Towards multispecies justice: non-anthropocentric ecocritical methods and practices

This article examines contemporary artistic practices that challenge entrenched Western binaries such as nature/culture and human/animal, proposing new frameworks for perceiving and engaging with the more-than-human world in the context of the Anthropocene. Through four case studies—The Embassy of the North Sea, Gustafsson & Haapoja’s Museum of Nonhumanity, Ursula Biemann’s Forest Mind, and Kyriaki Goni’s Data Garden—the article explores how interdisciplinary, research-based art practices reconfigures human-nonhuman relations, critiques extractivist logics and present alternative ways of engaging with ecological crises. Drawing on frameworks from eco-criticism, aesthetic theory, and Indigenous cosmologies, the article introduces the concepts of non-anthropocentric institutionalism and plant-human entanglement as theoretical tools to rethink environmental agency, legal representation, and techno-ecological coexistence. Haraway’s notion of natureculture helps articulate entangled ontologies, while Rancière’s distribution of the sensible and T.J. Demos’s ecocritical aesthetics frame artistic practices as political acts of ontological intervention that challenge what is seen, heard, and valued. These works do not merely represent environmental crises — they intervene in political structures by advocating for the rights of nonhuman entities, envisioning speculative futures, and fostering multi-species justice. Biemann integrates shamanic knowledge and Indigenous epistemologies; Goni speculates on symbiotic data systems between plants and machines. The Embassy of the North Sea pioneers sensory-based advocacy for marine legal personhood, while the Museum of Nonhumanity deconstructs species hierarchies rooted in colonial scientific taxonomies. Through their aesthetic strategies, these practices create spaces for critical reflection and action, particularly concerning ecological justice and the environmental impacts of human activities

Queer Joy on Social Media: Exploring the Expression and Facilitation of Queer Joy in Online Platforms.

Queer Joy is conceptualised as a form of resistance to oppression by celebrating queerness in the face of adversity. This research aimed to centre queer joy and understand how it is expressed and may be facilitated in online spaces. To do this we conducted a survey with 100 UK participants who indicated they identifed as LGBTQ+ on the online recruitment platform Prolifc. We asked a series of open and closed questions in an online survey to investigate 1) what queer joy looks like on social media 2) how queer joy content is engaged with on social media 3) which platforms are perceived to facilitate queer joy and 4) how queer people protect their privacy online. The results suggested that to facilitate queer joy online, platforms should allow fexible self expression and community engagement, while allowing for granular control over privacy and the audience such content is shown to

Creative Dilemmas: Balancing Open Access and Integrity

This article reflects on two research enabling practitioners’ (REPs) experiences related to making creative research outputs open. The REPs operate within a small specialist institution that is a research organisation (RO) focusing on the creative arts where open research is an embedded part of the RO’s research culture. Many of the RO’s academics are practice-based researchers whose research is disseminated through non-traditional output types such as artefacts, exhibitions, designs and videos. However, there are tensions when making creative outputs open that can lead to ethical dilemmas faced by REPs and researchers, including issues related to informed consent, intellectual property and reuse of the research. These tensions are illustrated by examining three examples of creative outputs where issues have arisen where the inter-relationships of open research, ethics and integrity are explored through vignettes. The findings of this article recommend continued training for researchers about the use of licences for creative works. Another recommendation calls for inclusive and transparent processes that support researchers in gaining justice when the intellectual property from their open access research outputs has been reused in a manner which contradicts the principles of research integrity

#Rebel Selves: Queer Selfies as Practices of Care

This visual essay presents an exploration of the gendered nature of visibleness and possibilities for queer entanglements through self-portraiture, performance, and installation. It culminates with #Rebel Selves, a practice-based research project comprising installations, self-portraits, contemporary dance performances, participatory workshops, and a smart phone app. #Rebel Selves draws on queer and posthumanist theories to develop experimental approaches to producing queer selfies. Research on selfies finds that negative feedback in comments and the currency of likes reinforce and police dominant gender ideals. However, research on queer selfies has highlighted their role in enhancing queer visibility, challenging stereotypes, creating supportive communities, and improving self-esteem. In this respect, selfie taking and sharing can be practices of care. In this essay I argue that #Rebel selfies do not escape the risks attached to being visible in the public sphere. However, they offer opportunities to be present without being subjected to disciplining gazes, and to participate in caring communities

