Items where Year is 2023

Young men, especially from working-class backgrounds, often lack the space, capacity, or opportunity to reflect upon masculinities and their role in shaping future trajectories. By devising mechanisms to engage young men differently in creative activities, participants in our project were supported to think beyond assumed futures and explore new possibilities. Mobilizing the theory of possible selves, this article draws on data across three creative university outreach workshops in England with 18 participants who were given the opportunity to explore masculinities using creative writing, photography, and dance/movement. Combining artifact analysis and semi-structured interviews, the article argues that these workshops created safe spaces for young men to articulate their concerns and fears about harm and risk in everyday life while facilitating an exploration of alternative possible selves.

In the early 20th century, the techniques of collage and film montage were linked with the cultural production of political radicalism. The assemblage of new wholes from existing parts established a critical method for negotiating the social world. Driven by technological and cultural developments, the practice of combining separate images is now applied within a broad range of art and media forms. Through its assimilation and concealment within the popular and commercial, collage has been detached from its political origins.

This practice led project lies at the intersection of documentary, archive film, animation and history. It’s philosophical framework is critical realism, a position that sees reality as a plurality of interdependent structures and mechanisms operating in stratified systems. The research deploys collage as a practical form of critical realism to explore the history of ‘Welsh Wales’ (Balsom,1985), along with the region’s political, cultural and social identity. The investigation is conducted
through engagement with film collection of the National Screen and Sound Archive of Wales.

Theories of Welsh history and identity are used in the analysis, interpretation and composition of the archive materials as evidence of a complex and layered culture.
In the creative mediation of factual material, realist collage addresses the non-physical levels of reality that are not directly visible in the archive film. This is done through using temporal and spatial juxtaposition as a method of realist inference to represent the causally generative domain that determines actual events. An imaginative sense of a non-empirical, complex whole is inferred through the temporal and spatial composition of image parts.

The originality of the research is in development of collage as a visual and practical research method that offers a novel form of critical realist inquiry. The thesis will reflect on the political implications of the practice, advance critical theory of collage, and provide new insights into the function of collage processes in non-fiction film.

Amidst the UK higher education strikes, Lorena Cervera and Isabel Seguí codirected #PrecarityStory, a short documentary that exposes the increasing precarisation of academic labour at universities. Released in 2020, the film follows a working day in the life of Isabel who, at that time, was a cleaner, researcher, and teacher at the same British elite institution. This is a (self-consciously) performative documentary (Bruzzi, 2006) inspired methodologically by the transmediatic form of Latin American testimonio, where an individual subject stands for a community and the film is an activist artefact in which ‘reality’ is managed creatively to further the political agenda of the filmmakers. This chapter explores the complexities of this approach in which a filmmaker and an empowered film subject join forces to challenge an exploitative workplace and interrogate the mode of production of collaborative cinemas.

From the 1970s, Latin American women began making documentary films with clear political intents. These films shed light on the precarious conditions that characterized women’s entry to the workforce and other labour struggles, on reproductive rights and women’s role in production and reproduction, and on the inevitable questioning of identity that results from migration and displacement. However, the historiography of Latin American cinema continues to ignore the legacy of these filmmakers. This thesis acknowledges and re-signifies women’s documentaries and reclaims their contributions to film history. Moreover, it provides a new lens through which to revisit the history of Latin American documentary while also adding to the scholarship on Latin American women’s filmmaking through both theoretical analysis and creative practice. In the written component, I propose three approximations to the study of Latin American women’s documentary cinema between 1975 and 1994. To do so, I have curated a selection of nine documentaries produced during these decades that illustrate some of the thematic interests, modes of authorship and production, and formal strategies and aesthetic devices employed by women filmmakers. Ultimately, I contend that this corpus of work was produced during a formative moment for women’s and feminist cinema. The analyses of these films have informed the making of the creative component. The short documentary Processing Images from Caracas traces the archive of activist, filmmaker, and photographer Franca Donda and the film collectives that she was part of, Cine Urgente and Grupo Feminista Miércoles. It also shows how Latin American women’s documentaries and other relevant materials that could make up an archive of women’s and feminist cinema are at the brink of disappearance and foregrounds the urgent need to create such an archive.

