This chapter suggests that the notion of cultivating ecosystem conviviality helps bring attention to nourishing sites of local empowerment and ecological belonging that often go unnoticed in urban environments. We offer this notion as a complement to ongoing efforts of invigorating cultural ecosystem services (CES) with relational and embodied approaches. Through a transdisciplinary and mixed methodology of soil arts that includes artist-led open stages, ecosystem conviviality is explored through soil-centered practices in urban gardening and art. The chapter attends to how gardeners situate themselves not as receivers or producers of services but as entangled co-creators of open-ended ecosystems. This in turn calls attention to a needed shift in CES focus, from benefits and human well-being to considering ecosystem relations and values as embodied co-becomings, with consequences for sites, people, and soils alike. The aim of the situated practice-theory of soil arts that this chapter presents, is to offer new perspectives and methods for those involved with planning and management of urban ecologies, and others seeking more integrative ways of grappling with socioecological challenges and uncertainties.

Since 2022, Visual Generative AI (vGenAI) tools have experienced rapid adoption and garnered widespread acclaim for their ability to produce high-quality images with convincing photorealistic representations. These technologies mirror society’s prevailing visual politics in a mediated form, and actively contribute to the perpetuation of deeply ingrained assumptions, categories, values, and aesthetic representations. In this paper, we critically analyze Stable Diffusion (SD), a widely used open-source vGenAI tool, through visual and intersectional analysis. Our analysis covers; (1) the aesthetics of the AI-generated visual material, (2) the institutional contexts in which these images are situated and produced, and (3) the intersections between power systems such as racism, colonialism, and capitalism—which are both reflected and perpetuated through the visual aesthetics. Our visual analysis of 180 SD-generated images deliberately sought to produce representations along different lines of privilege and disadvantage—such as wealth/poverty or citizen/immigrant—drawing from feminist science and technology studies, visual media studies, and intersectional critical theory. We demonstrate how imagery produced through SD perpetuates pre-existing power systems such as sexism, racism, heteronormativity, and ableism, and assumes a default individual as white, able-bodied, and masculine-presenting. Furthermore, we problematize the hegemonic cultural values in the imagery that can be traced to the institutional context of these tools, particularly in the tendency towards Euro- and North America-centric cultural representations. Finally, we find that the power systems around SD result in the continual reproduction of harmful and violent imagery through technology, challenging the oft-underlying notion that vGenAI is culturally and aesthetically neutral. Based on the harms identified through our qualitative, interpretative analysis, we bring forth a reparative and social justice-oriented approach to vGenAI—including the need for acknowledging and rendering visible the cultural-aesthetic politics of this technology and engaging in reparative approaches that aim to symbolically and materially mend injustices enacted against social groups.

In this exploratory paper, we focus on intersecting design political and visual processes of gendering and racializing in online AI image generators, in particular ArtBreeder and Midjourney. While AI image generators are becoming an integrated part of our contemporary society, they draw on cultural and historical imaging conventions of sorting and ordering the world and the people in it. These tools' powerful visual rhetoric can potentially aggravate existing discrimination, if not critically reflected upon. We argue that these design-facilitated representations position the ‘user’ into cultural imagery of representations with political implications. With an intersectional perspective from the feminist visual analysis, we critique and uncover how gender and ethnicity are represented and built into the systems, both in terms of visual culture and in designed interactions. We problematize these design strategies, and urge the HCI community to engage in further design political inquiries regarding the visual culture mediated by AI image generators.

The book is aimed at providing an assertion of Gender Studies as a vital community in our time, united in a commitment to inquiry. It brings forward an interdisciplinary set of early career researchers’ accounts of their motives for engaging in Gender Studies and, of the encounters with limitations as well as possibilities they experience on the paths they have chosen. Each chapter is accompanied by a brief response paper where a more senior researcher involves in conversation with respective chapter’s content and shares reflections regarding Gender Studies, its integration, and developments. The first level corresponds with the significance of research in the field and its transformative power in and, crucially, outside the academia. The second relates to the value of networking and community building for doing research. The book presents Gender Studies in a communicative, open manner that invites the reader to engage in and continue the displayed discussions. This book will be of interest to students and scholars of gender studies, sociology, queer studies, women’s studies, trans studies, anthropology, and literary studies.

After invitation to agenda-setting researchers in Europe, this is a short essay or memo in response. It is on the role and relevance of the Humanities in the contemporary world, especially on the practices of feminist posthumanities within environmental/biomedical/public and techno-humanities and how they transform the relevance of the Humanities in a world shaped by the Covid-19 pandemic.

Environmental violence takes form of both “spectacular” events, like ecological disasters usually recognised by the general public, and “slow  violence”, a type of violence that occurs gradually, out of sight and on a long-term scale (Nixon 2011). Planetary seas and oceans, loaded with cultural meanings of that which “hides” and “allows to forget”, are the spaces where such attritional violence unfolds unseen and “out of mind”. Simultaneously, conventional concepts of nature and culture, as dichotomous entities, become obsolete. We all inhabit and embody the world differently, as variously situated people, divided by national, sexual, bodily and economic status, and as very variously situated nonhumans in an increasingly anthropogenic world.

This chapter focuses on subtle “slow violence” unfolding through the instances of submerged chemical weapons, so-called dead zones, invasive species and high- and low-trophic mariculture in the Baltic and North Sea regions. It zooms in on the select cases of such “environed bodies”, their stories of excruciating slow violence and yet also on unexpected encounters with care and hospitality. The aim is to unfold a low-trophic theory for the naturecultural research on violence and care within environmental humanities, and to engage a coexistential ethics of environmental adaptability informed by feminist posthumanities.