Lullabies in Lockdown illustration exhibition

From 2020 onwards, the COVID-19 pandemic disrupted and significantly altered our familiar way of life. For those experiencing parenthood for the first time, they found themselves adjusting to two new realities. This article asks the question, ‘What can illustrated stories within the gallery offer to uncover, support and unite those with shared but unspoken lived experience?’ More broadly, it looks, via a group exhibition case study, at the opportunities of the gallery space for purposing illustration and its unique qualities, as a gentle invite to engage audiences with hidden and emotionally charged subject matter which benefits from being shared. The Lullabies in Lockdown project began as a month-long group illustration exhibition in Leeds, UK, in October 2022. It featured work by various illustrators addressing new parenthood during the pandemic. This article looks at different illustrative approaches to tell a holistic story of the time, providing an overview of the exhibition and the development of ‘Lullabies’ into a pop-up touring show. Through artist statements and audience feedback, it considers how collectivized illustration validates and processes lived experiences, revealing how public exhibitions can reassure individuals facing hardships alone by acknowledging shared struggles. This discussion emphasizes the illustrators’ role as witnesses and the gallery as a medium and highlights their combined potential to create tonally sensitive aesthetics that invite audiences to engage with challenging experiences. It argues for further research into the overlooked values of illustration, especially amidst cultural polarization and artificial intelligence concerns, as a means of humanizing communication. This article was first presented for conference at Washington University, St Louis, Missouri as part of the ‘Blind Spots’ 2023 Illustration Research Symposium

Learning Returns: The limitations and benefits of ‘snowballing recruitment’ as a process when researching the learning journeys of adults returning to education

An arts-based research project, Learning Returns, was designed to capture the learning journeys of mature learners. The participants had all returned to study the arts after being away from education and training. They undertook many routes back into education. Arts-based methods incorporating film-making were the means employed to record their stories (Broadhead and Hooper, 2024). Recruitment of the participants was continuous throughout the project and adopted a ‘snowballing’ approach. This involved the nomination by the participants of other potentially eligible people who could also make valuable contributions. Snowballing is not unproblematic as it is reliant on the social capital of the participants, and this could inadvertently exclude possible candidates from the research investigation. On the other hand, recruiting participants through data from institutions depends on who is identified as a legitimate learner, and this can also lead to exclusions of those learning in informal settings. This chapter reflects on how the snowballing strategy allowed for new insights to be gained about how mature learners become part of cultural ecologies, keeping in mind that only people who are part of these networks are identified as possible participants. It also shows how adult learners can play an important role in widening access to arts education

Director

The output is a body sculpture. The work is intended to present opposing movements: a rigid forwards-and-backwards-only walk which at the same time creates the freeform movement of the steel ball on the tray between the performer’s legs. Research process: Director was conceived in response to research into Franz West’s ‘Adaptives’ (body sculptures) at the Franz West Foundation, Vienna, 31 May 2024. It was the result of viewing many hours of archive footage of the ‘Adaptives’ that captured a range of performances with the sculptures over decades of West’s career: from studio experiments with the artist’s close circle; to invited responses via arts professionals such as Ivo Dimchev; to the open-ended testing of the works by the public in galleries across the world Research insights: The tacit understanding betrayed by both professionals and laypeople in the archival recordings is that humility, braggadocio, embarrassment, confidence, tenderness and aggression are equally welcomed via the Adaptives. This coalescence of contradictory responses also coalesces opposing worldviews. By exploring whether West’s Adaptives can be said to be representative of a phenomenological we-horizon, or whether are they something more prosaic (just another symbol of the alone-together culture upon which contemporary Capitalism insists), the initial insight was that they are neither and both: West’s wholesale turn away from didacticism via the Adaptives deliberately courts ambiguity. The further insight was to visualise ambiguity, to take West’s idea that a gesture can only emerge with the help of an object to its ambiguous extreme by enacting the ways in which subject (performer) and object (body sculpture) express and control their agency. Dissemination: Draft tested as part of Emergency24 exhibition at the Contact Theatre, Manchester 28 September 2024. The finished version was performed at “The Same Deep Water As You”, curated by Rowland’s Leaving at PINK, Stockport, 31 May 2025

