From ‘take-ism’ to pursuit of newness and originality: design professionals and models of creativity in contemporary China

Chinese innovative workers are often discussed in terms of their exploitation and empowerment within the current intellectual property systems, but little attention is given to their creative processes. Meanwhile, design practitioners are viewed solely as an innovation resource in the field of design thinking. Based on interviews with Chinese interior designers and secondary data, this article provides an analysis that situates their practices and experiences within the intersection of these fields, emphasising practitioners’ accounts of creativity and production of innovative, cultural, and aesthetic forms. Drawing on theories of practice, genre, and post-Bourdieuian analysis of cultural production, this article argues that the valorisation of creativity needs to be understood in relation to the practices in which they engage, within particular contexts of history, organisation, and genre cultures that provide opportunities for the transformation of genre boundaries. Operating within a milieu that saw copying as part of creative process, the practitioners had no agreement on how the work should be understood within the rubric of creativity. Despite this, they aimed for slight differentiation in design, appropriating and rediscovering multi-cultural forms to resist ‘take-ism’ – the imitative culture of copying of foreign decorative elements and styles, while establishing themselves in the commercial world

Measuring children’s metalinguistic awareness

Research into young learners’ metalinguistic awareness has led to both definitions of the construct and key findings about its role in children’s cognitive and linguistic development. I briefly summarise this research before introducing two established theoretical models that can help us understand the concept of metalinguistic awareness more broadly: E. Bialystok’s classic dichotomy of analysis of knowledge and control of processing, and R. Ellis’ notion of explicit (second language) knowledge. This is followed by an overview of measures of metalinguistic awareness that have been used in empirical studies to date as well as an illustration and critique of selected measures. As a result, I propose a model which combines features of the two previous frameworks by conceptualising knowledge representations and processes in terms of (1) how implicit/explicit and (2) how specific/schematic they are. I explain this model to illustrate how it can serve as a useful thinking tool. In particular, I argue that the model not only allows us to theorise measures of metalinguistic awareness more clearly and easily, but that it can also capture tasks aimed at assessing other linguistic and cognitive abilities. The paper concludes with a brief outlook on future research into metalinguistic awareness

The Expressive Injustice of Being Rich

According to limitarianism, it is morally impermissible to be too rich. We consider three main challenges to limitarianism: the redundancy objection, the inconclusiveness objection, and the commitment objection. As a distributive principle, we find that limitarianism fails to overcome the three objections—even taking recent theoretical innovations into account. Instead, we suggest that the core commitment of limitarianism can be drawn from the excess intuition. It entails that at some point, people’s claims to retain wealth become qualitatively different: they become preposterous from the point of view of interpersonal morality and justification. Extreme wealth, we argue, adds a distinctive expressive reason to worry about inequality and insufficiency, compounding these other distributive injustices. In retaining or wasting excess wealth while others have too little, the wealthy send a message of complete disregard for the interests of their co-citizens. They express that their disadvantaged compatriots have a diminished moral standing

Reassessing precarious and immigrant work: A psychoanalytic investigation of workers’ subjectivity and affective experience in food-delivery gig-work

In contemporary research on low-skilled immigrant workers, scholars have highlighted concepts such as precarity, exploitation, and racism as key loci of problematisation. Furthermore, how migrant workers experience exploitative and racist work-environments is also a topic that draws the attention of researchers, as these challenges influence and relate to workers’ subjectivity, affect and perspectives of otherness. Additionally, how subjectivity relates to resistance and what forms of control and consent influence the subjective manifestations of resistance—from an organisation studies perspective—is an important factor to examine as a fundamental attribute of workers’ lived-experience. My focus lies in the intersection of these three lines of thought and in particular how lived-experiences of precarity and otherness should be investigated within a framework that takes into consideration the combination of affective-experiences, subjectivity and practices of control and resistance at work. Lacanian psychoanalysis offers a methodological tool that can assist in shedding light on this interrelated perspective of the lived-experience of migrant workers as well as in analysing their subjectivity and affective economy in a multilayered fashion. To this end, the present study examines these questions by collecting a rich set of empirical data from migrant-riders who work in food-delivery platform-work in England. The analysis of the data collected is made from a psychoanalytic perspective which traces the different identifications that workers’ employ in their speech. Thus it allows the examination of the food-delivery subject—with its lack and different objects—along the modes of enjoyment that support their articulation. In this way, the suggested findings may improve our understanding of how migrant-workers experience their precarious and exploitative working conditions. The main contributions of this study rest on how riders embrace the precarious conditions of food-delivery in a way that sustains their commitment to this work, and secondly, on how the algorithmic system of control functions as a human resource management practice in food-delivery gig-work

Rethinking international law along with Amazonian ontologies: Human non-human divisions in the resistance of the Kukama-Kukamiria people to the Amazonian Waterway project

