Shaping The Future: Developing Principles for Policy Recommendations for Responsible Innovation in Virtual Worlds

As Extended Reality (XR) technologies continue to evolve at a rapid pace, they hold the promise of transforming the way we interact both with digital information and the physical world. Whilst Augmented Reality (AR), Virtual Reality (VR), and Mixed Reality (MR) technologies offer unbridled opportunities for social connections, productivity, and play, these rapid technological advancements also pose critical challenges to ethics, privacy, accessibility, and safety. At present, there is little policy documentation that directly addresses the novel affordances posed by XR technologies, leading to a ‘policy void’ in this space. Having clear and effective policy frameworks prior to the widespread adoption of technology encourages and enables responsible and ethical innovation of XR technologies. This workshop is therefore dedicated to developing forward-thinking principles to guide policy recommendations that address potential future vulnerabilities posed by the widespread adoption of XR technologies whilst simultaneously encouraging the responsible innovation of new advancements within XR. To ensure these policy recommendations promote responsible innovation, the workshop will assemble multidisciplinary academics, industry developers and international policymakers. Our goal is to ensure that all perspectives are considered such that we can collaboratively chart a responsible and sustainable course for the XR landscape

Biographical Fictions and the Writing of the World

This essay reflects on questions that arise when we consider fictional representations of historical lives (biofiction) as world literature. In what ways does writing about an individual life concern the world? How do the modes of biographical and autobiographical fiction explore or challenge the grounds and boundaries of nation, place, culture, language, tradition, lineage that constrain or sustain identities? How do they negotiate the continuities and fractures – psychological and emotional as much as historical and ideological – between person, home and world? How do they inform our thinking about “world literature” as literature aware of its responsibility in the world and to the world that it receives, describes, shapes, creates, passes on as legacy? I first consider Steven Price’s novel Lampedusa, which narrates the last two years of Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s life as he was writing Il gattopardo (The Leopard), a novel centred, in turn, on the real-life figure of Tomasi’s great-grandfather at the time of the unification of Italy. Anna Banti’s Noi credevamo (“We believed”), narrated in the first person of Banti’s grandfather, further helps examine how the biofictional form is used to critique the concept of the nation from its periphery and to investigate the relationship between place, nation and world. John Banville’s Doctor Copernicus, revolving on the astronomer who theorized heliocentrism, enquires into our historical, scientific, philosophical and literary constructions of the world as physical planet, as place in which we live, and as the object of our representations. Finally, Dar (The Gift), the last novel written in Russian by Vladimir Nabokov, through the failures of its protagonist’s biographical and biofictional experiments, raises the question for the émigré writer of how to rebuild a relationship with the world

The Victorian Geological Illustrations of Crystal Palace Park, London: cycles of conservation and neglect, 1993–2023

In 2023, two decades after the restoration of the Victorian Geological Illustrations by the London Borough of Bromley—and the visit of the late HRH Prince Phillip to mark the completion of the restorations—it is clear that these internationally significant sculptures are in a worse state than ever before. Although interest in them remains high, and in spite of the best efforts of the Friends of the Crystal Palace Dinosaurs to protect and interpret them, it is plain that they are greatly at risk. In the year that marks the two-hundredth anniversary of the description of Megalosaurus, depicted in all its magnificence in the park, it is a matter of urgency that we promote the significance of a site that really should be recognized for what it is—world heritage—and its current state of neglect

Squeeze and Slide: Real-time continuous self-reports with physiological arousal to evaluate emotional engagement in short films of contemporary dance

Engagement is a broad and multifaceted research subject. Self-report engagement data of time-based experiences such as life performance or films is mostly collected through post-hoc questionnaires. The present study compares two devices that allow for real-time continuous self-report while watching 2 short films featuring contemporary dance. The first device is a squeeze ball with a pressure sensor inside and the second device a mechanical linear slider. Users are prompted to indicate their emotional engagement throughout each film using a device. Electrodermal activity (EDA) was also recorded as an indicator of arousal. Across a study involving 31 participants, the squeeze ball and slider reveal comparable overall correlations to EDA data. However there are indications of user-preference for the squeeze ball in the context of rating emotional involvement

Towards a minor sociology of futures: Shifting futures in Mass Observation accounts of the COVID-19 pandemic

This article argues for a ‘minor sociology of futures’, which focuses on the significance of futures in and to everyday life by attending to minor shifts in temporal rhythms and patterns that illuminate how futures are imagined and made. We draw on Deleuze and Guattari's concepts of the major and minor, to attend to how major time is ruptured and remade and how minor temporalities can be productive of new relationships with the major and different futures. Our analysis focuses on the intricate and ambivalent relations with futures articulated in written reflections submitted during the early phase (March–November 2020) of the COVID-19 pandemic in the UK to a Mass Observation directive on COVID-19 and time. Nourishing a sensitivity to the minor helps us develop a minor sociology that takes futures seriously, which we argue matters in times of uncertainty that stretch beyond the pandemic

