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Paranoid Finance, Paranoid Media, Paranoid Readings
No full textBook review of Fabian Muniesa, Paranoid Finance (Cambridge: Polity, 2024)
Internationalisation and Securitisation in UK Higher Education
Full text linkThis paper provides an analysis of the current condition of the UK Higher Education sector, which it treats as an ‘exemplary case’. It examines two distinct and interrelated elements of the ‘polycrisis’ - internationalisation and securitisation. It argues that UK higher education is shaped by both an internationalised and now faltering business strategy and by the contested consequences of Britain’s geopolitical and military choices. Internationalisation is now perceived by policy-makers to give rise to new security risks, a perception which is linked to a concern for securitisation, and a consequent threat to academic freedom. By placing securitisation policies and internationalisation in the same frame, the article considers the significance of the Prevent Duty both for academic freedom and for the recruitment of international students. It concludes that UK higher education has not found a way of overcoming its policy tensions and that unless changes take place at Government level its new reluctance to prioritise international recruitment will worsen problems of funding and lead higher education into a renewed spiral of austerity to adapt aggressive austerity policies
Editorial - Special issue on Higher Education in the Face of Multiple Crises
Full text linkIt was with great interest that I accepted an invitation from Professor George Stamelos, University of Patras to host, as an editor, a Special Issue on crises and transformations of European Higher Education systems. I was slightly puzzled, at the immediate willingness of esteemed colleagues from prestigious European Higher Education Institutions to contribute to this Special Issue. I came to conclude that the topic was one in which colleagues felt personally, as well as professionally involved. Crises and transformations, and the contestation that accompanies them, have touched us all
Benthic Literacies: Glossing the Seabeds
No full textSince its emergence in the 1990s, the concept of an “ocean literacy” has gained increasing currency from scientists, advocacy groups, governments, and international organizations. For many, its importance has never been greater than now, when the unprecedented intensity and confluence of anthropogenic warming and resource extraction has begun transforming–and often devastating–marine places, relations, and lives. All the while, however, the ocean literacy idea and its constitutive preoccupations with reading and writing have invited critical scrutiny from environmental humanists (among others) skeptical of attempts to stretch the logosphere to encompass the seas. This eight-part glossary for the seabeds figures one approach to negotiating this tension. Our research collective—whose members reside in and across the disciplines of literature, geography, geology, art history, and art practice—offers glosses that work, variously and occasionally even at variance, to clarify seafloor natures; to vivify the socioecological entanglements that have long—and diversely—tied anthropic to benthic realms; and to illustrate seabeds’ unruly effects upon the very possibilities of scrutation and inscription. Alien, flocculent, green, museum, plume, reserve, submersive, vent: glossing these terms, we register our coincident commitments to the real affordances of benthic reading and writing and the recognition of the seabeds’ equally real and irreducible semiotic strangeness
Neo-Victorian Decadence in the 1920s: The case of Ben Hecht
No full textDecadent texts oppose much of what we understand to be “Victorian”: they are ironic, solipsistic, perverse. Decadence is thus something of an uneasy bedfellow for neo-Victorianism, which is generally regarded as a serious attempt to recover and reinscribe forgotten or marginalised historical presences. In recent years scholars have argued for a wider and more inclusive application of “neo-Victorianism” that extends beyond self-conscious reinterpretation of Victorian texts and histories. Marie-Luise Kohlke acknowledges that we might find “prototypical neo-Victorian departures and stirrings” in retrospective works by writers whose lifespans bridge the fin de siècle and early twentieth century. The early fiction of screenwriter Ben Hecht is one such example. Before he achieved commercial success in Hollywood Hecht styled himself as a successor to the Victorian decadents. Fantazius Mallare (1922) tells the story of Mallare, a solitary decadent at the very apex of ennui. He spouts Wildean epigrams in a red room reminiscent of the embellished and ornamental setting of Salome (1894), and his desire to nullify his senses to assuage the torment of sexual desire is Dowsonian in its extremes. Wallace Smith’s accompanying explicit illustrations constitute a warped kind of Beardsleyana. I argue that while the neo-Victorian credentials of Hecht’s text may be questionable, its decadence is not. In Fantazius Mallare Hecht not only reveals the mechanisms of decadence as self-conscious, self-reflexive, and ripe for parody, he also anticipates new forms of artistic expression. It has been suggested that the opening “Dedication” influenced Allan Ginsberg’s Howl (1956). Hecht’s work shows that decadence is an evolving critical concept that always has a special relationship with the contemporary moment and is characterised by a peculiar “taste for the distasteful”
