CLERKS

Part of a wider project led by Professor Simon Grennan at University of Chester, Anna Fox has been invited to respond to the work of pioneering 19th century cartoonist Marie Duval. In the 1870s Duval was well known for her work in the satirical magazine Judy, often picturing the lower middle-class workers of the Shoe Lane area of London. This new work, Clerks, relates to Anna Fox’s previous project, Work Stations, capturing office life in central London during the late 1980s, when cigarette breaks and a lunchtime drink were the norm. Today, office culture and the iconic industries of London have completely changed. The impact of the Covid pandemic on office culture and spaces have permanently affected our society and new economic conditions have had a considerable impact on the way offices are structured and how we all manage our working week. In these strange times office buildings are being built to remain empty, co-work spaces multiply, whilst desk-based workers continue to reconfigure their schedules between virtual collaboration and the physical workplace. Office environments are being planned that enhance our working lives in new ways with a seamless connection between luxurious leisure spaces and the flexible work station. With these shifts in mind, Anna is exploring and photographing office life in London today. The work will be presented at The Photographers Gallery, London, in 2028 and will also become a part of the Victoria & Albert Museum Photography Collection. A new book of the work will accompany the show which will tour in the UK as well as internationally. The previous project Work Stations has been exhibited almost every year since it was first completed and is currently on show at Tate Britain in The 80s: Photographing Britain until May 5th 2025

Embedded Authentic Learning through Job Shadowing: A Pilot Study with International Pre-Masters Students

This case study reports on a job-shadowing pilot within an international Pre-Masters EAP-led Research and Critical Analysis unit at a UK arts university. Drawing on experiential learning, Communities of Practice and dialogic pedagogy, the project positioned job shadowing as an authentic encounter linking academic literacies with creative industry practice. Data from tutorials and surveys indicate strong perceived value, with students reporting gains in disciplinary understanding and employability skills, while evidence from EAP outputs suggests emerging ability to translate experiential encounters into academic discourse. Challenges around securing placements, processing technical discourse and linking experiences explicitly to Final Major Projects highlight the need for closer alignment with discipline modules. The study underscores the value of EAP mediation in enabling access to Communities of Practice and demonstrates how authentic professional observation can meaningfully support academic literacies and postgraduate readiness, while also raising questions of scalability, workload, and institutional alignment

“Scaring a Different Way”: Drama, Documentary and Horror Hybridity in Chernobyl (2019)

The 2019 limited series Chernobyl, a Sky original drama co-produced with HBO, received widespread acclaim for its moving dramatization of the 1986 disaster at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant. Though primarily considered a ‘drama’, this chapter argues that it is important to consider Chernobyl in connection to other genres, modes and forms. As a popular series Chernobyl has begun to receive some scholarly attention, including being linked to the Gothic and horror by those such as Martin Butler and Michael Fuchs (2025) and Louis Bayman (2019), which this research builds upon by analysing how the creators and audiences have connected Chernobyl to different genres and modes. By touching upon critic reviews before considering the perspective of the series’ makers in more detail, including interviews with creator and writer Craig Mazin as well as director Johan Renck, it is possible to examine the tensions which emerge between the docudrama and horror. Due to the series re-enacting a true event with the purpose of unsettling and disturbing its viewers, there immediately emerges a potential tension between realism and sensationalism, accuracy and exploitation, empathy and disgust. Further complicating the generic makeup of Chernobyl is arguably its place as ‘quality’ or ‘prestige television’, much debated but widely used categorisations which connect to both creator and audience expectations about the series’ formal and thematic properties. In order to explore the series’ generic and industrial context, this chapter considers a range of extratextual materials intertwined with analysis of the text’s visual, aural and narrative techniques. I argue that this approach to Chernobyl allows us to better understand this significant text’s affect, as well as the fraught status of any docudrama taking on the horrifying subject matter of nuclear disaster

Social media and choreographic practice: Creative tools for collaboration, co-creation and creative practice

The challenge of writing about online social networks is that they are in constant flux, with new platforms emerging whilst older ones that once seemed established are closed. Therefore, rather than focusing on the platforms themselves, this chapter focuses on the different uses of online social networks within choreography, from early uses of Facebook to the more recent utilization of Instagram and Tik Tok and by doing so offers some thoughts and approaches that will remain pertinent and helpful in the future. Over the last couple of decades, a variety of online social networks have been developed, building on the ideological and technical foundations for Web 2.0, to enable the creation and exchange of user-generated content. Over this time, a growing number of dance companies have explored the potential of social media platforms with their choreographic practice to create online collaborative spaces for the development of new work and, as patterns of cultural consumption have changed, as platforms for the distribution and reception of new work as well. This chapter will be structured around a number of key case studies, discussing and analysing key works to draw out common themes and approaches

