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How can we help young people improve their local environments? How can they become agents of change?
No full textThis article explores some innovative research conducted at an urban university and a secondary school in the United Kingdom. It shows how young co-researchers (aged 11-14 years) used creative research methods to explore the ecology and culture of the local park, situated next to their school. They worked with university students and cademics at the university (also situated nearby), and researched the park by writing poetry, drawing pictures and making collages and films about it. The research shows that the young co-researchers found these research methods highly motivating and that the research generated powerful ‘affective flows’, whereby their creative outputs affected local councilors, community health groups and park managers at a research presentation. This led to changes being made to the park, i.e., improved lighting, a water fountain, improved litter picking schedules, and a community garden set up. The paper shows how these creative research methodologies created lines of flight, or new ways of thinking (Fox and Alldred 2015: 401), which helped the research team bring innovative solutions to old problems connected with the park. The creative research facilitated the generation of rhizomatic connections (401) whereby different generations – children and adults – came together to improve the park. The success of these research methods suggests they could be used in other contexts as well
Interpretable AI for Racial Harm and Platform Trust: A Mixed-Method Framework for Analysing Social Media Racism Narratives
No full textRacialised harm on social media impacts the psychological wellbeing, participation, and online safety of marginalised communities. Yet automated moderation systems often function as opaque classifiers, frequently misinterpreting expressions of racial trauma — particularly justified anger as toxicity. This paper presents an interpretable NLP framework for analysing racial harm in UK social media contexts, using survey data from 809 participants, including 408 narrative accounts of racially motivated abuse. The hybrid pipeline integrates domain-specific lexical sentiment scoring, TF–IDF topic modelling, and zero-shot transformer emotion inference with token-level attribution to ensure transparency. The model achieves balanced performance (F1 = 0.79) while preserving contextual interpretability. Thematic and emotional analyses reveal clusters of anti-Black abuse, Islamophobia, COVID-related anti-Asian hostility, and xenophobic rhetoric, with anger, sadness, and fear emerging as dominant and legitimate harm responses. Qualitative insights indicate low trust in reporting systems and limited platform accountability. Overall, the framework demonstrates that accuracy and interpretability can be jointly achieved, supporting transparent and accountable approaches to online harm analysis
Fabulating as mothers: the curious story of the girl with a bird in her mouth
Full text linkIn 1968, the skeleton of a young girl was excavated in a cave in Poland with the bones of a chaffinch in her mouth. Fifty years later, with the help of DNA sampling and historical research, archaeologist Malgorzata Kot traced the remains back to Finland. Not only were Finnish soldiers and their families deployed in that area in the late 17th Century, but Finnish folklore describes the concept of ‘soul birds’ being placed with the dead. The details surrounding the burial, however, remain elusive.
In the summer of 2023, Hilevaara travelled to Poland to meet Kot and learn more. She was able to see the girl’s bones (currently being held in two archival boxes at Warsaw University); and visit the site of her excavation, crawling on hands and knees inside the cliffs of the Ojkow National Park. She was able to see the barracks that most likely housed the girl’s family. In Krakow, she saw the skull of the finch that was found in the girl’s mouth, and another one that had been found a few centimetres away, on the dusty cave floor. The fragile cranial bones of the two adolescent finches replace the girl's own head, which is now missing, probably swept away by a flood that destroyed much of the archive in the Eighties.
Inspired by this strange archaeological find and the mysteries that continue to surround it, Hilevaara and Orley propose a series of speculative fabulations (as defined by Donna Haraway) as they try to make sense of it. Through a collaborative writing exercise they will experiment with a method of call-and-response to explore ideas to do with motherhood, raising girls, grief and biopolitical symbiosis. They will enact a practice of possibility: what if the bones discovered, human and bird, told a different story? One which revealed a different way of inhabiting the earth? A way which involved a much closer coexistence that we assume now? When to be bird, to be human, to sing, to fly, and to expire were experiences that were shared? A past Symbiocene, that got lost?
