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Cutting the apron strings: Establishing optimal distinctiveness from mentors in creative industries
Full text linkResearch has established that organizations benefit from “optimal distinctiveness,” that is, being sufficiently similar to and different from competitors. However, we know less about producers' strategic positioning choices to establish optimally distinctive identities. We explore this question through a qualitative study of chef-owners who started their own restaurants after training with well-known mentors. We identify two trajectories followed by chefs to establish optimal distinctiveness—legacy and divergent—and their components: interpersonal origins, strategic material and symbolic practices, tensions, and performance outcomes. Our study contributes to research by providing a more complete picture of how creative producers attempt to find an optimal balance between similarity to and difference from mentors, and the constraints they face in their strategic choices, including how these change over time
Towards a critique of care fetishism: Social reproduction feminism and the ethics of care
Full text linkRecently, there has been a notable rise in scholarly publications, research projects and public discussions engaging with care ethics and social reproduction feminism. However, despite their shared focus on caring activities, these two feminist traditions diverge significantly in their theoretical foundations and political implications. The primary distinction lies in their conceptualization of care itself: whereas care ethics emphasizes the affective and moral dimensions of caregiving, social reproduction feminism understands care as labour essential to sustaining life and reproducing labour power. In addition, they differ in their interpretations of interdependence – care ethics views it as an inexorable part of the human condition, while social reproduction feminism examines it through the relationship between production and reproduction. This article analyses hitherto under-scrutinized differences between these traditions. More specifically, it brings to the fore misinterpretations of social reproduction feminism by care ethics scholars while addressing underexplored dimensions within social reproduction feminism itself, including the role of affect in care labour, and Marx's concept of social relations of production. Ultimately, the article argues that the ethics of care tends to idealize caring activities as a moral good, detached from social and economic contexts. Using Marx's theory of commodity fetishism, it thus contends that care ethics risks treating care as a fetish, obscuring the systemic inequalities and inherent contradictions embedded in caregiving
bingenTV And the Hildegard von Bingen Society for Gardening Companions: A Conversation Between Sophie Seita, Naomi Woo and Declan Wiffen
No full textThis interview with Sophie Seita and Naomi Woo explores bingenTV, an exhibition at Mimosa House (London) in the Winter of 2023, and The Hildegard von Bingen Society for Gardening Companions, a queer-feminist, and ecologically engaged creative project. The conversation traces the Society’s origins, fictional and real, and its multimedia performances, workshops, and installations – including bingenTV, a satirical 1980s queer gardening talk show. Seita and Woo reflect on performance, rituals, archival fabulation, queer ecologies, and reparative ecological practices, drawing from a range of creative practitioners, such as Hildegard von Bingen, Vita Sackville-West, Pauline Oliveros and Alison Knowles, Mary Delany and others. The discussion explores the ambivalences of queer historical recovery, complicity, and exclusion – foregrounding gossip, humour, and embodied performance as valid modes of knowledge. Focusing on ways of cultivating community across human and more-than-human boundaries, the conversation navigates the tensions between healing and dissonance, critique and care, fiction and fact
Technical breakdown: breaching experiment-workshops in university lectures
No full textThis article explores the methodological design of breaching experiments, originally introduced in ethnomethodology as pedagogical tools for examining the maintenance of social order. Building on this tradition, I introduce a typology of breaching experiments and the idea of breaching experiment-workshops: collaborative, negotiated interventions that uncover how technical devices, and sociotechnical expectations mediate university lectures. Drawing on observations with two lecturers and subsequent efforts to design interventions in their teaching practices, I show how breaching experiment-workshops can surface the entangled roles of technology, disciplinary norms, and student expectations even when the breaches remain hypothetical. I argue that breaching experiment-workshops offer a valuable method for design researchers investigating human-technology relations by extending breaching into participatory, context-sensitive, and reflective co-design practices
Of networks and molecules: reflections on ephemerality, museum practice and webs of relation after disappearance
Full text linkThis chapter examines how ephemeral, body-centred artistic practices developed in Latin America under dictatorships—particularly those responding to forced disappearance—generate traces that unsettle conventional museum logics of permanence, ownership and extraction. Through an analysis of the Chilean collective CADA’s 1979 intervention Scene Inversion and the subsequent acquisition of the CADA archive by the Museo Reina Sofía, the chapter argues that ephemeral traces of political art function simultaneously as aesthetic acts, evidentiary forms and political demands that cannot be fully contained within institutional frameworks. Douglas shows how collaborations between museums and activist networks such as Red Conceptualismos del Sur challenge extractive acquisition models by foregrounding situated provenance, ethical stewardship and the politics of visibility in contexts marked by state violence. Engaging the museum’s notion of the “molecular” and “networked” institution, the chapter posits that rethinking museum practice through webs of relation—rather than through accumulation—offers a way to “re-earth” traces in ways that honour their political origins. Ultimately, it contends that attending to these unstable, potent traces reveals both the tensions and the transformative possibilities of museums seeking to hold, activate and care for the remnants of art born from disappearance, censorship and collective resistance
Self-disclosure and relational agents for mental health: a scoping review protocol
Full text linkIntroduction: Relational agents are an innovative form of Artificial Intelligence (AI) that can help address waiting times for mental health services. They often appear in the form of chatbots that provide responses to patient questions via web or mobile interfaces, and they seek to build long-term relationships with patients. Effective self-disclosure is key for therapeutic outcomes, and we are therefore conducting a scoping review to map the literature on self-disclosure to relational agents for mental health.
Methods: Our work will follow guidance by the Joanna Briggs Institute and the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) Extension for Scoping Reviews. We will systematically search Ovid Medline, Ovid Embase, Ovid Emcare, Ovid PsycINFO, Ovid Global Health, EBSCO CINAHL, Scopus, Web of Science and ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Global. Two reviewers will independently screen titles and abstracts as well as full texts of potential studies in Covidence. Both qualitative and quantitative studies from all countries published in English will be eligible. We will then provide a narrative synthesis of the results along with data tables.
Ethics and dissemination: Our scoping review does not require ethical approval. We will publish results in a peer-reviewed journal and during conference presentations
Robotic Painting using Semantic Image Abstraction
Full text linkWe present a novel image segmentation and abstraction pipeline tailored to robot painting applications. We address the unique challenges of realizing digital abstractions as physical artistic renderings. Our approach generates adaptive, semantics-based abstractions that balance aesthetic appeal, structural coherence, and practical constraints inherent to robotic systems. By integrating panoptic segmentation with color-based over-segmentation, we partition images into meaningful regions corresponding to semantic objects while providing customizable abstraction levels we optimize for robotic realization. We employ saliency maps and color difference metrics to support automatic parameter selection to guide a merging process that detects and preserves critical object boundaries while simplifying less salient areas. Graph-based community detection further refines the abstraction by grouping regions based on local connectivity and semantic coherence. These abstractions enable robotic systems to create paintings on real canvases with a controlled level of detail and abstraction