Colour me Pink! ​Being inspired by the Zandra Rhodes' Colourful Heritage Project

On Thursday, 6th February 2025, the University for the Creative Arts, Library & Learning, and the Colourful Heritage Project hosted a webinar introducing the Zandra Rhodes’ Colourful Heritage project. The webinar highlighted the vibrant fashion images and educational resources now freely available for educational use. The project, funded by the National Lottery Heritage Fund, offers a unique platform for students and educators to explore the influential work of fashion designer Zandra Rhodes. The webinar attracted art librarians, visual arts researchers, educators, fashion historians, curators, and museum/gallery staff, interested in learning about Rhodes' legacy and how to inspire future generations of designers and creatives. The Colourful Heritage project emphasizes engagement with fashion heritage and skill-building opportunities, particularly for underrepresented learners in Medway, Kent. The webinar introduced participants to the expanded Zandra Rhodes Digital Study Collection, which now includes textiles, headpieces, hats, jewellery, and iconic pieces such as the cape worn by Freddie Mercury. The webinar also included discussions on copyright rights and the use of the collection, visual literacy, and 'slow looking' techniques for better understanding garments and fashion collections. The event concluded with a reflection and Q&A session, offering attendees a chance to engage directly with the speakers. Further details about the Colourful Heritage project and the Zandra Rhodes Digital Study Collection can be found on the website: https://mylibrary.uca.ac.uk/colourfulheritag

Care as counterinsurgency

In Louisiana in 2021 a group of Black fathers gathered in the form of Dads on Duty to pre-empt increasing violence amongst their children at a local high school. Activist and writer Harsha Walia hailed this as community-based care exemplifying abolition in practice. This coheres with a recent focus on care as a political project providing an antidote to anti-Black violence. However, this case is instructive in foregrounding the limitations of a politics of care insofar as care is sutured into the continuation of policing and violence. With Fanon’s concept of incomplete death, I consider whiteness’ orienting tensions between the drive to annihilate Blackness and simultaneously to maintain Blackness as a source of exploitable value and the rights and privileges for whites. If care operates in this space of incomplete death, then care-politics becomes a survival program that conciliates anti-Black violence that would render impossible its abolition

Advancing sustainable development goals through green inclusive leadership in hospitality industry: a dual study perspective

Implementing green innovation is paramount for the luxury hospitality industry in accomplishing its sustainable development goals (SDGs). Therefore, identifying the key drivers that enable green innovation (GI) is essential for promoting sustainable development. Existing literature on luxury hospitality management has overlooked exploring the key factors that drive green innovation. This study leverages the natural resource-based view to examine the mediating roles of green dynamic capability and green environmental orientation in the relationship between green inclusive leadership (GIL) and green innovation. The research further examines the effect of GI on a hotel’s environmental performance and a hotel’s green image. The theoretical model was evaluated through two distinct studies focusing on Italian employees in the hospitality sector. The findings underscore the significance of GIL practices with environmental initiatives to promote sustainable GI. Expanding the GI debate offers compelling insights that might help hotel professionals make informed strategic decisions contributing to SDGs

The subject, the worker, and the slave reification, capitalism, and the divestment of reason from freedom

This article traces a line of thought through a reading of Lukács to suggest that the promise of Enlightenment modernity to emancipate thought from extrahuman authority is an impossibility because the problem of sovereignty returns in the form of the problem of freedom. The authority to make ourselves responsible, and act according to norms of our own making is the keystone feature of philosophical modernity. But this capacity to self-determine requires that the normative compels itself alone. This is a central problem for social pragmatism, which claims heir to Kant and Hegel’s enlightenment. Lukács exacerbates this, pointing both to how capitalism enmeshes us within its sociomaterial systems and how this foregrounds worker’s practical enactment within those systems. This casts doubt on the possibility of detangling norms from power required for autonomy. But rather than follow this line of thought, Lukács foregrounds the split subjectivity of the worker as the material limit of determination. Instead, in confrontation not with the figure of the worker but the slave as reified and naturalised category we might disarticulate reason from freedom in pursuit of the immanent disentangling of thought from the problems of sovereign authority that modernity promised

Contemporary art in the conflicts of globalization

Sole authored monograph

Circularity of semiconductor chip value chains: advancing AI sustainability amid geopolitical tensions