In order to understand the relationships individuals have with plastics today, it is useful to understand how people related to those materials in the past. After the restrictions of the Second World War with rationing touching many aspects of consumption, society of the 1950s was encouraged to consume products to aid economic growth, to maintain jobs, and improve lifestyles (Hine, 2010). Disposability and the notion of using something once and then throwing it away grew to become a sign of wealth and cleanliness, consumers were encouraged to use disposable products for their efficiency and to avoid contamination. The ideas of purification and convenience encouraged the development of ethical justifications for the use of disposable items (Hawkins, 2006). The link between cleanliness and single-use packaging is strengthened by the act of throwing away the wrapper (Lucas, 2002); the ecological consequences were not, at that time, contemplated (Fiell and Fiell, 2009). The popular understanding that plastics are low value and therefore disposable has been built up over a history of misuse of long-lived materials for short-lived products. This paper will explore the value placed on plastics through and exploration of their uses and misuses, their consumption and significantly their conspicuous non-consumption, and how we deal with them at the end of their useful life.

The thesis uses art practice as a research method to propose novel characterisations of animal life. These characterisations aim to challenge an organicist image of non-human animals. The thesis considers animal bodies and behaviours as subject to aesthetic judgments that are underpinned by deeper ontological and epistemological commitments as to relations between nature and society, in which to be categorised as the former entails a series of privations in relation to the latter – the absence of freedom, subjectivity and creativity. Scholarly research on the history of the perception and conception of animal life within modernity, and subsequent challenges made to these within the contemporary humanities and contemporary art support and inform the practical enquiry. The thesis draws primarily here upon new materialist and post-humanist-oriented animal studies, and on scholarship surrounding the contemporary French artist, Pierre Huyghe.

Positing the Anthropocene as a condition in which the distinction between human history and natural history has collapsed, the thesis argues for disassociating the concept ‘animal’ and the concept ‘nature’. The thesis attends to entanglements of animal worlds and cultural tropes where this equation fails. It proposes an an-organic and dis-harmonious animal life that attest to the end of nature and witnesses the dissonant and incomplete conditions of modernity. Both the written argument and the artistic outcomes propose novel ways to consider animals in relation to visuality. The thesis takes bio-art (i.e., art practice that incorporates living organisms) as of methodological value in this project where it engages the potentiality of animals themselves to challenge a received historical status. Furthermore, art practice is not just seen as a vehicle for depicting animal futures, but as a condition for liberating animals from nature. The thesis thus equates the postnatural animal with their becoming agents within artworks.

'The Art of Creative Research Exhibition' held to overlap with Singapore Art Week 2023, which brings together contemporary creative research from Hong Kong, Singapore, and the UK.

Featuring 15 practice-based researchers in the visual arts from the Royal College of Art, University of Cambridge, University College London, Arts University Bournemouth, the Education University of Hong Kong, and the National Institute of Education, Nanyang Technological University in Singapore.

Celebrating the interplay between dance and mark making, this performance presents the conclusion of a participatory research project led by AUB academics Jenna Hubbard and Adele Keeley with community dance company Co-Evo. The Moving Canvas Project explores the kinesthetic inhabitance of wearable canvasses marked with pens to create unique and original textile design whilst creating choreography.