Feral Interventions: Objects and Artworks on the Periphery

Being an artist requires stamina and a certain level of subterfuge. I make sculptural objects and installations from found domestic objects, the detritus of feminine material culture sourced from flea markets and second-hand shops, stuff I term “feral objects”. To be feral usually implies an escape from domestication, although it could also imply abandonment and vulnerability. In order to survive in the wild, feral animals, plants and insects—and perhaps feral objects too—must develop adaptive strategies in response to their new environment; a process that can have unforeseen consequences. Often unexpectedly productive, anthropologist Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing calls this process “feral effects”, the non-designed and unplanned-for consequences of imperial and industrial infrastructure. In 2023 I travelled to Norway with a suitcase of artworks to install in and around the island of Jeløya, including the gallery spaces and grounds of Galleri F15. This occupation of spaces and places beyond the parameters of the cultural institution was a feral intervention that took material form not entirely independent from, but as an intentional process of scavenging on the peripheries of the art world. For the three iterations of “The-Lost-and-Found” symposium that took place in Lisbon, Warsaw and Riga between December 2023 and June 2024, I travelled with artworks in my suitcase to opportunistically install feral interventions in and around the symposium venues. Understood in this context as a feminist position, feral interventions allow for evasion and unpredictability, for creative resistance to systems of control, and for the potential to undertake adaptive art-working strategies. Through analysis of the feral interventions undertaken, this article investigates how the versatility of artist and artwork might accommodate peripheral practices of exhibition and display

Writing the Chronotope: Critical Analysis and Creative Action

Using Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory of the literary artistic chronotope, this paper explores the interplay between literary theory and creative writing, and how theories of literary criticism can offer provocation and insight into the creative act. The artistic chronotope is concerned with how time/space is rendered in a work of literature. With specific attention to the ‘aircraft chronotope’, how time/space is represented in prose fiction set aboard aircraft, the paper draws together acts of analysis, creativity and pedagogy, exploring the question of how writers can utilize the notion of time/space in their creative work. The paper focussing on the short stories ‘All the People Were Mean and Bad’ by Lucy Caldwell and Miranda July’s ‘Roy Spivey’, to identify the creative possibilities of the literary chronotope. The intention is to analyse how student writers can recognize and develop the quality of their own prose writing through engagement with literary theory. By bridging the gap between theory and practice, this paper seeks to support writers and educators to reimagine the role of literary theory in their pedagogy and craft

Home is a Belief

In this case study two sets of images are compared that emerged from drawings made by the artist Garry Barker whilst talking to people who live in his local community. One set of drawings were produced in response to conversations made about a selected ‘special’ object from a domestic setting, that meant something important to a post stroke victim; another group of drawings were made after talking with refugees living in temporary accommodation in a repurposed high-rise block of flats. In both cases drawing is used to reveal narratives that can emerge from human/object relationships and two different world views are articulated, both revealed as being as much to do with fiction as reality, as they travel in opposite directions, sometimes as imaginary travellers and at other times as observers of a harsh reality. A third ‘life story’ is then interjected as an example of how when images are woven from the threads of stories about ‘home’ they can also be disturbing, especially when events are generated by political realities. These drawn images allow us to reflect upon the fact that sometimes the home hosts doorways to other worlds and sometimes home is not a home at all