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Who Cares About The Colourists?
No full textWhen academics, fans and historians discuss the comics industry they tend to privilege the work of writers and artists, excluding the other professionals such as inkers, colourists and letterers who are intrinsic to the production of these texts. In mainstream superhero comics this happens despite the fact that all of these professionals are usually named in exactly the same way, alongside each other in credit boxes on the first page of the story. This paper will illustrate this disparity by comparing the results of a survey of comic fans with an empirical analysis texts within the so-called 'Marvel Age', demonstrating the huge difference between the people fans think created their favourite stories, and the people who actually did. It will look for societal explanations for this problem via Cultural Memory theory and individual reasons via Fuzzy Trace Theory, before finally explaining - with a song - why this is a vital issue not just for comics studies but for society as a whole
Fashioning the National Body through Patchwork
No full textA mystic curator, ‘manga kewpies’ and fantastical super-pigs are pieced together in this history of Korean patchwork. Commonly known in South Korea as jogakbo, the national histories of the form arise from a period of cultural preservation under government policy. The written record of the textile that is composed of fragments sutured together can be traced to the authorship and conservation work of Huh Dong Hwa (1926-2018), a private patron of the arts, whose collection of Korean textiles and embroideries were posthumously donated to the Seoul Museum of Craft Art. The sewn together forms now signify narratives of Korean womanhood labouring under the disciplining confines of neo-Confucian society during the Joseon period. As a result, the form has come to also symbolise the national body. This lecture explores how these ornamental objects and surfaces move through multiple significations, reinforcing and complicating the nationalist histories of Korean women
Grey Milk & Lost Kin Re-sounding, Re-visioning and Re-membering Trauma in the Scottish Nawkin Archives
No full textRecent scholarship has begun to address the violence of colonial legacies that erase Indigenous and local knowledge systems, cultural heritage, and collective identity. Yet Scottish Nawkin communities from the southwest borderlands remain absent from these conversations. Situated in radical dissonance with Eurocentric epistemologies and systematically erased by the extractive logics of racial capitalism, Nawkin people remain among the most socioeconomically marginalised and culturally dispossessed groups within Britain’s racialised hierarchy. Many conceal their identities to evade the state’s Gypsy/Traveller designation and its regimes of stigma, ostracism, surveillance, and assimilation. The Scottish Government’s recent acknowledgment of cultural genocide affirms what Nawkin communities have long known: that state violence operates through epistemic theft, enforced forgetting, and the destruction of relational lifeways. Emerging from ancestral refusal, this practice-led research traces a radical ancestry not through linear recovery but through fugitive affiliation with encrypted and subjugated knowledge systems. As a descendant of Nawkin forebears who concealed our genealogy to survive capture, I approach this work as both reclamation and protection. Encrypted custodianship becomes a fugitive praxis—grounded in concealment, kinship, and the safeguarding of ancestral knowledge from extraction. At its core is a radical methodology animated by Nawkin poetic traditions—encrypted, mimetic, and rhythmically insurgent. These traditions transmit knowledge through gesture, cadence, and spectral presence, resisting archival legibility and institutional capture. Through kin(a)esthetic tinkering and writing along the film track, the thesis enacts an anarchival, anti-disciplinary praxis that reimagines research as ritual, poetics, and refusal. Framed as a potential history (Azoulay 2024), the research reimagines Nawkin cosmologies as cinesonic epistemology and living cultural force—summoning what continues to reverberate in embodied, encrypted, and insurgent form, and affirming relationality as a strategy of knowledge justice
The Critical Fitting
Get PDFWe propose here an alternative method for teaching ‘garment fit’ within fashion design education: The Critical Fitting. This workshop method has been developed through ongoing practice-based research. This project contributes to a growing body of work within fashion design pedagogy that critiques the ‘dominant assumptions of Eurocentric fashion epistemologies’ embedded in the technical practices, skills and tools currently taught to fashion design students (Ahmed, 2022, p.401). Our own experience as educators (teaching design, patterncutting, fashion studies and science and technology studies) informs the development of these workshops. To date, iterations of the workshop have been run at a number of global fashion and science and technology studies conferences, with London College of Fashion students and educators (as standalone workshops and embedded within the students’ design and technical units). We have also run the workshop in collaboration with other fashion schools. In line with many other fashion educators who are ‘building communities of resistance’ through radical and speculative teaching methods, the creativity of the fashion school, or rather its educators and students, provides us with an opportunity to ‘destabilise the self-reinforcing power structures of the twenty-first century fashion industry’ (Gardner & Mohajer va Pesaran, 2023, p.9)
Surrealist Resistance in the Digital Age: Attention, Daydreaming and Virtuality as Potentiality
No full textJonathan Crary, art historian, cultural theorist, and the author of the major work Suspension of Perception: Attention, Spectacle, and Modern Culture (1999), discusses how our perceptions have been disciplined and institutionalised in tandem with technological innovations in modernity, including the development of observational apparatus and visual techniques, which fundamentally reformulated our psychological and physical dimensions. While this may sound unfamiliar, there is an underlying relationship between Crary's work and Surrealism, particularly when he discusses daydreaming as a 'domain of resistance internal to any system of routinisation or coercion'.
In October 1924, the centenary of the publication of André Breton's Surrealist Manifesto was celebrated with a major exhibition at the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris. What was the era like a hundred years ago? Some time had passed since the invention of various audiovisual apparatus, such as photography and cinema. The era of consumer society, popular culture and the media had arrived. People were adopting a new identity as the now familiar ‘masses’ or ‘consumers’, and a major reorganisation of perception and the body was taking place alongside this. A century later, we are witnessing the remarkable (almost violent) penetration of digital technology into our daily lives, and once again experiencing a significant reorganisation of perception and the body.