This visual essay will explore the themes of collaboration, play, the digital intermediatory space and how we engage with the digital ‘other’ of yourself. The research builds on the work of Stark Smith's The Underscore (1987). This long-form dance improvisation structure is used to frame the creative journey which takes place within a jam session offers a platform to explore and consider how the experience might be re-framed with in an online context. The research also draws upon the writing of Weber, Mizanty & Allen (2017) who present digital conference tools as a method to create and teach choreography, and Francksen’s writing around how the use of digital technology produces the digital body, which can interact with the performative body (2014). The research further extends the understanding of these digital spaces as places for intangible, ephemeral, and communal play. This new practice gave a chance for reflection on both our artistic practices and our lives during the pandemic; Halprin’s Life/Art Process has been a supportive model for understanding the therapeutic nature of jamming practice (1995). The drawings and short films created during this project document the process, but also have currency as individual artefacts. The observations and recommendations below will be presented alongside empirical research about the relationship between the artists’ practice and how through drawing and movement they found beneficial creative exchange, in a temporary digital space.

This film explores the relationship between the free expression of improvised drawing and the intertwined practice of movement and music in what we frame as ‘creative jamming’. The film tracks the journey from studio-based improvisation jamming to on-line practice imposed by the onset of the 2020 pandemic which forced remote working and collaboration. Our sites of encounter shifted from performance spaces to our home environments, where multiple spaces were simultaneously connected using technology. Through the practice we discovered that bodies, objects, materials and movement could be shared, replicated, recycled and mirrored back to us. The film observes how the pandemic opened new spaces for play, imagination and world building; the adaption of practice from live to digital performance breeds both difference and familiarity. No longer inhabiting the same physical space, this new environment, created and framed by the lens of the laptop and phone camera, holds the practice somewhere between different houses creating a catalyst for new observations and inquiry. The film demonstrates that the gap created by the COVID-19 lockdown bought with it new creative elements including using the technology as a mode of enquiry, rather than merely a form of recording the performance.

Franca Donda (Italie, 1933-2017) s’est initiée à la photographie avec le photographe américain Paul Strand et s’est impliquée dans les cercles culturels de la gauche italienne. Si elle et son mari, le photographe Paolo Gasparini ont vécu quatre ans dans la Cuba révolutionnaire, c’est à Caracas que Donda a passé la majeure partie de sa vie. Avec d’autres femmes engagées, Donda y a contribué à la diffusion des idées féministes en créant de nouveaux récits filmiques et photographiques. Ses photos représentent aussi bien la lutte des féministes latino-américaines que la vie quotidienne des femmes de la classe ouvrière et des communautés indigènes, dans divers pays d’Amérique latine. Elles constituent des archives absolument uniques et pratiquement inédites qui peuvent être versées à l’histoire des femmes au Venezuela
et à l’histoire du féminisme en Amérique latine.

Largely ignored by scholars of fashion and clothing, an investigation of the history of garment repair and maintenance reveals a series of fascinating discourses that can be utilized to critique the development of the fashion industry. The aim of this chapter, therefore, is not only to map out manifestations of clothing mending and repair activities between 1800 and the present day, but to further consider the social and economic value of those practices and their relevance to the fashion system of the twenty-first century. In doing so, this chapter presents a complex picture of mending in which gender, class, economics, and aesthetics interweave with the evolution of the problematic global fashion system that we have today. The subject is approached by initially addressing some key issues around researching the subject and then moves chronologically through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, before considering mending in its contemporary contexts. While historically, mending has typically been perceived as a domestic, feminine activity of low cultural value that carries connotations of material deprivation, today it can be understood as a cultural phenomenon that holds both social significance and potential solutions to the practical problems of the fashion industry.

This paper will expand on insights unearthed during a practice-led PhD recently undertaken by the author at University of the Arts, London. The research project is investigating illustrated skateboard deck artwork in order to identify the distinct visual aura the skateboarder conjures within popular culture. Skateboard deck artwork is a kind of illustrated vernacular, principally developed in California during the 1970s and 1980s, to market skateboard products. The imagery is distinguished by thematic concerns aimed at young adult skateboarders. A practice-led investigation will reveal the origins and function of this persistent illustrated language. This approach will rely upon the author’s prior experience as a professional illustrator and arts educator to illuminate the significance of visual aesthetics, thereby offering a new lens to survey skateboard’s resilient visual culture.