Semiconductor chips are the foundational hardware driving the capabilities of artificial intelligence (AI) systems. This paper explores the potential of circular economy strategies to address key challenges in semiconductor chip value chains, including environmental impacts, resource constraints, and geopolitical risks. The study fills a gap in existing literature by focusing on an industry that remains largely underexplored in circular economy research. The key research questions the paper explores are: 1. How can circular economy practices transform the semiconductor value chain to reduce environmental impact and improve resource security? 2. How can these circular practices strengthen the value chain against geopolitical risks and supply chain disruptions? Using a value chain approach and complex systems perspective, informed by a narrative literature review of academic and grey literature, the paper examines how circular practices across five key stages of the semiconductor value chain can mitigate environmental pressures, reduce dependency on critical raw materials like silicon and gallium, and enhance supply chain resilience against geopolitical disruptions. Existing initiatives by leading companies such as TSMC, ASML, and Intel are reviewed, alongside emerging technological innovations in semiconductor chip materials and manufacturing processes. The paper concludes by identifying critical future research questions and providing actionable insights for policymakers, industry and researchers

At Home: mobilising contemporary design history through curatorial practice

In April 2022 At Home: panoramas de nos vies domestiques opened at the Biennale Internationale Design Saint-Étienne. Co-curated by three design historians and curators, Penny Sparke, Jana Scholze and Catharine Rossi, the exhibition explored the values and meanings of the home today, and examined how designers, architects and artists have deployed these concepts in their work. This paper positions At Home as a case study in contemporary design history. Based on a collaborative cu- ratorial approach, and focused on mobilising design’s past to interpret and communicate the present, the exhibition sought to show the relevance of design history to an international, local and non-specialist audience. The curators organised the exhibition into five themed sections: Utopia, Shelter, Identities, Well-being, and Connectivity. Through a selection of international artworks, designs, architectural projects, photographs and films showing design-based responses to these issues past and present, the curators set out to stimulate reflection on the ways the domestic interior interacts with its inhabitants and the external world. They sought to articulate designers’ and inhabitants’ growing concerns about the climate emergency, widespread inequality, the erosion of the bound- ary between the private and public self, and the challenging aspects of today’s technological advances, and how these affect the inhabitants of the domestic sphere (Taylor, Downey and Meade, 2023). Conceived before Covid-19, researched during it, and exhibited in its aftermath, At Home also reflected on the home’s changing meaning in light of the pandemic. The curators sought to include everyday and familiar design objects alongside critical, speculative and polit- ical projects in order to facilitate the audience’s engagement. The latter included examples of Italian design from the 1960s to 1980s; Recognising the repeated citation of these designers’ practice in Italian design historiography, we sought to provide a different perspective by contextualising these architects’ work in light of contemporary designerly concerns. This paper seeks to examine the relationship between the history of design and its contemporary interpretation, how the developing realm of curatorial research methods and approaches can further the relevance of design history today, and how design history can inform curatorial practices and vice versa

Monstrosity in Bioshock: monsters, modernity and strategies of containment

This chapter examines the ways monsters in the videogame Bioshock are managed, controlled, captured and contained. A key theme is the tension between monsters and modernity. Monsters exist outside modernity. Associated with ancient beliefs, they have no place in the terrestrial zoology. The first and most brutal method of containment games employ involves the monster’s eradication, disposing of that which cannot be accommodated by contemporary epistemology. Another more complex method of containment brings monsters into the fold of scientific rationality, providing logical reasons for their existence through evolutionary or pharmaceutical explanations. The game also conscripts players themselves as scientific researcher, photographing monsters as a further means of furthering their eradication through modern technologies. Yet despite these strategies this process is never entirely effective. The monster by nature cannot be entirely contained and controlled. Moreover, the line between monster and human becomes increasingly strained as the adversaries eradicated accumulate, as the playable character develops increasing semi-supernatural abilities, and as they assume the guise of the very creatures they battle

Foreword

This brief piece is a discussion of the haunting qualities of the videogame medium, incorporating the ghostly entities of early arcade titles, the abandoned labyrinthine spaces of contemporary walking simulators, the often-spectral presence of players within game environments, the uncanny nature of videogame technologies and digital animation, glitching, game nostalgia, and the way games experiences haunt everyday life

Normalized cyborgization: cybernetics in the Cyberpunk franchise

his chapter investigates how Cybernetics, and specifically cybernetic augmentations, are represented in the Cyberpunk franchise and how their impact on society is portrayed. Cyberpunk 2077 (2020) and other extensions will be touched upon due to their flexibility and openness in creating imaginary speculative futures, the chapter will focus on worldbuilding elements in official TRPG publications. Also called ‘story-world databases’, these publications, like rulebooks and sourcebooks, play a major role in framing and shaping TRPG experiences by providing complex world infrastructures describing the culture, technology, and society of a fictional world with intentional gaps and adaptation spaces to be filled by the players during game sessions (Schallegger 2018; Mochocki 2021). The chapter begins with a brief history of cybernetic augmentations in the Cyberpunk franchise, explores their normalization, and concludes by examining one of their key impacts on individuals’ health