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Universities Undergoing Climate Transition: Developing MLP tools from a context- specific and critical standpoint
Get PDFKnowledge gaps persist in the emerging field ‘Design for Transitions’ (DfT). Our research builds on the ‘multi-level perspective’ (MLP), a core concept in DfT and the wider Transition Studies field, and we address critiques of the MLP in terms of social practices, agency and power. Grounded in a ‘Research through Design’ approach and learning from our prior work, we have carefully adapted and designed MLP tools. We elucidate design considerations for MLP tools from within our 'live' climate transition of a UK university – research conducted within a university about the university. Contributing to DfT, we present six ‘design criteria’ for MLP tools, which are critically discussed in terms of context-specificity and general MLP critiques. Towards advancing DfT, this paper addresses the question: What are some key design considerations in adapting the MLP in ways that are theoretically-grounded and widely applicable yet responsive to a particular context
The Second Wave of Attention Economics. Attention as a Universal Symbolic Currency on Social Media and Beyond
Get PDFSince the advent of social media, capturing and holding the attention of people has become paramount for the success of products, political messages, and even research. The economics of attention is often seen as part of the market economy. We argue that a larger societal transformation is underway, which will see attention become the defining currency that moves individuals, exchanges, and many other elements of society. This paper connects the attention economy to the institutional foundations of modernity. It then discusses how attention can be accumulated and exchanged like a currency and proposes a dual-stream model distinguishing between calcified and flow attention. Based on this model, we investigate recent developments facilitating the use of attention as a currency, and their potential impact on our daily lives more generally. We conclude by providing an outlook and concrete questions for future research to understand where the economics of attention economy is heading
The value of intellectual property education for creative entrepreneurs: a case study from University of the Arts, London (UAL)
Get PDFIntellectual property (IP) rights are the legal rights that protect the financial and reputational interests of creative and innovative practice. IP rights play an active role in creative practice from generating new work and exchanging ideas, to planning showcases and building communities. The role of UAL’s IP Education team is to encourage students and graduates to recognise the agency they have as future change makers and understand the important role that IP plays in launching and growing their business as well as contribute to the creative economy.
IP Education workshops provide a safe space for individuals to self-reflect and the team support in helping creatives increase self-confidence and make their own informed decisions. With a focus on experiential learning, the team’s approach to empowering future entrepreneurs combines compassionate pedagogy with the lived experiences and of recent graduates as peer-to-peer learning. This considers IP ownership, representation and use in the context of collaboration from ideation through incubation to launch and growth.
This case study highlights the work of the IP Education team at UAL and their progressive approach with UALs aspiring entrepreneurs. As creatives consider their future selves, it is important for individuals to think about what IP means to them within wider social and economic contexts to help safeguard their reputation and establish sound business practice. The aim of the case study is to demonstrate the value of IP education in a creative context, the benefits for creative entrepreneurs to think strategically and to help consider how to best manage their working relationships within responsible business practices
Unleashing Fantastic Nightmares: Ee ja nai ka (1867-1868), The Dawn of Transgression in Japan
Get PDFThe international character of the avant-garde movements of the early twentieth century is often described in terms of 'simultaneity', or the speed with which they spread around the world. For example, André Breton’s Surrealism, which began in Paris in 1924, spread rapidly around the world within a decade. It was brought to Japan as early as in 1925 by the poet Junzaburo Nishiwaki who had just returned from studying in England. Subsequently, the Japanese version of the movement was developed by poets and artists hand in hand with the European groups. This kind of canonical narrative of the arrival of avant-garde spirits in non-European countries is problematic. For it constantly feeds the myth that emphasises the singularity of Europe as the artistic and intellectual ground zero of the twentieth century, as the cultural missionary to ‘enlighten’ the world.
In this paper, I explore an alternative narrative behind the reception of avant-garde spirits in non-European countries, using the case of Japan as an example. I will discuss ee ja nai ka as a peculiar touchstone in the process of modernisation and westernisation in Japan which unleashed a transgressive drive for the coming century. Ee ja nai ka were carnivalesque riots that swept the country from the summer of 1867 to the spring of 1868. They began as religious celebrations and communal activities and eventually evolved into a protest that included frenzied dancing, cross-dressing, nudity, sex and mob violence. ‘Ee ja nai ka’ was the refrain the revellers sang, often translated as ‘Why not?’, ‘Who cares?’, ‘I don’t care’ or ‘It doesn’t matter’. It reflected the Dionysian mentality of the time when Japan was emerging from nearly two hundred years of isolationist foreign policy and undergoing major social and political reform at the start of the Meiji Restoration. Ee ja nai ka unleashed the anger and frustration of the people against the long-standing feudal oppression of the shogunate, triggered by the chaotic confusion resulting from the polarisation of the country in the face of a regime change, modernisation and Western influence.