This article utilizes similarities and overlaps between the work of Joseph Beuys and the increasingly prominent illustrative and performative practices of live scribing or graphic recording as a springboard into a further discourse regarding management theory and creative practice. The idea of the graphic recorder or graphic facilitator originated from interactions between management theory, architecture and the new age counterculture of the 1970s. In recent times, embodied as the live scribe, such practice may now be considered within a seemingly incongruous overlap of management theory and contemporary illustration.

Joseph Beuys in his own way was also a ‘live scribe’. Designated under his all-encompassing concept of ‘social sculpture’, his was a performative art; constructed with the ambitious aim of healing social ills and reuniting elements of the primitive and modern. This article – delivered in part as an illustrated timeline – will act as a speculative survey of equivalences, links and historical foreshadows resonating between the work of Joseph Beuys and contemporary practices of live scribing or graphic recording.

In this practice-based research project the Teleorama, an historical, miniature optical device, is interrogated as a two-dimensional, drawn, painted or printed form that expands into a three-dimensional layered structure to internally depict a scene or event. This interrogation is brought into a relationship with the subject matter of the spatiality and materiality of modern ruins to address the following principal research question: Can the form of the Teleorama be applied to an investigation of sites of contemporary ruination in order to create immersive drawing-based installations that offer new approaches to fine art drawing practice?

The Teleoramic viewing experience is theorised through ‘layered vision’, a concept describing how the form is constructed to depict a scene from several viewpoints, or distinct spatial locations, and is consequently able to represent multiple moments in time. The Teleorama’s ability to invite the viewer ‘in’ to explore its miniature space is conceptualised through reference to the Picturesque, with which it shares an interest in framing and layering as absorptive devices, evidenced in contemporaneous painting and garden design.

Through constructing maquettes informed by several formal iterations of the Teleorama, and enlarging these to become installations, my practice explores the extent to which such works can convey the fragility and ephemerality observed in my initial encounters with modern ruin sites. The Teleorama’s potential to provide a perceptually and physically immersive experience for the viewer is examined in relation to both its structural form and selected fine art installation practices that employ representational imagery.

Whilst existing two-dimensional art practices address the modern ruin as a subject matter, this research proposes that the multi-layered, semi-enclosed structure of the Teleorama can be used as a basis from which to create immersive drawings of such sites. As such, I propose ‘installation drawing’ as a novel art form that allows for the physical experience of space and apprehension of a remote, virtual place. This dual ability suggests installation drawing as a model that might be adapted to confer this dynamic viewing experience to wider subject matter (and through varied media) by practice-based researchers in the field of Fine Art and beyond across other disciplines.

Architectural modelmakers have long carried out their work hidden behind the scenes of architectural design, and in presenting a history of architectural modelmaking in Britain for the first time, this book casts a new light on their remarkable skills and achievements.

By telling the story of the modelmakers who make architectural models rather than architects who commission and use them, this book seeks to celebrate their often-overlooked contribution to the success and endurance of the architectural model in Britain over the past one hundred and forty years. Drawing from extensive archival research and interviews with practicing and retired modelmakers, this book traces the complete history of architectural modelmaking in Britain from its initial emergence as a specialist occupation at the end of the nineteenth century through to the present day. It reveals the legacy of John Thorp, the first professional architectural modelmaker in Britain, who opened his business in London in 1883, and charts the lives and careers of the innovative and creative modelmakers who followed him. It examines the continually evolving materials, tools, and processes of architectural modelmaking and outlines the profound ideological, economic, and technological influences that have shaped the profession’s development.

Illustrated with over one hundred photographs of architectural models from previously undocumented archives, this book will be of great interest to architectural modelmakers, academics, and historians, as well as anyone with an interest in architectural history and modelmaking.

