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Three Ways of Returning
Full text linkThree Ways of Returning comprises three filmmakers’ reflections on the themes of home, exile and relation. Guo leads us into the lively seascape of contemporary China, presenting snapshots of local fishermen’s lives from her radically changed home village, under threat from the globalised corporate maritime industries. Zimmerman employs a disquieting and startlingly intimate lens to look back into their childhood and adolescent years in Germany, and the challenging intergenerational violence that persists. Akbari brings us into the intimacy of her family, exiled from Iran, and reveals the profound complexity of personal and political aspects of migrant life in Canada. These three short films together create a richly textured exploration of home and belonging of lives in various forms of exile, and the strategies of surviving and thriving that accompany this displacement
Perception is a Spike Turned Inward: Reflecting on Contemporary Events through Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
Full text linkThis essay examines how Sir Gawain and the Green Knight provides a critical framework for understanding contemporary moral and epistemological failures. Through the lens of the Green Knight as a monstrous figure embodying both judgment and transformative grace, I analyze three recent events that exemplify modern evasions of moral reckoning: Richard Dawkins' rigid empiricism and dismissal of symbolic thought, Archbishop Justin Welby's institutional protection over justice in response to abuse allegations, and the mechanized violence of drone warfare that distances aggressors from the human consequences of their actions. Drawing on Alfred North Whitehead's philosophy of symbolism and Slavoj Žižek's theorization of Christ as monstrous rupture, I argue that the Green Knight represents a necessary disruption to ideological stability—a force that refuses to allow individuals to remain comfortable within their inherited frameworks. The essay contends that contemporary figures of authority, like Gawain's pentangle, construct artificial systems of certainty that ultimately fail when confronted with moral complexity. By "puncturing the fantasy" of both medieval romance and modern rationalism, I demonstrate how the poem's central figure challenges us to recognize perception itself as "a spike turned inward"—a violence we enact upon ourselves in pursuit of certainty. In an age of algorithmic chaos, institutional corruption, and dehumanized warfare, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight remains urgently relevant, offering not nostalgia but a medieval mirror reflecting our contemporary inability to submit ourselves to genuine transformation
Reflexive Effects of Articulated Negative Word of Mouth on the Sender’s Brand Hate and Future NWOM Intentions: Mediating Role of Brand Hate and Coping Mechanisms
Full text linkUnderstanding the influence of verbalised negative word of mouth (NWOM) on the sender received little research attention despite its consequences for both theory and marketing scholarship. Two studies employing cross-sectional scenario-based experimental research expands the word of mouth, brand hate and coping literature by investigating the reflexive effects of NWOM on senders’ brand hate and future NWOM intentions. Additionally, the mediating role of brand hate and coping mechanisms (active coping and venting) is examined in explaining the relationship between NWOM behaviour and future NWOM intentions. The moderating role of tie strength was also examined. Hospitality and mobile phone services are the research contexts of this study, and the sample (N = 614) is recruited in the United Kingdom via a commercial consumer panel. Results suggest that novel to extant literature, articulation of NWOM about a brand strengthens NWOM sender’s brand hate and augments their future NWOM intentions. Furthermore, brand hate mediates the relationship between NWOM behaviour and future NWOM intentions. Therefore, this study progresses the theoretical understanding of the NWOM–brand hate relationship. The findings further reveal the serial mediating effect of NWOM behaviour on senders’ future NWOM intentions through brand hate, venting, and active coping. However, this research found no differential impact of tie strength on the NWOM sender’s brand hate and intended NWOM behaviour. This research will allow marketing managers to comprehend the impact of given customer NWOM on their brand from the sender’s perspective and to understand the psychological mechanisms supporting the diffusion of brand related NWOM
The Arts in HCI Tapestry: Networking, Making, and Reflecting Together
Full text linkThroughout history, the arts and creative practices have played a pivotal role in HCI. They serve as inspirations, challenges, and innovative avenues for learning and extending HCI methods. While HCI often prioritises empirical evidence and outcomes, the art world emphasises diversity, process, and personal experiences. As generative AI and interdisciplinary collaboration grow, the relationship between art and HCI is undergoing a transformative shift, affecting how wemakeand think. Tapestries have long recorded changing narratives, practices, memories, and identities, capturing transformation. By tradition, they are collaborative productions of skilled craftspeople. Inspired by this, the meetup invites artists, designers, makers, technologists, researchers, educators, and others to create a shared tapestry ‘beyond warp and weft’. Attendees may contribute sensory elements to a paper surface (warp), including visual, tactile, auditory, kinaesthetic, gustatory, olfactory, cross-sensory, and social aspects (weft). The completed tapestry serves as a collective narrative that encapsulates the shared experiences of participants
Fashion on the Frontier: Photography, Time and Colonial Modernity on the Madeira-Mamoré Railroad, Brazil
No full textFashion on the Frontier: Photography, Time and Colonial Modernity on the Madeira-Mamoré Railroad, Brazil (2026) examines the relationship between fashion, photography and the temporal regimes of colonial modernity in the Brazilian Amazon. It explores how land was demarcated with the expansion of the North American frontier in South America, but also how the contours of different ethnic and racialised bodies were delineated and articulated through fashion and via the pseudo-scientific medium of photography. It moves across diverse fields of thought to consider histories and theories of photography and fashion, modernity and coloniality, labour and domesticity, gender and whiteness, whilst deploying innovative and pertinent historical methodologies for thinking about archival hegemonies and silences. By interrogating History as a critical practice in the fashioning of Latin America, her research questions the emphases and erasures that haunt Brazilian fashion histories
Digital Exhaustion: Burnout, Fatigue and Overload in the Age of Constant Connectivity
No full textOverflowing inboxes, relentless, back-to-back Zoom calls, and the constant buzz of meetings. Nonstop notifications. Daily life in digital culture can be exhausting. This timely and urgent edited collection introduces ‘digital exhaustion’ as a conceptual lens to critically examine the ever-expanding presence of digital technologies in our personal and professional lives. Drawing on interdisciplinary perspectives, this book explores how digital exhaustion is experienced, felt, and articulated in our hyper-connected culture through burnout, brain rot, binge-watching, data extraction, energy consumption, and social media compulsion. Digital exhaustion emerges as a key structure of feeling in an era of constant connectivity and algorithmic demands.
