http://bura.brunel.ac.uk/handle/2438/32856 2026-07-01T07:36:43Z 2026-07-01T07:36:43Z Havsteen-Franklin, D Krogh, M http://bura.brunel.ac.uk/handle/2438/33540 2026-07-01T02:00:28Z 2026-05-28T00:00:00Z

Title: Safe spaces as assemblages: Affect, sonic territorialisation, and digital everyday health musicking for young people’s wellbeing Authors: Havsteen-Franklin, D; Krogh, M Abstract: Introduction: Young people across Europe face unprecedented mental health challenges amidst social inequalities, environmental crisis, and technological disruption. With formal services difficult to access, everyday digital music engagement may offer therapeutic value, yet these practices remain undertheorised. This paper develops a conceptual framework for understanding how young people construct “safe spaces” through digital everyday health musicking (DEHM), examining the intersection of assemblage theory, affect studies, and sonic territorialisation. Method: We provide theoretical analysis to underpin clinical and research investigations examining how musical engagement operates within complex socio-technical assemblages through spatial and affective frameworks. Results: Safety in DEHM emerges as fragile and contextually negotiated rather than fixed. Through sonic territorialisation, young people construct provisional territories by modulating affective flows through musical engagement. These processes operate through structured (algorithmic, playlist-based) and experimental (exploratory, creative) digital practices, whilst also bearing risks of affective enclosure and algorithmic constraint. Discussion: DEHM represents a legitimate complement to formal music therapy, offering distinct therapeutic affordances through autonomous engagement with digital technologies. Rather than replacing professional intervention, DEHM provides frameworks for understanding how sonic practices generate therapeutic possibilities outside clinical settings, positioning young people as active agents whilst maintaining critical awareness of platform constraints. Music therapists and mental health practitioners should recognise DEHM as a valuable therapeutic resource whilst supporting critical digital literacy. Recommendations address ethics of institutional appropriation emphasising how practitioners can enable exploratory practices that enhance rather than constrain young people’s existing musical agency.

2026-05-28T00:00:00Z Paramana, K Kompatsiaris, P Argyropoulou, G Pais, A Sengupta, U http://bura.brunel.ac.uk/handle/2438/33485 2026-06-23T02:00:28Z 2026-06-10T00:00:00Z

Title: Space-Making and Practices of Resistance Authors: Paramana, K; Kompatsiaris, P; Argyropoulou, G; Pais, A; Sengupta, U Editors: Paramana, K Abstract: In the current climate of geopolitical upheaval (from Ukraine, to Gaza, Iran, Venezuela, and Greenland), the articles in the “Political Economy and the Arts” special section of this issue illuminate what arts do to produce resistance at a micro level by re-writing problematic narratives, visibilizing marginalized communities, imagining alternative models and futures, and working towards equitable space-making. The emerging themes of space-making and practices of resistance among them, grounded in each article’s particular geographies, contribute to conversations in the “Political Economy and the Arts” Special Section and beyond on the interrelationships between political economy, arts, power, and resistance. Their different (inter)disciplinary perspectives in approaching and understanding this interrelationship further these conversations. Description: Contents of the Special Section of Lateral, the Journal of the Cultural Studies Association, Volume 15, issue 1, 2026, edited by Katerina Paramana.

2026-06-10T00:00:00Z Paramana, K http://bura.brunel.ac.uk/handle/2438/33484 2026-06-22T02:00:30Z 2026-05-01T00:00:00Z

Title: Political Economy and the Arts: Introduction – Space-Making and Practices of Resistance Authors: Paramana, K Abstract: Here, Katerina Paramana introduces the articles in the “Political Economy and the Arts” special section of this issue. In the current climate of geopolitical upheaval (from Ukraine, to Gaza, Iran, Venezuela, and Greenland), the articles illuminate what arts do to produce resistance at a micro level by re-writing problematic narratives, visibilizing marginalized communities, imagining alternative models and futures, and working towards equitable space-making.

2026-05-01T00:00:00Z Paramana, K http://bura.brunel.ac.uk/handle/2438/33483 2026-06-22T02:00:29Z 2026-06-17T00:00:00Z

Title: On Affective Objects: Martyro, Veronique Doisneau, and the Production of (im)Material Objects Authors: Paramana, K Abstract: Differing perspectives on the ephemerality of performance have led to debates since the 1980s regarding its ontology. Sondra Fraleigh and Peggy Phelan, for example, believe that performance’s ‘only life is in the present’. Others have disagreed. For example, Rebecca Schneider believes that performance remains in the body of the spectator in a complicated manner and Miranda Joseph, drawing on Marxist theory, argues that performance is in fact material because it produces social relations which have material effects: they affect our thinking and behaviour. In alignment with Joseph, this text begins with the presupposition that performance, and, specific to this text, the object we might call dance performance—the dance performance event and its particular contours, in other words, the performance event as an entity which emerges in the space-time where/when the onlooker and the work meet—is material because it is social. I discuss two dance performance objects, my work Martyro (2011) and Jérôme Bel’s (2005) Veronique Doisneau, as (im)material affective objects. I examine each work individually, providing first a thick description of each in order to communicate how they used affect to connect to their spectators and to critique the contexts of their presentation, the worlds in which the Subject in each of these performances worked. Drawing on understandings and theories of affect (from Deleuze and Guattari, Gilbert Simondon, and Brian Massumi to Lauren Berlant) and political economy (including David Harvey, Cedric Robinson, Jeremy Gilbert, Ashok Kumar, and Katerina Paramana), I then argue that both works used affect to remind their audiences, their witnesses, of the power of revealing one own’s experience of ‘suffering’ as Subjects, whilst simultaneously critiquing the wider economies in which these works, these affective objects and their Subjects, are embedded. It is this production of affect, I suggest, that potentiated action for change, by affecting others’ perspectives and behaviours. Description: Data Availability Statement: Data sharing is not applicable. No new data were created or analyzed in this study.

2026-06-17T00:00:00Z