Author Archives: Alison Fox

As our 10th anniversary celebrations come to a close, we asked Sonja Astrakhan, a student at UCL School of Slavonic and East European Studies (SSEES) to share her perspective on the Press as a student.

The UCL Press, the UK’s first fully open-access university press, is celebrating its 10th anniversary this month. Throughout the last decade, it has published almost 400 scholarly monographs and developed a series of 15 journals. The Press represents an ambitious commitment to rigorous scholarship, unconstrained by financial considerations. Each individual publication is editorially independent and free to publish in and to read.

For a student, the Press presents an opportunity to survey the research done in the UCL and the wider academic community. While researching the Press, I was delighted to discover that several of my professors were regular contributors. The School of Slavonic and East European Studies, my alma mater – or as we jokingly call it amongst friends, the mothership – is home to the FRINGE Center, an interdisciplinary research hub focused on complexity and ambiguity. Incidentally, its contributors, including Dr. Murawski and Prof. Ledeneva, have excellent independent books and co-publications with the UCL Press. Having had the pleasure of attending their classes, it is warming to see their work celebrated by the university, not just in acknowledging teaching but also research through publishing opportunities.

Besides recognizing familiar staff names, the UCL Press also provides direct opportunities for student scholarship. Alongside the 15 professional academic journals, the Press is also home to 9 student journals on a wide range of subjects. These include Interscript, the journal of publishing, Bioscience Horizons, and Slovo, also SSEES-affiliated. As with all Press resources, the student journals are free to read and publish in; like any rigorous publication, they undergo a peer review process handled by the appropriate faculty. For students considering a career in academia, the opportunity to publish free of charge in respectable journals without the intense competition of ‘Big Name’ journals is indispensable for building a portfolio and bolstering confidence. However, even for those who are not considering academia, publishing in a student journal can be a rewarding experience. It provides the opportunity to delve deeper into a subject that can be curtailed by the pressure of deadlines and tight wordcounts, and demonstrates ambition and intellectual curiosity. Besides career considerations, student journals stand for the primary mission of university: exchanging information. Hopefully, the next decade of the UCL Press will see an expansion of student publications.

Beyond facing the difficulties of publishing, students will also be aware of the obscene costs sometimes accrued when trying to access a journal UCL does not subscribe to. The modern academic publishing industry is a behemoth. In 2020, the “Big Five” — Elsevier, Wiley, Taylor & Francis, Springer Nature, and SAGE — accumulated around 19 billion dollars in revenue. Behind these numbers is a system of academic publishing practices that are increasingly turning publishing into a competitive sport and making it financially inaccessible, subverting the egalitarian purpose of academic research: providing information about the world we live in. The capture of the academic publishing market blocks access to high-quality research with steep paywalls and may have implications for the kind of research that is being done. A scandal in the behavioral sciences a few years ago suggested that well-respected academics may have been tinkering with their results to produce more “publishable” papers – that is, those which produce surprising or marketable results. Freakonomics reported on the story, concluding that the profit incentive in academia may be a significant driver of subpar research.

Within this context, the UCL Press deserves all the more praise. The university’s active steps to platform meaningful, rigorous research and commit to the free exchange of knowledge should serve as an example for institutions nationwide. Instead of relying on subscription payments or publishing fees, the Press is financed through profits made on physical book sales, grants, and other indirect charges. It is a relief as a graduating student to have access to an open-source academic resource beyond the complimentary journals provided by UCL to alumni. More importantly, it is heartening to see that our institution’s stated commitment to a “diverse intellectual community” surfaces not only in mission statements but in action. I am proud to have studied at a university that is making academia more accessible, and am excited to follow the Press’ future publications.

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About the Author

Sonja Astrakhan is a student at UCL School of Slavonic and East European Studies (SSEES)

The Oxford English Dictionary defines boredom, tautologically, as ‘the state of being bored’, and provides us with two synonyms, perhaps by way of compensation: ‘tedium’ and ‘ennui’. The entry states that the first uses of the word ‘boredom’ in literature are found in Charles Dickens’s Bleak House (1852–3). The aptly named Lady Dedlock suffers from the ‘chronic malady of boredom’ because she is stuck in a marriage of convenience. Meanwhile, another character called Volumnia is described as someone ‘who cannot long continue silent without imminent peril of seizure by the dragon Boredom, [and who] soon indicates the approach of that monster with a series of undisguisable yawns’. Boredom, for the Dickens of Bleak House at least, seems to be a female malady, one that is by turn chronic, monstrous and spasmodic, a deadly sickness. Lady Dedlock was ‘bored to death’, he writes.1

That the OED’s lexicographers could find no better way of describing boredom than by resorting to tautology shows just how difficult the condition is to define. The word names the experience of a kind of deadlock, one that can be so obdurate and self-referential that the best way of accounting for it may be in its own terms: boredom means being bored. Failing this, one might resort to the use of synonyms – ‘tedium’, ‘ennui’, but also ‘monotony’, ‘dullness’, ‘dreariness’, ‘weariness’, ‘inertia’, ‘apathy’ and so on – knowing that none of these words means the same thing. The attempt to define boredom precisely may be a hopeless task. Yet it is at least arguable that this resistance to definition, and indeed this hopelessness, resonate in some ways with the experience of boredom, and so provide a true enough description of it. We are bored when we lose interest. The world then feels unavailable or withdrawn, refuses to mean anything other than itself, and appears to prevent us from relating to it in a creative or meaningful way. Described in this manner, boredom starts to sound like depression, even melancholia, though the condition is probably more mundane than either.