The transgressive mentality of ee ja nai ka recurs throughout the twentieth century in the form of countercultural provocations against conservatives and normative society. By shifting the historical touchstone for narrating the dawn of the avant-garde from the European epicentre to ee ja nai ka, that is, a crucial yet underrepresented event in Japanese modernism, I aim to challenge the constraints of the discipline of art history and avant-garde studies, which are persistently self-referential and Eurocentric
‘Do you consider him to be a fit addition to the British Nation?’: Exploring twentieth century fashion businesses through naturalization records
No full textThis paper will focus on four Jewish immigrants to Britain who helped to shape the early history of the wholesale couture trade. It will illustrate how naturalisation records can be utilised to find in-depth information regarding migrant owned fashion businesses.
The term wholesale couture was first used to describe the pinnacle of the ready-to-wear fashion industry in London in the 1930s. However, the trade had earlier antecedents with many company directors working for, or, establishing firms broadly connected to the fashion trade- covering everything from ostrich feather dealers, to shoe repairers and tailoring firms- in the first two decades of the twentieth century. Almost all of the founders or owners of wholesale couture business were Jewish first- and second-generation immigrants, whose families had travelled to London between c 1880 and 1939 to establish new lives in the city.
The research presented here relates to the early history of three key wholesale couture firms; Koupy, Simon Massey and Brenner Sports and the four men that founded these companies; Chas. Kuperstein, Harry Massey and Aron and Nathan Brenner. Extremely limited business records survive from these firms. However, in this paper I will demonstrate the surprisingly rich and detailed information regarding fashion businesses that these men’s naturalisation records reveal. These records include details such as wages, profits and number of employees and information about the types of garments they produced. Some records, as I will demonstrate, even point to the anti-Semitism they experienced in Britain. I will illustrate furthermore how these naturalisation records can be used in tandem with the 1921 census and trade publication Drapers’ Organiser to create a rich and detailed picture of a network of Jewish migrants- from seamstresses to entrepreneurs- who were engaged in the high-end ready-to-wear fashion trade
Controversies, Problematic Information, and Polarisation: Case Studies Across Six Continents
Get PDFPolitical trends around the world have drawn further scholarly attention to the study of polarisation, especially also as it is expressed and potentially deepened by public communication on digital and social media platforms. The very concept of polarisation itself, however, remains ill-defined especially in communication research, where it is often used as a mere buzzword without sufficient definition – even in spite of a wide range of conceptual approaches that variously emphasise issue-centric, ideological, affective, interpretive, interactional, or other facets of polarisation (Marino & Ianelli, 2023; Esau et al., 2023). Issue-centric approaches to the study of polarisation often connect it with specific controversies, and therefore align well with controversy mapping and related methodological frameworks. Especially where they study such controversies in digital and social media contexts, they also point to the significant intersections between the circulation of problematic information by and the deepening of polarisation between partisan actors, as well as to the often asymmetrical nature of such contestations (where groups on one side of a given controversy are substantially more likely to use problematic information to support their cause than the groups opposing them; Kreiss & McGregor, 2023). Unfortunately, much of the recent research in this field has continued to focus on a small number of key political contexts, with emphasis especially on the US and UK. This panel reviews evidence on the intersection of controversies, problematic information, and polarisation through a series of case studies from six continents: North and South America, Europe, Asia, Australia, and Oceania. In combination, these studies present a substantially more comprehensive picture of global similarities and local differences. Paper 1 explores the polarising impact of disinformation campaigns in favour of incumbent president Jair Bolsonaro in the 2022 Brasilian presidential election. It reveals a potentially unusual bottom-up disinformation pattern that produces a reverse influence flow from grassroots activists to political leaders and complicates standard distinctions between mis- and disinformation; this also creates new challenges for fact-checking efforts. Paper 2 examines the dynamics of Italian public opinion in response to the introduction of COVID-19 restrictions in early 2020. Drawing on longitudinal survey data, it identifies a range of perspectives from extreme communitarian to extreme libertarian, and connects this to patterns of legacy and social media use, attitudes towards political institutions, and levels of exposure to mis- and disinformation. Paper 3 compares the divergent dynamics of political debates on Indigenous rights in Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand. In the campaigning leading up to Australia’s 2023 referendum on greater Indigenous recognition and representation, it identifies a highly asymmetrical contest that flipped public opinion from strong support for Indigenous recognition to a 60% No vote within less than one year. In the heated political debate about Māori rights in Aotearoa New Zealand since the 2023 election of a new, conservative coalition government, it identifies continuing Māori/non-Māori solidarity in resistance to the reduction of rights stemming from the 1840 Treaty of Waitangi. Paper 4 investigates the debates on Twitter about measures to combat sexual violence in Indonesia that came into effect in 2021 and 2022. Drawing on extensive content and network analysis, the study shows that, diverging from the #metoo-style activism against sexual discrimination, harassment, and violence that is common in Western contexts, in Indonesia this agenda is interpreted predominantly through the lens of an underlying polarisation between secular nationalist and Islamist political groupings in the world’s largest Muslim-majority democracy. Paper 5 compares the online dynamics of the abortion debate in the US before and after the Supreme Court’s 2022 Dobbs decision, focussing especially on political candidates’ social media messaging on abortion rights. Analysis of Democrats’ and Republicans’ posts about the issue, and of broader Twitter and Facebook user engagement with the issue, is expected to point to substantial differences between the parties, timeframes, and platforms. In combination, these five papers cover a rich selection of case studies on the intersections between controversies, problematic information, and polarisation around the world. Extended abstracts for all five papers are included in the submission
Fashioning the not-self: speculative non-human fashions
Get PDFHow should the fashion community speak out against ongoing systemic sexist, racist, body ableist, classist, heteronormative and unjust design practices to expose the coloniality of fashion and racist patriarchal capitalism: should we try to reform these systems or propose something entirely different using an alternative starting point? For fashion theorist Elizabeth Wilson, dress is defined as the space between the self and the not-self, with much of fashion focusing on the rich narratives of identity and selfhood, but what of the not-self? Could recentring the not-self in fashion open new dialogues for systemic change in fashion? To explore the not-self, I will apply the Black feminist and women of colour feminist radical concept of the non-human, most recently discussed by sociologist Akwugo Emejulu in the book Fugitive Feminism, into a fashion context. This approach aims to reclaim non-human from its category of exclusion based on race and gender, and instead assert the non-human’s rights to existence and, so I will show, validate the not-self in fashion.