The 250th anniversary of the birth of Romantic poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834) was celebrated in 2022. In recent times, one of his most famous poems, ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ (initially published in the first edition of Lyrical Ballads in 1798), has gained increasing resonance as a proto-environmental text. It warns the reader, or listener (personified by the listener-within-the-poem, the Wedding Guest), that when humankind mistreats nature there are devastating consequences. In the age of the Anthropocene and the climate emergency, it is a poem that speaks to our time. This article considers this ecological interpretation of the text and its connection to other literary ‘texts’ across a range of media. It surveys how the poem’s semantic field, imagery and themes contribute to its meaning, and how contemporary readings show the impact of this context on its reception.

In this article I reflect upon the process of designing and constructing a digital
interactive narrative using elements of biomimicry as an intrinsic part of the ecological
themes it wishes to dramatise. The ‘branchiness’ of this modern iteration of the chooseyour-own-adventure style of game is supported by a complex substructure of coding
and wider ecosystem of coders, mirroring a forest and its exoteric and esoteric networks
and labyrinths. Published by West Coast start-up, Tales: choose your own story,
Hyperion: tower of the winds (2020) is a 24-part, 96,000-word digital novel set in the
storyworld of my fantasy series, The Windsmith Elegy (2004-2012). I argue that Fantasy
has a role to play in cultivating ecoliteracy and in modelling alternative modalities in
response to the multiple challenges we face in the Climate Emergency. I posit that the
design, playing, and prosumer discourse such ergodic texts generate have a mycelial
quality to them—rhizomatic structures, which, as Deleuze and Guattari advocate, are
non-hierarchical, resilient, and reciprocal. Acknowledging the compromised
entanglement of the digital, I critique the affect and ethics of gaming platforms, which
can both raise awareness and be part of the problem: the dirty ecology of every
electronic device and virtual noosphere.

‘Green Words’ is a walking & writing wellbeing project that will take place in the Bridport area of West Dorset in Spring 2023. The idea is to lead short inspiring walks in the local area to encourage those who would not normally go for a nature walk to learn to appreciate the biodiversity on their doorstep and at the same time improve their health and wellbeing. The walks will cover a variety of terrain appealing to a range of abilities from those with limited mobility to the confident walker. Guided creative writing workshops (also FREE) will be held in Bridport’s Literary and Scientific Institute on East Street following each walk led by an experienced facilitator, Dr Kevan Manwaring, who is the Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at Arts University Bournemouth, and a keen walker. Over 10 weeks ‘green words’ will be nurtured and honed, leading to an anthology co- designed and co-produced by the group – with contributions of poems, prose, photographs, and drawings. The anthology will be launched at a final showcase, held in Bridport Arts Centre.
The project, initiated by Bridport-based Dr Manwaring, is funded by the Dorset Community Fund, with the support of Mick Smith, director of Bridport Arts Centre, which is celebrating its 50th anniversary in 2023 with a range of events. The Arts Centre is keen to promote environmental initiatives and awareness-raising as part of its core goals.

The increasing complexity of external regulation and quality metrics applied to universities in recent decades has emphasised the importance of the internal role of Head of Quality. This thesis discusses the social power and professional autonomy of Heads of Quality in higher education in England. It considers the types and levels of power and autonomy they exercise, and how this is affected by organisational structure. Following a scoping survey with responses from 52 Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) in England, 11 interviews were conducted across three case study HEIs, selected as representatives of particular organisational types, with staff in similar roles interviewed in each case. Alongside the Head of Quality, interviews were also conducted with their line manager, a direct report, and a senior academic with responsibility for quality management. The thesis proposes a new exploratory typology of HEIs according to organisational structure, based on the degree of centralisation / devolution and the strength of hierarchical control. Secondly, it offers an enhanced understanding of the role played by ‘third space’ professionals within English higher education, typified by the Head of Quality. It argues that the ‘space’ in which these third space professionals operate is not uniform, and that while each Head of Quality exercises professional autonomy, the ways in which these are enacted is dependent on organisational type and the availability of different bases of social power. It therefore adds to the literature on third space professionals in higher education, by proposing a more structurally-situated explanation for the phenomenon which also considers organisational type. Finally, the thesis proposes a model of social power and the deployment of professional autonomy according to organisational type. These findings extend our understanding of the exercise of social power and professional autonomy within different types of HEI, and have practical implications for universities, individuals with responsibilities for quality assurance, and the wider professional workforce.