MAVIS: Multi-Stem Audio Visualisation in Immersive Spaces Framework

Abstract The visualisation of music has gained traction in both research and musical composition in recent years. The increased accessibility to immersive technologies, such as virtual reality (VR) and other forms of mixed reality (MR), lend themselves to the examination of how visualisation can impact the perception of audio virtual worlds. In this paper, we propose the MAVIS (Multi-stem Audio Visualisation in Immersive Spaces) design framework, an approach to generating a visualisation of multi-stem structured orchestral music in a virtual world. This research explores the impact on participants’ interaction with an orchestral musical composition through the use of a two framework iterations informed by use cases. The resulting final design structure outlined in this article points towards constructing multi-stem virtual orchestral experiences through three pillars: semantic consistency, spatial agency, and complexity control. Whilst this research serves to propose a design intervention, future work requires a more extensive participant testing approach, coupled with an exploration of additional multimodal analysis. Keywords: immersive visualisation; virtual reality; multi-stem audi

Atomic Horror: Fears of Nuclear Technology in Gothic Literature, Film and Media

While much work on the representation of nuclear power has focused on film and literature, this edited collection reveals that fears of nuclear power have also been expressed within television, online platforms, video games, tabletop games, theatre and audio work. By bringing together these different forms the edited collection elucidates similarities as well as drawing attention to media specificity, as many of the chapters consider why atomic horror has been explored via a particular medium, be it the Heads-Up Display or skill system of a video game, the use of a global map and atomic iconography in a board game, the ‘quality television’ category which lends prestige to the subject, or even a ‘media mix’ of different forms. We suggest that this range of forms finds distinctive ways to resonate where perhaps other modes of communication and information, such as news reports, may lose their powers of affective communication. The Gothic and horror especially can uncover the depth of societal fears and breadth of potential devastation that are often unspoken, lost and numbed within the statistics and data incorporated in news reports, documentaries and everyday discourse, when the subject matter itself has become an everyday horror despite being a steadily growing matter of concern globally, politically and ecologically. This edited collection argues that horror and the Gothic have been returned to time and again by creators and audiences as powerful tools to communicate one of the most significant challenges the world continues to face

Dear Lino: A Love Letter in Ink and Dust

In a letter to painter and printmaker Lino Mannocci, artist and lecturer Amanda Couch reflects on their friendship, the time she spent as his printmaking assistant from 2005 until his death in April 2021, and the influence his work had on her own artistic practice. The letter functions as both a tribute, and a meditation on longing, memory, and artistic encounter. Couch recounts their rituals in the printmaking studio, the material and spiritual dimensions of monotype creation, and the influence of Mannocci’s imagery and material practices on her own artwork. Through poetic prose and recollection, she explores themes of transformation, materiality, and the ephemeral nature of art and life. The letter is a site of mourning and appreciation, conjuring Mannocci’s memory in clouds of ink and dust

Scarily bad acting: perceptions of performance within the scary movie franchise

While the historical tendency to neglect close analysis of acting and performance in film studies is gradually being addressed by a number of scholars in the field, this chapter suggests that acting in the horror genre requires further consideration. Surveying popular criticism on acting in film reviews and the coverage of awards seasons, there tends to be an emphasis on identifying high quality performances with a bias towards traditional dramas, and a lack of attention paid to the horror genre by contrast. This chapter suggests that this neglect has arisen because horror has not traditionally been associated with high quality acting, arguably the opposite: there is an assumption that most horror genre films will feature poor performances. The horror spoof is an interesting case study through which to examine the perception of acting in horror, then, for its goal is to poke fun at the more derisory aspects of horror. As such the unintentionally laughable horror performance becomes an intentionally comedic punchline. The Scary Movie franchise is notable for taking aim at a number of different horror subgenres and tropes and this chapter will consider how the franchise draws attention to the potential theatricality of horror performances. In particular, it connects the female stars of the first Scary Movie to a lineage of scream queens, identifying the components that have made their performances a source of mockery

Illustrating non-fiction: a practice-based exploration of visual and material strategies in non-fiction children's books

This practice-based investigation explores visual and material strategies used by illustrators to present and structure the information, organise the book’s content, and influence the perceived reliability of the depictions in non-fiction picturebooks. The study was motivated by a shift in the genre that resulted in the proliferation of visually-conceptualised books, and in an increased presence of the illustrator in their ideation and development. The methodological bricolage employed in the study enabled a combination of methods, at the core of which was creative practice. A review of primary literature led to the identification of visual strategies used in the genre, which were analysed in view of the degree of reliability they are perceived to convey by using the social semiotic concept of visual modality. Finding potential in introducing features from informational spaces into the book, four projects were developed through creative practice, exploring connections between non-fiction picturebooks and cabinets of curiosities, museums, and collections. Reflective processes were holistically applied through the research to reveal insights during making, and to extract conclusions from the findings. Through this study, I found that modality can be expressed through pictorial, design and material means in non-fiction picturebooks. While certain strategies risk conveying authoritarian implications, they can be reframed, resignified or contested through conceptual, visual and material approaches. This investigation thus highlighted the illustrator’s role in shaping the content of non-fiction picturebooks through their subjective voice, creative choices, and modality conveyed by the strategies employed. The investigation concluded that, given the convergence of the creative and the informational in non-fiction picturebooks, illustrators have the possibility of using visual and material means to communicate information, influence the perceived reliability of the depictions, reinforce the narrative, enhance the content, and generate alternative reading experiences. The picturebook can thereby offer great expressive potential for the illustrator to construct informational experiences by making use of the multimodal nature of this form