BURA Collection:

Adapting through adversity: The transformation of art therapists’ professional identity

Mon, 09 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Title: Adapting through adversity: The transformation of art therapists’ professional identity Authors: Muižniece-Slesare, L; Akmane, E; Havsteen-Franklin, D; Mārtinsone, K Abstract: Professional identity, constantly reshaped by social and technological change, comes under increased pressure during crises. The COVID-19 pandemic and the war in Ukraine profoundly disrupted healthcare systems, and art therapy was no exception. This study examines how these overlapping crises have reshaped art therapists’ professional identity, focusing on dialectical processes of contradiction, adaptation, and the restructuring of therapeutic roles and self-concept. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 31 Latvian art therapists working across diverse settings. Reflexive thematic analysis, guided by a dual-dialectical framework drawing on Hegel and Badiou, identified five key tensions: disconnection versus belonging; vulnerability versus responsibility; tradition versus innovation; collaboration versus distinctiveness; and doubt versus confidence. Through reflection and adaptive strategies, art therapists integrated these contradictions, strengthening and sustaining their professional identities. Hegel’s dialectics accounted for gradual synthesis, while Badiou’s concept of rupture captured abrupt redefinitions, together showing how professionals maintain and reshape identity during disruption. Description: Highlights: • Dual-dialectical lens reveals how crises disrupt and transform professional identity. • COVID-19, digitalisation and war reshaped arts therapists’ professional identity. • Practitioners adapted roles, boundaries, and practices to sustain identity. • Reflection and learning rebuilt confidence and strengthened professional roles. • Crises spurred creativity and peer support, reaffirming professional meaning.; Data availability: The authors do not have permission to share data.

Catherine Wheatley (2019) Stanley Cavell and Film: Scepticism and Self-Reliance at the Cinema

Thu, 01 Oct 2020 00:00:00 GMT

Title: Catherine Wheatley (2019) Stanley Cavell and Film: Scepticism and Self-Reliance at the Cinema Authors: Rugo, D Abstract: As D.N. Rodowick aptly points out on the back cover, Catherine Wheatley's Stanley Cavell and Film will become a go-to volume both for those wanting to discover Cavell for the first time and for veteran readers looking for clarification or a novel way to approach the philosopher's work. Unlike many volumes dedicated to elucidating and initiating readers to more or less difficult authors, Wheatley's book admirably manages to combine legible exegesis with critical depth. The volume elegantly guides readers through Cavell's opus, familiarising them with key “master tones”, providing a way to tune into the philosopher's theoretical nuances and stylistic specificity. However, there is no attempt here to domesticate Cavell's idiosyncrasies. Quite to the contrary, Wheatley uses the philosopher's conceptual quirks to lead novice and expert alike out of the terrain of mere illustration in order to develop an original reading. That is, Stanley Cavell and Film succeeds in its aim of providing entry points to film studies scholars put off by philosophical density (p. 21), while also offering an original approach to the American philosopher's writing. Wheatley does this not simply by illuminating Cavell's work on and through film; she also confronts his philosophical project more generally, with one of her crucial insights being precisely that to separate Cavell's ‘film theory’ from his more general philosophy sacrifices much of the incisiveness of his work. Description: Book Review.

Mapping Decolonial Cinema

Fri, 20 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Title: Mapping Decolonial Cinema Authors: Rugo, D; Carbone, MB Abstract: The articles that animate this special issue aim to map and investigate decolonial practices in cinematic worlds from the Global South. Whilst the scope is for obvious reasons limited to only few practices and context, this approach emphasises the potential of these cinemas to resist hegemonic filmic (and more generally cultural) forms and to move beyond thematic concerns, formal strategies and industrial frameworks generated and sanctioned in the Global North. ...

Commodifying Care: Migrant Literature and Materialist Feminism

Thu, 09 Oct 2025 00:00:00 GMT

Title: Commodifying Care: Migrant Literature and Materialist Feminism Authors: Houlden, K Editors: Mishra, S; Vandertop, C Abstract: Taking my cue from the recent critical and popular efflorescence of social reproduction theory, this chapter looks to the commodified gendered dynamics of our neoliberal conjuncture by focusing on migrant women’s poorly paid domestic work. It draws on two novels about female domestics, published either side of the 2008 financial crash, Thrity Umrigar’s Mumbai-set tragedy, The Space Between Us (2005) and Christy Lefteri’s topical, Cypriot-based Songbirds (2021). Both make visible the gendered labour not taken into account sufficiently in economic discussion, while simultaneously reflecting the challenges of writing about those with lesser social standing. If Umrigar investigates the tensions of madamhood from a self-confessed problem-space within (inviting her middle-class readers to do the same), Lefteri struggles to render the same concerns from without (encouraging the passive hand-wringing of a European liberal readership). One final tension troubles both books though: while registering and resisting processes of commodification, they simultaneously commodify the voices of women who otherwise might not have the means to tell, or sell, their own stories. In this way, the novels express the problems of commodification inherent to an uneven literary marketplace.