Where did the birds come from? Who placed them there? What acts of care transpired? And whose acts were they? Those of a grieving parent, willing their daughter’s soul to be transported back to her homeland, or those of a charm of chaffinches? Who died first? What happens if we blur the role of the human and bird here, as we think about what it means to be a parent and lose a daughter? What happens when we think about caring for and letting go of our children afresh? What if the girl and the birds were not buried, but found somewhere to set their bodies aside as they learnt how to fly? What if parenting was about teaching your children to fly? About learning to fly? Did the girl ever have a human skull
The child Musicality Index: A child-friendly version of the Goldsmiths Musical Sophistication Index
Full text linkThe Goldsmiths Musical Sophistication Index (Gold-MSI) has contributed significantly to the study of musical sophistication in adolescence and adulthood, however the field lacks an equivalent self-report instrument for childhood. Existing measures focus heavily on instrumental learning and fail to consider social, emotional and motivational factors which are likely to underlie engagement with music. To address this gap, the current research introduces the child Musicality Index (cMI), a new psychometric self-report measure of musicality for 6- to 13-year-olds which captures children’s motivation for and enjoyment of music. In study 1, a large cohort (N = 302) of children (6–13yrs) responded to items adapted from the Gold-MSI to suit a younger age range. Factor analysis (N = 283) was used to select 8 items for the children’s version of the measure, split into two group factors (‘musical drive’ and ‘enjoyment of music making’) and one general factor (‘musicality’). Studies 1b and 1c then investigated whether children’s responses to these 8 items were valid and reliable (N = 250–460). Study 2 provided evidence for the psychometric properties of the final 8-item version of the task in a new sample (N = 56). The new, 8-item cMI provides a short and robust measure which can facilitate investigation of the most critical aspects of musicality during childhood. It has demonstrated good psychometric properties in UK and US samples and is now openly available for use in wider research
"Like I wasn’t in control of myself”: Menstruation Experiences of Autistic Young Adults
No full textThere is growing awareness that menstruation may be challenging for autistic people, perhaps due in part to sensory sensitivities, differences in interoception and barriers to healthcare support. Although research is beginning to highlight issues during menstruation, there has been a reliance on caregiver perspectives and limited reporting from autistic people themselves. Through semi-structured interviews with nine autistic young adults (all cisgender females), we explored the experiences of autistic individuals in managing menstruation. Thematic analysis described autistic individuals’ experiences including the influence and impact of co-occurring conditions and sensitivity to emotional and physical stimuli, and emotional resignation when dealing with menstruation. Although some of these themes have been reflected in previous research, the theme of emotional resignation was novel. Despite people reporting distressing symptoms, people seemed to accept that this was the norm and did not expect the situation to change (resignation). People also described coping strategies and required support and accommodations. The study emphasizes the importance of tailored support systems and educational resources to better address the specific menstrual health needs of autistic individuals. Use of tools such as cycle trackers may help reduce the unexpectedness of menstruation. Future studies should further investigate the use of coping mechanisms and experiences of emotional resignation to develop practical, autism-friendly solutions
Social mobility is a joke: Working-class women and British TV comedy on ‘the social floor’
Full text linkThis article examines a range of recent autosociobiographical representations of and by working-class women in the contemporary UK, focusing on Rain Dogs, Chewing Gum and Alma’s Not Normal. It argues that what unites these different representations – all of which are TV comedy-dramas, some with connecting iterations as memoir and play – is a vigorous critique and rejection of the neoliberal meritocratic dream. These representations show that the idea of a level playing field in which working hard to activate talent results in success is simply not a possibility for most working-class women: upward social mobility is a joke. Yet crucially, this situation is not simply portrayed as a thwarted tragedy of the downtrodden, or as poverty porn in the tradition of reality TV. Instead, through life-affirming exuberant comedy, they show how the wider socio-political landscape is unjust whilst energetically refusing to accept its limits or internalise its stigma: they ‘reject respectability’.