This paper documents the Author’s experiments with 3D-based AI image generation software, identifying within the visual outcomes a tendency towards hauntology that is seemingly the result of the collaborative image-making process as well as a material quality of the method. The paper suggests that a combination of the authors own aesthetic concerns and working methods, combined with the tendencies inherent within the training method used to develop the Stable Diffusion AI model, results in images that are haunting in a number of ways that align to the conceptual framework of Hauntology: through unexpected traces and glitches; anachronism; notions of shared dreaming / remembering; and through the invocation of the poor image.

This paper reports on an investigation into the role of experiential knowledge in growing capacity for producing low-cost buoyancy aids with soft goods manufacturers – tailors – in Zanzibar, set within complex knowledge exchange collaborations under academic-industry partnerships. In this study, the makers' practice of tailoring and their local environment knowledge had a formative role in designing a prototype ‘workflow system’ for local, small-batch production of low-cost rescue throwlines as part of a wider community-led water safety programme.

The study builds on a previous phase of the research that identified limitations with a human-centred design (HCD) approach to the creation of opensource instruction manuals for low volume production of rescue throwlines. We propose that the previously incumbent HCD approach through its problem-solving procedures obscured the importance of the local makers’ participation in the problematisation of the manufacturing process. By foregrounding the local makers’ knowledge of the whole manufacturing process, from sourcing materials in the market to making and testing the products, this study aimed to investigate how the local makers would devise and develop their own methodological approach to making the rescue throwline, examine what the findings would suggest for the design of the throwline, and explore how this knowledge might be exchanged with other collaborators in the project. A further and longer-term aim is to support the development and impact of local capacity building in end-to-end drowning prevention management by demonstrating the importance of experiential knowledge in existing local communities of makers.

A participatory making approach informed by design thinking underpinned the design of the study. An experimental participant-led approach to the generation of data draws attention to the different positions and types of knowledge negotiated. The study elucidates some of the barriers for exchanging this critical experiential knowledge with collaborators and exposes challenges for creating new social infrastructure within the community concerning drowning prevention. It concludes that managing complex knowledge exchange in prototyping in the Zanzibar context requires an iterative methodological approach to the co-construction of knowledge centred around the experiential knowledge and skills of the users of the ‘workflow system’.

Making textiles with others is an exciting and unconventional way of doing research. It has developed from the discipline of textiles practice, but can be readily adapted within other disciplines, bringing arts-based research approaches into conversation with social science research. Textile-making activities can include knitting, sewing, crochet, weaving, dyeing, braiding and embroidery; we consider ‘making’ to also include related activities such as handling textiles or playing with clothes. There are many ways of Making Textiles Together: it should be thought of as an approach rather than a single method.

Making together is the key element of this approach. Activities can be highly diverse in terms of context, format and intention, from drop-in workshops to open-ended creative projects that might extend for months, or even years. They might be synchronous or asynchronous and might take place in person or online. Participants might contribute to one shared piece of work or work on individual textile pieces side by side.

These activities can be used to generate rich data of multiple types. Data might take form in the creative work itself or data might be generated alongside the things being made, for example in the form of audio recordings of discussions, observational notes, or video footage of gestures and interactions. Data can be generated by the researcher, by the participants, or both.