Accessible yet theoretically grounded, this collection is an essential resource for scholars in cultural and technology studies, while also speaking to broader debates in anthropology, psychology, digital geography, urban studies, and consumer research. Responsive to the urgent need to engage in sustained dialogue about digital futures, this book offers fresh insights into how we might understand—and rethink—digital wellbeing, social media addiction, and the growing demand for a right to disconnect
Climate Places: Floating University Berlin
No full textA chapter in a book of case studies honouring the life and work of the late Peter Blundell-Jones. The chapter draws on the work of the research collective MOULD (of which Jeremy Till is a founding member), and in particular their identification of eight 'sites' that architecture needs to address in the face of climate breakdown
Optimising Omnichannel: The Case of South African Fashion Retail
No full textThis study investigates the obstacles middle-market fashion retailers face when pursuing omnichannel (OC) retailing in South Africa (SA), a fast-growing yet infrastructure-constrained market, and indicates how their operations can be optimised.
A qualitative approach was selected, using multiple case study research and multi-method data collection using semi-structured interviews, observation and secondary sources, which were thematically analysed.
The three OC transitioning fashion retailer cases expound on the specific characteristics and industry dynamics within SA that add complexity to the implementation of OC. The research reveals specific enablers that enhance dynamic capability that SA fashion retailers have developed to overcome OC challenges, including investments to improve e-commerce logistics specific to the market context, adapting to unreliable external infrastructure, developing a growth mindset and a focus on mobile operations and credit facility.
By foregrounding an emerging-market context long overlooked in OC scholarship, the study proposes a conceptual framework linking market characteristics to the nature and intensity of OC hurdles and to the dynamic capabilities required to surmount them.
A granular understanding of contextual factors is critical for designing viable OC strategies in emerging markets. The insights guide fashion and non-fashion retailers seeking to implement OC in similarly nuanced environments
Closing the Capability Gap: Embedding Service Design in Frontline Professional Development
Full text linkThis report examines how service design capability can be systematically embedded within Continuing Professional Development (CPD) frameworks for frontline public sector workers in the UK. While service design has become increasingly influential in government, digital, and strategic transformation roles, frontline professionals such as care workers, housing officers, librarians, and benefits advisers—remain largely excluded from access to design-led learning. These workers represent nearly a third of the UK workforce and are often best positioned to identify service challenges, yet existing CPD structures prioritise compliance and regulation over reflective, experiential problem-solving.
Using an exploratory, qualitative research approach, the study combines a literature and policy review, analysis of international case studies from Norway, Sweden, and Portugal, and semi-structured interviews with UK practitioners across local government, design consultancy, academia, and professional training. The findings demonstrate that embedding service design into frontline CPD requires more than introducing new training courses. Instead, it demands coordinated system-level change across policy, funding, organisational culture, procurement, and workforce structures.
Evidence from adult learning theory and workplace learning research shows strong alignment between service design and effective professional development when learning is experiential, collaborative, and embedded in real work. International models such as StimuLab, Experio Lab, and LabX illustrate how design capability can be scaled through sustained investment, embedded learning, and communities of practice. However, UK-specific barriers—particularly lack of time, negative perceptions of design, and limited organisational support—must be addressed.
The report concludes that extending design capability to the frontline represents a significant opportunity for strengthening public services. Achieving this requires system-level commitment to workforce development that recognises service design as a core professional capability rather than a specialist or optional skil
Sounding Situated Knowledges
No full textIn this presentation I will give an overview of “sounding situated knowledges” as a methodological offering within feminist sound studies. Drawing on my work examining the field of archaeoacoustics, I will explain my argument for the importance of both embodiedness and situatedness in sonic knowledge production which borrows heavily from Donna Haraway. In doing so, I advocate for the figure of echo to be re-imagined as a feminist and decolonial figuration