Unlike the majority of autosociobiographies, then, these representations primarily use a comedic tone. Their focus is not on ‘escape’, ‘transcendence’ or the aspiration for a middle-class life, but on the complexities of working-class lives as lived in context and on critiquing institutional structures. They do value collective community support and crave the security of putting a ‘social floor’ on their circumstances, of not having to constantly worry about losing everything. Considering why the televisual is a useful vehicle for these narratives, the article asks: what do these women’s exuberant rejections of neoliberal meritocracy and bourgeois standards of judgement indicate about the wider cultural, social and political context, or current conjuncture
HerStories: History and Fictions of Black Women
No full textFemale novelists have long been some of the most keen, prolific researchers and recorders of the Black past. A quick look at the works of Mary Prince, Buchi Emecheta, Maryse Conde, Andrea Levy and perhaps most recently Cherie Jones, Myriam Chancy and Zadie Smith, to name just a few, reminds us that Black women writers have been researchers, recorders, keepers, and advocates, deeply involved in sharing and highlighting Black histories. Reflecting on the implications of theoretical and methodological innovations and interventions in modern Black history, principally by Saidiya Hartmann and Michel-Rolph Trouillot, and practices in historical fiction, this paper will consider if it is possible, with these crossings, never mind desirable, to continue to produce Black histories which exclude Black women
Special cultural commons section: Roundtable discussion of Catherine Rottenberg’s This Is Not a Feminism Textbook, Goldsmiths University Press (2023)
Full text linkThe following special section is a series of responses to Catherine Rottenberg’s This Is Not a Feminism Textbook (Goldsmiths University Press, 2023). This is the second book in the ‘This is not a . . . textbook’ series (the first being on science fiction) which describes itself as not ‘a purely commercial publishing venture’ but also an ‘outreach initiative in support of lifelong learning, and a mode of resistance against the marginalisation of the arts, humanities and social sciences in neoliberal economies’. The book consists of a series of entries on topics including families, bodies, sex/gender, motherhood, trans, disability, class, all pitched at an introductory level and written by academic scholars from a range of disciplinary backgrounds with a particular concentration in media and cultural studies. It is a book which is experimental in its format. The editor/curator, Catherine Rottenberg, is Professor of Media, Communications and Cultural Studies at Goldsmiths, University of London. Her books include The Rise of Neoliberal Feminism (2018) and Black Harlem and the Jewish Lower East Side (2014) and, with the Care Collective, The Care Manifesto: The Politics of Interdependence (2020). For this section, we start with an introductory conversation with Catherine Rottenberg before inviting a series of scholars to respond to the book – Srila Roy (Wits University, South Africa) Gabriela Méndez Cota (Universidad Iberoamericana, Mexico) Zainab Naqvi (Manchester Metropolitan University, United Kingdom). They were asked to consider questions raised by it: their initial response, questions of in/exclusion, its relationship to further feminist issues or how it intersects with the conjuncture they are in as they understand it. To begin with, however, we asked Catherine Rottenberg about the text, its context and production
'All Talk: A workshop on public programming as discourse production'
Full text linkThis case study provides an account of the key insights from the international workshop ALL TALK: Institutional Discourse, Exclusions and the Politics of Gathering held in Drugo More, Rijeka, from May 25–26th, 2025. Public programming has long served as a vehicle for cultural institutions to engage audiences through a variety of discursive formats beyond exhibitions, catalogues and more traditional research outputs. Forms of public programming range from the classically delivered speaker talks and symposia to gallery education programmes and more experimental pedagogical initiatives such as artist-led workshops, summer schools, world cafés, reading clubs, speakers marathons, citizens’ assemblies, and many more. The workshop brought together fifteen participants who work on public programming in institutions, educational and cultural spaces across Croatia, Slovenia, Austria, Lithuania, Palestine, and the United Kingdom. The insights from the workshop are arranged in three sections: (1) ‘Both Sides Now: Liberal Paradigms of Public Discourse’, which critically examines the limits and harms of mainstream forms and conceptual frameworks to organize public discourse, such as neutrality; the platform; and the debate; (2) ‘From Civility to Control: Colonial Legacies and the Militarisation of Public Programming’ aims to show the extent to which institutions of organized state violence have shaped what can be known, said and shared publicly and (3) ‘Counter-Genealogies of Public Programming’ revisits alternative histories of caring for public gathering and exchanges from the perspective of autonomous institutions, new forms of partnerships between the public sector and civil society and pedagogical experimentations rooted in social movements. This Case Study will be of interest to curators, cultural programmers, educators who want to examine comparative practices and alternative forms of public programming across Europe and to critically examine the histories, contexts and limits to public programming in the current conjuncture