Much has changed since Dickens used the word, and it is often held that boredom, understood as a by-product of industrial capitalism, describes a structure of feeling that characterised Britain and Europe in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, not what is now variously called postmodernity, late capitalism or the contemporary. Flaubert was bored, Emma Bovary was bored, Manet’s Olympia was bored, Lady Dedlock was bored, Volumnia was bored, the bourgeoisie was bored, Heidegger, Kierkegaard and Schopenhauer were bored, Nietzsche even thought that, after the seventh day of creation, God was bored, but we today are not bored. We are distracted, unable to maintain our attention for any considerable length of time, and this, it is claimed, prevents us from developing genuine and profound interests and from experiencing life authentically. This attention deficit, itself one of the most prevalent diagnoses in mental health today, especially of children, may also make us vulnerable to manipulation and exploitation. Our perception of the world is so fragmented and overloaded by new technologies that we risk losing our critical faculties altogether, even, according to one critic, our capacity for sleep.2 Meanwhile, hundreds of books are published each year that show us how to focus our minds, how to respond with greater ease to the proliferation of information in what has been called ‘the age of distraction’.3 The implication is that the ‘age of boredom’,4 as Flaubert described it, has now passed. The principal culprits are thought to be the culture industries and, more recently, the internet, together with the digital technologies that allow us to access it. Under such conditions, it would seem that the time needed to be bored is no longer available. We may now even feel nostalgic for those times in our lives when we were bored: in childhood, say, when time seemed to slow down, sometimes painfully so. The danger in this form of retrospection, of course, is that boredom is idealised or romanticised. ‘Boredom is the dream bird that hatches the egg of experience,’ wrote Walter Benjamin. ‘A rustling in the leaves drives him away.’5 Boredom may at times be a dream bird, the ground of creativity, and so quite unlike Dickens’s dragon or monster. Yet it should not be forgotten that, if the rustle of leaves distracts us from what may be the deeper and more fundamental experience of boredom, and if distraction, once a remedy or palliative, has since become its own sickness, then boredom nonetheless remains an experience that we spend much of our lives trying to avoid, and for good reason. Being bored is a little like being dead – in a minor key. ‘Concert, assembly, opera, theatre, drive, nothing is new to my Lady under the worn-out heavens,’ writes Dickens of Lady Dedlock.

On Boredom addresses boredom in its manifold and uncertain reality, and asks what might be at stake in thinking about the affect today. One of the basic questions the writing and art included in this volume pose is whether there is a creative or critical potential to boredom or whether it is in fact as deadening an experience as it is often held to be. ‘All boredom is counter revolutionary,’ cried the Situationists in the 1960s. Perhaps that is so. But perpetual revolution can itself become boring, permanent change can feel like sameness, and what is striking is how boredom, itself an ordinary, everyday experience, can become the site of some of our most extreme fantasies and projections: of revolution, counter-revolution, sickness, deadness, creativity, dream birds, dragons and monsters. Why might this be so? Is boredom really such a Pandora’s box? Or do these fantasies betray just how anxious we are at the possibility of confronting our own boredom, with the risk that we might encounter a meaningless kernel at the very heart of what we call life?

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About the Authors

This is an excerpt from the open access book On Boredom, edited by Susan Morris and Rye Dag Holmboe (UCL Press).

Susan Morris is an artist interested in the relation between automatic drawing, writing and photography. She uses various media including chalk on paper, inkjet printing and Jacquard tapestry. Works are often generated directly from recordings of data such as her sleep/wake patterns (using a scientific-medical device called an Actiwatch) or her unconscious bodily movements as recorded in a motion capture studio. Recent essay writing includes ‘Drawing in the Dark’ for Tate Papers No. 18, 2012, and ‘A Day’s Work’, catalogue essay for the exhibition for A Day’s Work that Morris curated for SKK, Soest, Germany, 2019.

Rye Dag Holmboe is Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at UEA, where his research examines the relationship between creative process and psychoanalysis. He completed his PhD at UCL in 2015 where he was an AHRC Doctoral Scholar. Holmboe has published books on contemporary artists as well as articles on art, literature and theory. His book on Sol LeWitt will be published by MIT Press in 2021 and he is currently writing a monograph on Howard Hodgkin, which is supported by the Howard Hodgkin Legacy Trust. He is also in the third year of training at the British Psychoanalytic Association.

