is evident in the relocation of production to countries with the lowest wages and weakest labor protections, the exploitation of surplus populations of garment workers through racial hierarchies, and the general cheapening of labor power. The system operates unevenly across regions, distributing benefits unequally in ways that both reflect and reinforce colonial structures. Many formerly colonized regions and their fashion systems are incorporated into global fashion as peripheries, supplying labor and “authenticity” to corporations, media, and educational institutions in the capitalist core.
This chapter critically examines how the capitalist world-system and global fashion as its product depend on neocolonial power relations and unequal exchanges between the centers and peripheries of the global economy. In doing so, it seeks to bridge studies of fashion and decolonization with critical political economy. Such an approach accounts for the surplus value extracted from fashion’s peripheries, demands its redistribution, challenges the relentless accumulation and monopolization of capital–now the greatest threat to the survival of the planet–and, in doing so, opens the possibility of decolonization on a planetary scale.
Keywords: Capital, Race, Coloniality, World-system, Delinkin
Brewing Knowledge: Filmmaking as Research in Experimental Archaeology
No full textDrunk? Adventures in sixteenth Century Brewing is a research-based film produced within the ERC-funded FoodCult project (2019–2025). Developed in collaboration with historians, archaeologists, craftspeople, scientists, and filmmakers, the film follows the reconstruction of a sixteenth-century beer through experimental archaeology. The film was conceived, from the outset of the project, as a mode of inquiry, with filmmaking shaping how the reconstruction was interpreted and communicated. This article examines the film as creative practice research, focusing on three dimensions: radical interdisciplinarity, where cinematic and editorial decisions brought different forms of expertise into dialogue; materiality, where framing and sound design highlighted tools, ingredients, and environments as co-actors in the reconstruction; and embodiment, where the camera conveyed tacit skills, sensory awareness, and affective responses. Audience reception, gathered through questionnaires, Q&A discussions, and teaching contexts (cited as pers. comm.), is considered alongside close analysis of the filmmaking to evaluate the project’s dialogical and pedagogical value. We show that filmmaking can operate as a research method in its own right, generating historical insights, facilitating interdisciplinary exchange, and extending the reach of historical inquiry to wider publics
Remembering/imagining: Shona Illingworth’s time present and Trinh-T Minh-Ha’s forgetting Vietnam
Get PDFThis article considers the intersecting of remembering and imagining vis à vis individual and cultural amnesia. It focuses on two artists’ films, Shona Illingworth’s video installation Time Present (2016) and Trinh-T Minh-Ha’s film, Forgetting Vietnam (2015). Time Present portrays the experience of an individual living with amnesia and further relates it to the immobility that denotes the cultural representation of the island of St Kilda (Outer Hebrides). Forgetting Vietnam questions the problematic legacy of the Vietnam War and its recollection by bridging personal and shared experiences through a portrait of Vietnam itself. Both Illingworth and Trinh use film’s features of frames and movement to convey the emotional and affective resonances of the experiences and places presented to generate the possibility of presence. This article closely examines Time Present and Forgetting Vietnam with a focus on the films’ respective structures and thematic developments and reads them by suggesting the intersecting of remembering and imagining culturally and its potentiality for engaging with absence and silenced histories through decentralized approaches
Research-Led Pluralist Typographic Practices: Case Studies from South Asia
Get PDFThis article is grounded in an exploration conducted by the author on publishing as a platform that brings intercultural communication, pluralism, graphic design and typography into productive dialogue with each other through engaged (in social and political issues; in creative, educational, and critical practice) and situated (local communities; international networks of editors, translators, designers, illustrators, publishers, and readers) design research frameworks and practices. This has resulted in an exploration of spaces in which new kinds of documents can be created, with, by and for marginalized publics, and, conversely, how the production of new texts and images creates spaces that enable emancipatory, temporary, or subversive practices to occur that suggest new directions for the practice of typography and typographic frameworks. This exploration through design research and practice, is framed by the author’s own context, as that of a South Asian designer and researcher, working in the Global North.