In my presentation, I will discuss the potential for resistance in the digital age by reimagining Surrealism's transgressive strategy. We are living in the digital age where the 'attention economy' is on the rise. When 'attention' itself becomes the focus and is increasingly exposed to violent exploitation and manipulation as it is formulated into a commodity, how can we conceive a space that resists the colonisation of our final frontier: the realm of our psyche
About the Night
Get PDFThis practice-led research project critically examines the micro-level creative practices of producing and directing the short fiction film About the Night (2023), while exploring innovative approaches to storytelling. The ambition for the film was to push boundaries of form, style, and narrative structure, without becoming purely experimental. I aimed to work professionally but outside an industrial context to identify barriers to innovation within the creative process.
One of the core research questions became: how can production dynamics be rethought to foster more innovative and inclusive storytelling? A second followed: how can we break free from conventional constraints, given that even arthouse cinema largely adheres to traditional storytelling norms?
About the Night centres on a belligerent young waiter and a woman seeking solace in a late-night café. Initially inspired by a Hemingway story, the narrative explores an everyday moment between two strangers, grounded in the belief that small acts of kindness can change the world. The research underscores the value of embracing production as a site of inquiry, so that we can learn to foster more daring and socially transformative storytelling practices.
While About the Night was made in a relatively safe environment, most filmmakers lack this security. The research highlights how filmmaking is inherently shaped by friction and setbacks, with key creative moments emerging as story needs are balanced against real-world constraints. Effective collaboration demands both critical thinking and creative insight to navigate content, intent, and necessary compromises. Each contributor must negotiate and refine their role to achieve the final product.
To remove barriers for emerging filmmakers, it's not just about skills and training — we must also create safe environments that mitigate risk, enabling creatives to thrive. This research calls for a deeper understanding of production dynamics to challenge dominant practices and foster innovation beyond the auteur model
Cuts, Shreds, Remains and Scraps: Challenging the Authority of Language in Critical Fashion Knowledge
No full textThis presentation concerns the location of theory within fashion design education. At London College of Fashion where I lead the teaching of Fashion Theory, students undertake theoretical modules alongside their design classes, which are led and taught separately by the Cultural and Historical Studies Department. This can often create a false spatial and disciplinary divide between practice and theory. Furthermore, it often means that the teaching of theory becomes associated with hierarchical ideas of worthiness and power, weighed down with a perceived ‘academic voice’ (Wilson, 2016). In my presentation, I will discuss a workshop that I have developed that aims to break down these hierarchies by, quite literally, cutting up theory into fragments and reconfiguring it into experimental, visual ‘essays’. The workshop engages students in a practice-based methodologies, using language as a material (Goldsmith, 2011) to construct visual and poetic outcomes, and theory as scraps of ideas to think with - rather than a distant and separate academic field.
Goldsmith, K. (2011) Uncreative Writing. New York: Columbia University Press
Wilson, S. (2016) (2016) Where Theory Belongs. Four Ways to Experience a Seminar in Contemporary Art. Tate Research Centre Working Papers
Scoping innovative retail product returns pathways
Get PDFPurpose
Product returns in omnichannel retail are wasteful and generate significant financial and environmental impact. Returns systems often suffer from low efficiency and effectiveness. Innovative technology and service solutions are proposed by an increasing number of startups, with many enabling new more effective and sustainable pathways for returned products to be sold again whilst conserving product value.
Design/methodology/approach
By adopting an engaged research approach involving close dialogue with retailers as well as technology and returns service providers, this paper explores the implications of adopting these innovations and the outcomes for retailers and suppliers, employees, and consumers. Using the lens of the retail technology adoption framework by Shankar et al. (2021), this paper investigates how innovation in technology and process can enable alternative pathways for consumer product returns. Some offer added value to consumers, and many reduce waste and allow retailers to conserve the value of returned products.
Findings
Retailers increasingly take control of secondary markets to increase the retained value of returned products, shorten pathways to resale, and increase resale rates. Peer-to-peer returns, “trying whilst the courier waits,” and the returns ecosystem approach all optimize returns management, impacting both the forward and reverse logistics of retail.
Research limitations/implications
The study focused on fashion items, but offers relevance for household items, furniture, sports equipment, and other items with similar characteristics.
Originality/value
This paper suggests extending the retail technology adoption framework to include the aspect of value conservation, in addition to the existing value-adding and commoditising features. The new pathways enable retailers to address the challenges of high returns rates, financial pressure, whilst reducing environmental impact
The infra-ordinary shuffle
Get PDFEducator Colin Priest navigates the infra-ordinary through improvisation, between making and sound toward a porous pedagogy. Invigorating institutional routine to image a collective experience of an experimental spatial design teaching studio
Public Design in the UK Government: A Review of the Landscape and its Future Development
Get PDFThis is a report published by the Cabinet Office, UK Government, as part of the Public Design Evidence Review in 2025, authored by an interdisciplinary team of academics - Lucy Kimbell, Catherine Durose, Rainer Kattel, and Liz Richardson.
The report argues there is growing evidence that public design has untapped potential to help address challenges facing governments. The report reviews and synthesises the existing evidence and activities across the UK government associated with ‘design’. It offers a list of practices generally seen as associated with design; a working definition of public design; and a framework that shows what public design adds to the policy cycle.
Using the evidence base available, the report offers illustrative examples of an important range of outcomes and impacts from using public design practices. It also outlines important questions about how to address barriers that inhibit the potential of design to be realised in government