Making Textiles Together offers flexibility in terms of research questions. The approach can be used to investigate something that is closely linked to the act of making, such as how people with different cultural backgrounds learn hand-crafting skills. Alternatively, it can be used to research a completely different topic. For instance, the research focus might be to explore people’s coping strategies when grieving and the researcher might choose a textile making activity to create the desired environment for sharing these personal and sensitive stories. A third possibility is an action research approach that uses making to address and solve problems or create items that can be used directly by the participant group, such as mending garments or creating objects to meet specific needs.

World-leading filmmakers and scholars come together in Introduction to Screen Narrative: Perspectives on Story Production and Comprehension to offer the reader cutting-edge insights into how screen narratives work. This collection explores a variety of mediums (e.g. feature film, television, animation, video games) and how they have evolved. It also explores how major artists have innovatively subverted narrative conventions (David Lynch, Jean-Luc Godard, Bela Tarr), and how academics from a variety of traditions (film scholars, philosophers and cognitive psychologists) have shed insight on screen storytelling from different disciplines.

Books on screen storytelling have traditionally fallen into two separate camps. This first is screenwriting manuals, which are designed to help the reader with story construction, building characters and writing dialogue, along with formatting scripts and finding agents. The second camp is books on film narratology, which aim to make the reader aware of the broad norms of moviemaking and how particular films relate to those norms, currently and historically. This collection is the first of its kind in drawing a bridge between the two domains.

Offering state-of-the-art surveys of narrative from internationally-renown researchers, theoreticians, and media practitioners, this collection is a key text in understanding contemporary research from a range of disciplines in a single, accessible resource designed to engage both novices and experts in the field of screen storytelling.

The global pandemic forced the film industry to adapt its practices. The primary driver of these changes was the economic imperative for production to continue. Similarly, film production courses had to deploy new methods to enable student films to be produced. Through this process new and often creative working methods were devised. This necessity for change also allowed for a critical reassessment of standardised industrial filmmaking - this emphasised that until this point there had been a general unwillingness to reflect upon the industrial production and educational norm, with its ecological unsustainability, exclusive practices and embedded hierarchies. So, the imposing of ‘restrictions’ in fact became an opportunity for creative discovery and to rethink practice related possibilities.

In this paper the authors will draw on their experience of teaching MA Film Practice, at Arts University Bournemouth, and the need to reimagine disciplinary engagement and devise new curriculum components. This process transformed restrictions into ‘creative parameters’. It also focused the course’s practice based research ethos and enhanced the student reflexive and reflective development. These innovations are now embedded in the course’s structure and have facilitated a departmental debate concerning ‘standardised’ working methods (copying historical normative models), and how we can foster a more inclusive and inventive learning environment.

Further to this, the graduating students, now emerging reflective practitioners – more socially, ethically and conceptually aware – can potentially affect new standards and approaches to film production, and in doing so promote original and diverse work, as well as embracing inclusive and ecologically sustainable methodologies. This paper will consider the instructiveness of this academic innovation and its potential to inform future film practice.

Leaders of international humanitarian and development organizations (IHDOs) contribute to providing aid to many of the world’s poorest and most disaster-affected people in South Asia. Challenges they face include increasing demands for compliance, accountability, and transparency against the need to deliver on intended results and objectives. Leaders are required to provide vision, strategy, consistency, and security in contexts that are increasingly volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous (VUCA). Constant changes and instability in the operational, political, and social environments in South Asia contradict traditional linear thinking and planning of programs and cycles. IHDOs, with their increasing regulations and procedures, and dwindling organizational space and time stymie innovation and creativity, while calling for increased yet potentially inappropriate professional standards to be applied against ground realities and human capital available. Diverse cultural dimensions must be accounted for including those of the country, the people, the organization, the team, and the leader themselves. Further, IHDO leaders must establish and nurture relationships with a multitude of stakeholders, aside from their teams. These include their organizational hierarchy and peers, donors, government representatives, clients, service providers, local civil society organizations, academic institutions, media, and their program beneficiaries; each relationship comprising its own nuances and consequences. Leaders must be versatile if they are to be successful, appropriately balancing the application of their characteristics and competences. For this, a new philosophy, theory, and practice of leadership versatility is presented that leaders and their IHDOs can promote and apply in their endeavors to face and overcome the above challenges in South Asia.

