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Contemporary Kurdish Women’s Art from Prison: An Abolitionist Feminist Resistance
No full textThis article explores the prison works of two Kurdish women artists, Fatoş İrwen and Zehra Doğan. It analyzes the works of these artists that were produced during a particularly dark period in the recent history of Turkey when the “peace process” ceased, and the Turkish army resumed violent attacks against Kurds in the southeast of the country in 2016. Both artists served time in prison for so-called terrorist propaganda and continued to produce art despite the limitations of incarceration. The essay analyzes the artists’ prison works in the framework of abolitionist decolonial feminism. The analysis of Doğan and İrwen’s prison works focuses on the artists’ subversive use of materials that are otherwise considered as abject. Their art embraces and re-envisions waste, producing a feminist epistemology that resists prison walls and colonial segregation. As both artists reclaim what the colonial matrix of power treats with contempt and disgust, their works become powerful statements of insurgence and resurgence
The Ethics Of AI Speech Synthesis
No full textPodcast interview discussing my article on AI reproducing the female voice controlled by male popular music producers
The Bane of Chinese Civilisation: Pruning Gangtai Dramas and Meteor Garden
No full textFocusing on the fraught reception of Gangtai television dramas, this chapter focuses on how their popularity from the 1990s to early 2000s provoked anxieties over vulgarisation, youth corruption, and cultural sovereignty. While commercially attractive and cost-effective for television stations, these dramas were framed as “spiritual pollutants” that degraded public taste and Chinese cultural values. Figures like Wang Shuo who was accused of vulgarisation for his tongsu works, ironically condemned Gangtai culture as vulgar, a stance shaped by his personal frustration with his daughter’s fandom. This chapter examines the discourse surrounding the highly popular Taiwanese idol drama Meteor Garden (2001), which was controversial for its depictions of school violence, celebrity worship, and effeminate masculinity. Its suspension prompted illegal circulation and discussions among students, parents, and teachers. Censorship proved productive, generating a domestic alternative, Meteor Showers (2009) that aligned with state-sanctioned youthhood and behaviour. The discourse surrounding the morally rehabilitated series revealed a gap between its high ratings and the conflicting moral views it provoked. Renowned playwright Wei Minglun, who championed women’s emancipation through theatre, condemned the fandom surrounding Meteor Garden. His defence of “individuality” in elite theatre while disqualifying its popular expressions on television reflects a deeper anxiety over the erosion of cultural authority
LearnSLXR: A Learner-Centric, Teacher-Empowering AI+XR Platform for Scalable Sign-Language Learning
No full textCommunication barriers between deaf and hearing communities persist across home, school, work and public services, exacerbated by scarce interpreter ca-pacity and limited access to high-quality, scalable sign-language (SL) learning for hearing people. We address this problem by proposing LearnSLXR, a Learner-Centric, Teacher-Empowering AI-enabled XR platform that delivers a scaffolded Learn → Practice → Assess flow with authoring, analytics, and low-friction web/XR deployment. Our approach draws on framing the deaf community needs—CEFR-aligned deaf-approved content, and interpretable, real-time feedback on standard devices—and grounds the design in lessons from the SIGNUM Battle serious-game, which showed higher recognition and engagement than video-only materials and highlighted usability/analytics gaps that a platform must close. We (1) restate the societal and technical problem space and deaf-led requirements, (2) review related SL learning tools, (3) distil findings from evaluating SIGNUM Battle with student cohorts to extract peda-gogical and technical design requirements, and (4) present the LearnSLXR ar-chitecture: teacher capture-to-publish authoring, on-device landmarking for formative feedback, voice/keyboard assessment, and item-level analytics for classroom use. We conclude with an evaluation roadmap aligned to deaf-governed metrics for inclusion, accessibility and learning gains, positioning LearnSLXR to reduce the skills gap between hearing and deaf communities at scale
Digital Communities of Practice and the Knowledge Transformation Cycle: Enabling Sustainable Food Systems through AI and Metaverse Technologies
No full textThis study develops a conceptual framework to theorise how digitally augmented Communities of Practice (CoPs), such as the Slow Food Movement, can support sustainable food systems transformation through advanced knowledge management. Although digital innovation is increasingly applied in agri-food systems, much of the literature remains technocentric, focusing on infrastructure and automation, while overlooking how digital tools mediate community-based knowledge flows and adaptive capabilities. Addressing this gap, we integrate Nonaka and Takeuchi’s SECI model with Teece’s dynamic capabilities framework to examine how Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Metaverse technologies enable CoPs to create, share, and transform knowledge.
The main contribution is the DEKA-CoPs model (Digitally Enabled Knowledge Architecture in Communities of Practice), which explains how digital mediation can enhance epistemic agility, collaborative innovation, and system adaptability. Methodologically, the paper uses a theory-building approach to develop four propositions that can guide future empirical work.
This framework advances knowledge management and sustainability literature by shifting the focus from firm-based innovation to digitally enabled, community-led knowledge infrastructures. It offers practical implications for policymakers, technologists, and sustainability practitioners interested in designing inclusive, adaptive platforms that embed local knowledge in agri-food transitions
Friendship and the Sociality of GBTQ+ Sexual Health in Times of Resistance
No full textSexual health has always been a social matter. While the science of disease transmission remains a focus for public health stakeholders, for social scientists, the sociality of infections, both enduring and emerging, remains central. That is, friendships and relationships are core to health, risk and illness. Yet, there has been virtually no work on how friendships and their varying contours are interplaying with (increasingly) antibiotic resistant STIs. Drawing on 49 interviews with sexuality and/or gender diverse people in Australia, we argue that the sociality of sexual health is central to the development of antibiotic resistance. Our analysis highlights the importance of friends to this, including de(stigmatising) STIs, deployment of humour to regularise important meanings, striking a balance between autonomy and mutuality, and role of friends as sexual health educators. These hitherto under-recognised relational dimensions of sexual health are critical to working with communities in addressing the rise of resistant STIs
In Conversation with Eleanor Sharpston. A Life, A Journey
No full textWhat was behind a legal life lived in the spotlight? In this extended conversation between Professor Adam Lazowski and Dame Eleanor Sharpston KC, one of the most important European lawyers of her generation, two friends lift the curtain on what was happening backstage.
Over nine chapters, they discuss Eleanor's early life, her university years, and her parallel career at the Bar and in academe. They move on to consider her leading cases in the English courts, which included Brown and Others (Operation Spanner) and the Metric Martyr, before laying out a thoughtful insider's assessment of her time on the Bench at the Court of Justice of the European Union in Luxembourg. The closing chapter of the book is dedicated to current events, including the rule of law crisis and the future of European integration. A candid, illuminating and often amusing discussion with a transformative European lawyer