This thesis focuses on the nature-culture dimension in the Amazonian territory as an ontological question. It examines how international law operates in the face of Amazonian Indigenous ontological diversity regarding the human-non-human divide. In so doing, it seeks to contribute to existing explanations of why international law's responses to Indigenous resistance end up contributing to the elimination of Indigenous worldviews and dashing the hopes of those who resist in the Global South. On this basis, the research sets out to analyse the dynamics of the operations of international law in the Amazonian context through the case of the Kukama-Kukamiria people’s resistance to protect the Marañón River against the Amazonian Waterway, an infrastructure project in Peru. In analytical terms, the study employs an interdisciplinary approach, theoretically informed by Amazonian studies and critical approaches to international law. In terms of the empirical component, a case study method is used, based on qualitative analysis of documentary and visual information, as well as semi-structured in-depth interviews. The research reveals that, in the Amazonian context, internal forms of oppression through international law involve the hitherto-unnoticed reproduction of assumptions about how divisions are made between the human and the non-human, or more generally, between nature and culture. These are assumptions taken for granted by modern Western thinking, not necessarily shared by Amazonian societies. The thesis looks at this subtle operation and problematises it to understand the struggles and dilemmas of Indigenous people's resistance. The study reveals, through the case study, how international law is implicated in reproducing premises about the human-non-human that, while acting inadvertently, operate against the grain of Indigenous resistance. In doing so, it contributes to make visible and destabilise the conditions of possibility of the injustices in which international law is implicated in the Amazon, as a necessary step towards overcoming them

Spanish labour market, mobility and labour shortages

We use a simple yet powerful approach to investigate the dynamics of worker flows across sectors in the Spanish economy. The method imposes a minimal amount of structure on the data by assuming sector-specific matching functions, and backs out the direction of workers’ search intensities across sectors using data on realised worker flows and vacancies. We find that aggregate search intensity in Spain has been increasing since the pandemic and has led aggregate labour shortages to be below pre-pandemic levels by 2023. However, this boost of search intensity is directed to industries with low matching efficiencies and job finding rates. As a result, aggregate match formation is near to a 10-years low relative to the number of matches that would result if search intensity was allocated to maximise total matches given the observed vacancy distribution and match efficiencies across sectors

The Death Receptor 5 regulates 5-FU-induced apoptosis via the p38 SAPK pathway

Apoptosis is an important process that helps to eliminate damaged or unwanted cells, including cancer cells during chemotherapy treatment. Previous work identified a novel apoptosis-inducing complex and pathway that is triggered by the chemotherapeutic drug 5FU. 5FU causes DNA damage that gives rise to the activation of ATR and subsequent upregulation of caspase-10, which in turn recruits FADD, caspase-8, TRAF2 and RIP1 to a complex termed FADDosome. Within the FADDosome caspase-8 is activated leading to downstream apoptosis signalling via Bid and mitochondria. Interestingly, 5FU induced apoptosis is lower in p53 knock-out cells without affecting the FADDosome-mediated caspase-8 activation. Therefore, this study investigates the role of p53 and the molecular pathways it controls in 5FU-induced apoptosis in colorectal cancer cells. I found that 5-FU regulates FADDosome-induced apoptosis through p53-dependent upregulation of TRAILreceptor 2 (TRAIL-R2) also known as Death Receptor 5 (DR5), leading to a partial activation of the receptor independent of its ligand TRAIL. This activation triggers non-canonical signalling including the p38 MAPK pathway, which is absent or substantially reduced in p53-null and DR5 knock-down cells. Co-treatment of cells with 5-FU and p38 inhibitors diminished apoptosis levels by about 50%. These results demonstrate that the role of p53 in chemotherapy-induced apoptosis is more complex and potentially more multi-facetted than expected. TRAIL-R2 activated p38 MAPK might promote the activation of Bid by active caspase-8 or other molecular mechanisms that lead to mitochondrial outer membrane permeabilization (MOMP). As MOMP is needed for the release of Smac/Diablo from the mitochondria to inhibit the anti-apoptotic protein XIAP, this mechanism is essential for the full execution of apoptosis, and can explain the relative resistance in p53-null cells

Revolutionising Vehicular Security: Lightweight Handover Authentication in RIS-Aided VANETs (invited Paper)

Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks (VANETs) form the foundational communication framework of intelligent transportation systems, facilitating low-latency, vehicle-to-everything data exchange for enhanced traffic efficiency and safety. Accordingly, ensuring secure, efficient, and scalable authentication is essential to maintain communication trustworthiness, especially in highly dynamic and dense traffic scenarios. While traditional public key cryptography (PKC)-based solutions offer strong security guarantees, they are computationally intensive and struggle to scale under VANET workloads. To address these challenges, this paper proposes a novel lightweight handover authentication scheme that integrates pairing-based cryptography with symmetric key primitives to ensure message integrity, anonymity, and unlinkability. The proposed solution is deployed within a real-world Reconfigurable Intelligent Surface (RIS)-assisted commu- nication environment, enhancing the robustness and feasibility of the authentication process during handover. Furthermore, a comprehensive evaluation is conducted, comparing the computational and communication overhead of the proposed scheme with existing cryptographic protocols. Results demonstrate the superior scalability and efficiency of the proposed approach, making it well-suited for next-generation VANET applications

Corporate ownership types and internationalization strategies: The moderating role of home country capitalism

Despite widespread academic consensus that firm ownership impacts internationalization, there is disagreement on which ownership type increases internationalization. Also, the risk differentials of internationalization strategies need to be considered: sales internationalization (a low-risk strategy) and asset internationalization (a high-risk strategy). Furthermore, home-country capitalism can moderate these relationships – a relationship unexamined in such research. Using a sample of US, Western European, and emerging-market firms, this paper addresses these research gaps. It examines how five different firm-ownership types (government, family, institutional, managerial, and corporate) and home-country capitalism influence internationalization strategies. We find that government ownership reduces sales internationalization. Family and institutional ownership increases sales internationalization, whereas institutional, managerial, and corporate ownership increases asset internationalization. Higher home-country capitalism reduces the impact of institutional and corporate owners on sales internationalization while increasing the impact of all five ownership types on asset internationalization. Our findings have implications for corporate governance and internationalization literature and practice