Within the field of digital musical instruments, there have been a growing number of technological developments aimed at addressing the issue of accessibility to music-making for disabled people. This study summarizes the development of one such technological system—The Modular Accessible Musical Instrument Technology Toolkit (MAMI Tech Toolkit). The four tools in the toolkit and accompanying software were developed over 5 years using an action research methodology. A range of stakeholders across four research sites were involved in the development. This study outlines the methodological process, the stakeholder involvement, and how the data were used to inform the design of the toolkit. The accessibility of the toolkit is also discussed alongside findings that have emerged from the process. This study adds to the established canon of research around accessible digital musical instruments by documenting the creation of an accessible toolkit grounded in both theory and practical application of third-wave human–computer interaction methods. This study contributes to the discourse around the use of participatory and iterative methods to explore issues with, and barriers to, active music-making with music technology. Outlined is the development of each of the novel tools in the toolkit, the functionality they offer, as well as the accessibility issues they address. The study advances knowledge around active music-making using music technology, as well as in working with diverse users to create these new types of systems.

The Genius Loci exhibition asks how ten artists can explore sensations of landscape, how are experiences of sensing the character of a landscape transformed into a painted surface or a sonic action? How does each person’s diverse knowledge of that place inform the artwork? Katie Barons is an artist who investigates sensations felt when immersing herself in nature and capturing these sensations using paint. The series of paintings in this exhibition are derived from Hengistbury Head, a headland which wraps around Christchurch Harbour not far from Bournemouth. Luke Mintowt-Czyz’s uses the physicality of paint to explore competing physical tensions on Bournemouth beach where the polarities of young and old, rich and poor, lonely and connected, healthy and ill, extrovert and introvert, coalesce on the seashore each summer in a writhing bodily mass. Sonic Camouflage is a series of collaborative improvisational sound workshops which asks how an ancient Greek whistling language called Sfyria can be used to provoke the creation of contemporary collective artworks.

The 'When Lives Collide 2023' exhibition depicts the real-life horror of road collisions as described by those involved and aims to raise awareness of the risks we all face on a daily basis as road users.

Taken by renowned photographer Paul Wenham-Clarke, a Professor of Photography at Arts University Bournemouth, the images are being exhibited to mark the 30th anniversary of RoadPeace, the road victims' charity. The RoadPeace provides information and support services to people bereaved or seriously injured in road crashes and engages in evidence-based policy and campaigning work to fight for justice for victims and reduce road danger.

Every single day on the UK's roads, on average five people are killed, 84 are seriously injured yet despite this, the public is largely unaware that so many people are affected by crashes. Many people don’t believe that they or their loved ones will be affected by a collision. But the exhibition shows that crashes affect everybody whatever their age or gender and wherever they live.

The images serve as a window into the soul of people who have experienced everyone’s worst nightmare and address the senseless loss of life that our society so easily seems to accept. "Some of the portraits capture raw emotions as they surge and flow through the participants, from grief-stricken crying, to fighting back the tears to smile, as they remember their lost one. In British culture, we shy away from crying in front of others, or even watching others cry, but these images allow a prolonged examination of a range of visceral emotions and will evoke a strong response in anyone who sees them.

Nick Simmons, CEO of RoadPeace, said: “When Lives Collide 2023 takes an artistic approach to explore the impact of road harm from the point of view of those directly impacted by it. Paul’s work so cleverly and creatively documents the lives of crash victims and acts as a call to work together to end road death and injury. If this exhibition makes just a few people think about their actions next time they get behind the wheel and turn off their phone before they drive, or decline that alcoholic drink then it will be a great achievement.”