Beyond Erasure: Forensic Vision, the Politics of (in)Visibility, and Image Ecologies in Spanish Documentary
No full textIntermedial heterotopia in contextual studies
No full textIn this article, I investigate how heterotopic space(s) can be formed through the use of different media in contextual studies in theatre and performance. Specifically, I examine the use of cameras and screens in developing learning practices for undergraduate students. These learning practices frame students’ exploration of identity and promote intermedial interaction as a place of seeing/being and taking part. The intermedial options presented transpose the everyday use of communication technology to a set of creative tools that augment and expand practice-as-research, holding the exploration of various identities at the centre of the learning process. The theoretical framework of my study draws from theories of space and place in relation to experience; I argue that heterotopia(s) can be considered as a place of learning and creativity for analysing and re-shaping context, and I examine how approaches to digital learning can be usefully combined with contemporary intermedial practices. The paradigm of ‘doing-thinking’, as outlined by Jo Scott, supports and contextualises the effort in Higher Education more broadly to establish practice-as-research principles in the pedagogy of contextual studies. As a case study to illustrate my arguments, I outline my teaching practice in workshops that I designed and delivered in 2023 at London Metropolitan University, UK
From the ‘Lure for Feeling’ to 'Grassroots Planning': Grammars of Intention and Conjuncture in the Future Possible
No full textThis chapter draws on Isabelle Stenger's notion of 'speculative pragmatism' and A.N. Whitehead's idea of the Lure for Feeling and to explore how the whir of curatorial rhetorics often seal future possible into over-determined packages of intention. Working from attempts to develop curatorial curriculum with students at Goldsmiths, the article poses a move from the abstraction of the concrete in both the university and curatorial projects into what Ruth Wilson Gilmore describes as 'grassroots planning', proposing deep inhabitation of the conjunctural, spatial and material problems in the present
It ‘supercharged our ability to empathise’: Safeguarding practitioners’ experiences of a trauma-informed approach to child–parent separation
Full text linkThis article examines the experiences of practitioners involved in the ‘Child Coming into Our Care’ (CCIOC) process, a trauma-informed approach supporting children taken into care in England. Drawing on twenty-one semi-structured interviews, this study explores the impact of applying trauma-informed principles. The findings highlight four key areas: (1) Open information sharing provided a fuller picture of the child; (2) Constructing a shared narrative helped children understand their situation; (3) Becoming a participant in the transition and remaining thoughtful about the importance of familiar objects and routines helped to provide children with a sense of continuity; (4) Focusing on the child’s lived experience shifted emergency planning to be more child centred. The CCIOC approach created space for emotional engagement, helping practitioners consider how each child might be affected at every stage of separation. While acknowledging that trauma from family separation cannot be entirely avoided, practitioners found the approach meaningful, enhancing empathy and preparedness. Based on collaboration between researchers and practitioners, this study contributes to debates on trauma-informed practice, highlighting the value of child-centred multi-agency planning. It suggests reframing the CCIOC approach from ‘trauma reducing’ to ‘trauma responsive’ and advocates for further research on integrating trauma-responsive frameworks in child welfare practice
Making Research Public. Ethics, Politics, and the Power of Plural Dissemination
Full text linkDissemination is too often treated as a neutral endpoint, a passive delivery of research findings. With this work I insist otherwise. Rooted in new materialist thought, I position dissemination as an ethical praxis: a place of epistemic struggle, creative resistance, and institutional possibility. With theoretical positioning, methodological reflection, and infrastructural critique, I expose how citation practices and formats like the PDF sustain extractive logics. Performative, multimodal, and collaborative forms become acts of refusal and remaking. Voice, access, and positionality are ethical imperatives. Here I focus on the dissemination of socio-material and practice research, asking how its public forms and infrastructures enact ethics in both their possibilities and their exclusions. To make ethics public is to remake dissemination as plural, relational, and accountable knowledge-making