Using the format of a ‘life drawing’ class, the audience will have the opportunity to depict the not-self in fashion by exploring non-human transgressive subjectivities and lived experiences. Here drawing will be used as a form of speculative conversation to imagine not-self possible futures in fashion, restore hope in fashion and situate fashion within a new liberatory politics based on antiracism and decolonial feminism
Site-Specific Pedagogy Map
Get PDFPaper presentation of 'The Site-Specific Pedagogy Map', part of a performance pedagogy toolkit I made during a UAL Educational Enhancement Sabbatical 2023/24. The toolkit takes the form of a mini-zine and broadsheet fold out map.
Performance in this context is engaged as a way of encountering, interacting and thinking and making with the world, and not as a discipline to be taught.
The intention is to work towards a non-hierarchical pedagogy, building on Jane’s Collin’s brilliant work in this area. In this configuration, the tools, exercises and frameworks can be used by any discipline including performers, designers, theatre makers, painters, sculptors, sound artists and so on. Many of the tasks and exercises have suggestions for adaptations from these perspectives
International journalism: political crises and their impact on foreign correspondents: the case of the failed coup attempt in July 2016 in Turkey and its impact on European correspondents who live and work in Instanbul
No full textThis doctoral dissertation investigates the impact of political turmoil on foreign correspondence. More specifically, it adopts as a case study the impact of the failed coup attempt of July 2016 in Turkey on the European correspondents who have worked and lived in Istanbul before and after the coup. After a detailed discussion about the essence of foreign correspondence, the contemporary Turkish societal and media landscape, we set the basis of our theoretical background. The convergence of the Role Theory, the Tipping Point concept, the Resilience Theory in psychology and the Spiral of Silence allowed us to conceptualize the ‘Syndrome of the Correspondent’ as a framework overarching our research questions. Through in-depth semi-structured interviews with 40 EU correspondents in Turkey, we developed the themes which provided answers to our research questions. The application of Actor Network Theory on the themes allowed us to construct the three crucial networks of the correspondents: before, during and after the coup. This enabled us to comprehend the correspondents’ roles, main actors of their networks in different phases of their work and to reply with evidence that their EU cultural identity and background is perceived as otherness which encumbers greatly their work in times of political turmoil
Repositioning the work of Tam Joseph: from social commentary to aesthetic value
No full textThe British artist Tam Joseph (b.1947) has worked extensively and continually for the past fifty years with a practice encompassing painting, drawing, and sculpture. His work is held in several notable public collections across the UK and two particular paintings from his body of work – ‘Spirit of the Carnival’ (1982) and ‘UK School Report’ (1984) - appear regularly in collection displays and survey exhibitions in public art museums. On this basis, one might understand Joseph as having made an important contribution to contemporary British art, and that he ought to feature in mainstream narratives of British art since the 1980s. However, one need only scan through the names of the many artists who have featured in major survey texts and exhibitions of British art since the 1980s to realise that Joseph is absent from established and popular constructions of British art history. This case study is concerned with the contribution of public museums and collections to this outcome. My research of the acquisition, interpretation and display history surrounding Joseph’s work reveals that Joseph’s work has been presented almost entirely in terms of its socio-political content and contexts, rather than in terms of its relationship to the canon of British art and contemporary art history. On the basis that Joseph is not the only racialised and minoritised artist whose work has been subjected to this delimiting and partial approach to interpretation, I reflect on the potential of the Transforming Collection project’s machine learning text analyser prototype to help art historians, curators and collections cataloguers to identify at scale where this occurs, and propose a slow, object-centred, and artist-directed approach to producing collections information as a proven, effective remedy