Some of the initial thinking in this article was explored in a chapter for The Routledge Companion to Design Research — 2nd Edition. The article takes a holistic, post-disciplinary approach to graphic design and typography aiming to challenge notions of graphic design as purely aesthetic or craft-based, or as concerns of form and function. It calls for a shift in considering the wider politics and contributions of visual language — graphic design and typography specifically — to societal change. Additionally, it reframes research-led practices (and thereby visual language and typography), not as an elite activity but as a human practice that emerges as curiosity and intent. Such an approach is critical to undertake considering a global health crisis, climate emergency and with issues of conflict and social injustice where communication plays a pivotal role. The article concludes that how we approach design research and practice needs to be rethought so that it makes a meaningful contribution to planetary issues
Social Media and Society: Platforms, Publics, and Anti-Publics
Get PDFThe Special Issue on Platforms, publics, and anti-publics focused on the complex intersection of platforms, including issues around their ownership, datafication, business models, and algorithms; and the emergence of publics and anti-publics online, which has been increasingly impacted by platforms infrastructures and designs. This Special Issue underscores the need to understand how online publics are influenced by sociotechnical affordances and shaped by the political and ideological influence of platforms’ governances. The articles featured in this issue explore the role of digital platforms in relation to sociability and public discourse; and dive into the discussion of publics, marked by the emergence of online communities and sociability online, and anti-publics on social media, poisoned by political propaganda and online abuse. The articles included in the issue are extended versions of the research presented at the 2024 International Conference on Social Media and Society (#SMSociety)
Inheriting the Family: Objects, Identities and Emotions
No full textMuch of our cultural heritage emerges from family histories – with many of the objects curated in museums, stories passed between generations, and monuments marking notable figures being the direct product of familial collections, donations, and investments. This edited collection uses emotion as an analytical tool to interpret such behaviours, and offers novel ways to investigate how and why family inheritances from a range of social, racial, and ethnic groups maintain their cultural power, as they move through time and from the private to the public spheres.
Drawing on a variety of case studies, and exploring items ranging from Victorian library chairs, to quilts, religious texts, and pieces of intergenerational writing – this volume considers the role of objects and inheritances in the emotional lives of individuals and families, and acknowledges them as agents in the creation of histories and identities. Combining insight from scholars of the history of emotions with that of historians and researchers situated outside the academy, this collection allows fresh insights on family history and material culture to emerge
Otto Dix and the Memorialization of World War I in German Visual Culture, 1914–1936
Get PDFThe First World War was a defining experience for the German painter Otto Dix (1891–1969), as it was for many artists of his generation. The years he spent on the front uniquely qualified him to show the public the war as he – and many of his fellow veterans – experienced and remembered it. Throughout the years of the Weimar Republic (1919–1933), the memorialisation of the war was, however, highly contested in both visual culture and written discourse. Dix produced artworks that were among the most controversial and celebrated contributions to the public debate about the truth and the meaning of the war. In her tightly focused study, Ann Murray investigates Dix’s most confrontational representations of the war and their reception in Germany: his Dadaist depictions of war amputees of the early 1920s, the lost work The Trench (1923), the large print portfolio The War (1924), the triptych Metropolis (1928), and his monumental multi-panel composition War (1929–1932) – works that challenged dominant heroic narratives and offered stark visual testimony to the war’s trauma
Fragments of The Tempest: A Prototype development of hair, make-up and prosthetics artistry for gaming and digital experiences
Get PDFMaking Connections: Staff Voice in Decision-Making and Governance at University of the Arts London
No full textUAL’s Social Purpose Lab, in collaboration with the People and Culture Group, commissioned a service design review of the infrastructure, processes, and systems for informal staff voice to the Service Futures Lab. The goal was to strengthen connections between the grassroots energy, ambition, and imagination of UAL’s staff community and the University’s decision-making processes. This project aimed to accelerate UAL’s ability to achieve its social purpose goals, particularly in areas of Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion (EDI), and was expected to define a methodology to replicate the same process towards Social and Environmental Sustainability