Discourses of COVID-19 Vaccination in China: Public Response to Government Domination and the Emergence of ‘Vaccine Citizenship’

Using online discourse-centred ethnography and focus group discussions, this paper explores evolving discourses of COVID-19 vaccination in China and corresponding public responded. In addition to the state’s intensive control of COVID-19 outbreaks, China initiated independent research and the development of vaccines from the spring of 2020. In line with the state’s emphasis on success in controlling the outbreaks, government propaganda aimed to shape and disseminate successful images of the vaccines developed. Correspondingly, the public showed a supportive attitude when the first two domestically produced vaccines received Emergency Use Authorisation (EUA) by China's authorities. In contrast, vaccine hesitancy emerged when the government claimed its initial success in pandemic control and tried to communicate the vaccine’s safety and effectiveness. Importantly, COVID-19 outbreaks have never disappeared in China. As new domestic outbreaks emerged and the administration started to promote vaccination more vigorously, more people were forced to accept vaccination. When the government endowed vaccine discourse with the responsibility of protecting the general population’s health, the implementation of the vaccination programme became even more constraining. This paper examines empirical data on the government’s and individuals’ discursive practices through a focus on subjectivity as part of China’s biopolitical governance of COVID-19 which presents vaccination as an individual ‘technology of the self’. In this complex context of top-down governance, I analyse how the exercise of biopower and a sense of governance emerged and changed during China’s efforts at COVID-19 control

Introduction: The digital self(ie) and world-making.

The book examines the social and cultural role of selfies in India. It looks at how the selfie, unlike the photograph, which was a gesture towards an external reality, remains intimately self-referential, yet reconfigures social ordering, identity formation, agency, and spaces in curious ways. This volume approaches questions about the construction and performance of the self through the digital selfie and uses this situated, contextualized, and culturally specific phenomenon as a site to explore the themes of self-making, place-making, gender, subjectivity, and power. Highlighting the specific contexts of production, the authors examine the array of self-expressive capabilities realized in a multitude of uses of the selfie that simultaneously reconfigure the self, the space, and the world. An important study of visual social media culture, the volume will be useful for interpreting everyday media experiences and will be of interest to students and researchers of image studies, visual studies, photography studies, visual culture, media studies, culture studies, cultural anthropology, digital humanities, popular culture, sociology of technology, and South Asian studies

Ray of Light

Expanded version of paper given at the colloquium celebrating the work of Nicholas Royle on the occasion of his retirement

Passages to the Outside: A Prelude to a Geophilosophy of the Future

What might it take to reimagine the futures of geographical thought on an earth whose geological disjunctures and catastrophic dynamics have radically upended the progressive temporality that once made of “the future” a modern article of faith and a matter of concern? What, in other words, is the future to those practices animated by the metamorphic forces of the earth? Seeking to inhabit the problem-space these questions generate, this commentary suggests that at stake is nothing less than the challenge of learning to think futurity immanently, as a problem of space. The challenge is to reimagine the future not as the promise of a yet-to-come but as a passage to the outside: to those immanent zones of indeterminacy, anarchy, and contingency composed in the interstices and outlaw edges of every territory, where impossible forms of sociality and speculative methodologies of life are improvised in the act of striding the forces and movements of an unstable and tumultuous earth, giving themselves over to the inchoate and the unformed, to a groundlessness that surrounds and subtends every ground, to a runaway metamorphosis which eludes finality and escapes totality. That, indeed, might be the task of a geophilosophy of the future

Professional status matters: Differences in flow proneness between professional and amateur contemporary musicians

Achieving peak performance for musicians often requires getting into a state of flow. Experiencing this state depends on various genetic and environmental factors; however, the importance of one’s professional status in relation to flow remains unexplored. Therefore, we investigated the differences in flow proneness between professional and amateur musicians in a large sample (N = 664) of contemporary musicians. We found that professional musicians were significantly more flow prone in music than their amateur counterparts, and artists were significantly more flow prone than record producers. Further, professional musicians were more flow prone in their daily lives, suggesting a potential crossover effect of pursuing a flow-inducing activity to a professional level. Instrument, genre, and type of training did not influence flow proneness, and finally, trait anxiety was not significantly higher in professional musicians. Overall, this study highlights the positive consequences of pursuing music professionally and provides insight into the nuances of music professions that may influence flow proneness