UCL Press announced that it had reached its 20 millionth open access download at a special event to celebrate the 10^th anniversary of its first publications.  

UCL Press’s pioneering publishing programme spans many of the major academic disciplines, from history to philosophy and the sciences to anthropology. The Press has published more than 400 books that have been downloaded more than 11.7 million times, whilst its 15 journals have attracted more than 8.8 million downloads. 

Its publications – which feature monographs, edited collections, academic journals and textbooks – have reached readers in 242 countries and territories worldwide, providing access to vital academic research to readers in the Global South and beyond. More than 280 of its books have been downloaded in more than 100 countries and territories; 7 of these have been accessed in more than 200 countries/territories worldwide. 

The 20 millionth download was Structural Injustice and the Law, edited by Professor Virginia Mantouvalou (Professor of Human Rights and Labour Law, UCL) and Professor Jonathan Wolff (Alfred Landecker Professor of Values and Public Policy, Blavatnik School of Government, Oxford University). 

The most downloaded open access book in the UCL Press list continues to be How the World Changed Social Media by UCL Professor of Anthropology Daniel Miller and a collective of eight other global anthropologists. The first book in the hugely popular 11-book Why We Post series, it has been downloaded nearly 945,000 times since it was published by UCL Press in early 2016, and has been translated into a variety of languages, including Hindi, Tamil, Portuguese and Italian.  

The most downloaded journal is London Review of Education, an open access journal publishing rigorous, theoretically based research into contemporary global education, which has seen nearly 2million downloads of its articles since it transferred to UCL Press in 2020.  Also notable is the flagship interdisciplinary journal UCL Open Environment, which utilises an open peer review model. The journal has amassed nearly 435,000 downloads of its published articles, and more than 435,000 of its preprints.  

More recently, UCL Press has also established an open access textbooks programme to provide free, high-quality digital textbooks for students, which have been adopted by university courses across the world, including UK, Panama, Canada, Sweden, USA, Germany and South Korea. 

Marking the occasion, Dr Paul Ayris, Pro-Vice-Provost (Library, Culture, Collections & Open Science) and Chief Executive of UCL Press, said:  

‘In an environment where scholarly books typically sell around 200 copies worldwide over their lifetime, open access publishing clearly demonstrates significantly higher global demand for scholarly publications when they are made freely available online, ensuring that high-quality research outputs reach their full potential audience and that important research is made available to policy makers and to those for whom content can otherwise be unaffordable or inaccessible. This delivers UCL’s clear mission to act for the long-term benefit of humanity, as outlined in its 2034 strategy.’ 

If you are interested in publishing your book, journal or journal article with UCL Press, please visit ‘Publish with Us’ on: www.uclpress.co.uk  

Links 

• Download UCL Press books and journals for free.  

• View all UCL Press statistics 

• UCL Press 10th Anniversary: Open Access Monograph Panel Event (Online) – Tuesday 10 June 

Today’s blog post, by Professor Katherine Twamley, describes the issues around parental leave in the UK that she discusses in her recent open access book. This article originally appeared The Conversation.

UK campaign group The Dad Shift is staging a “dad strike” on June 11, to protest the poor paternity leave available to fathers in the UK. Fathers and other parents are being asked to “picket or pickup” – to leave work and join protests at government buildings, or use this time to do the school or nursery run.

My research suggests that a poor offer of leave for fathers means they do not believe either the UK government or their employers view their participation in childcare as important.

UK fathers can take up to two weeks’ leave at the time of the birth of their child, but it is paid well below the living wage. This leave is also only eligible to fathers who have been continuously employed by their employer for at least 26 weeks up to the 15th week before the baby is due.

Paternity leave was introduced in 2003, when maternity leave was extended from 18 to 26 and later 52 weeks. This has resulted in a stark inequality between mothers’ and fathers’ opportunity to take time with their new baby. The UK paternity leave offer also compares poorly against leave offered for fathers in other countries, ranking 40th out of 43 OECD countries

And despite the small amount of leave offered to fathers in the UK, only 59% actually take it. This is mostly due to the poor pay, but fathers also report facing pressure from work that inhibits their use of the leave options available to them.

Sharing leave

Shared parental leave, introduced in 2015 throughout the UK, allows parents to share up to 50 weeks between them. But it has failed to alter parental leave patterns: only 5% of fathers take any shared parental leave.

The low remuneration offered – currently £187.18 a week, if taken within the first nine months, or no pay at all thereafter – again has affected how many men make use of this scheme. They may also feel they are “stealing” the mother’s leave, because a father taking shared parental leave means the mother has to go back to work sooner.

But it’s really important that fathers take time with their babies. When fathers take leave, there are multiple documented benefits for the family and beyond.

Dads’ time at home with their children can help establish a bond between father and child. Research has found that a father who spends time with his young baby, and does activities with them, is more likely to be an engaged parent as his child gets older. There are also potential improved developmental outcomes for children. These benefits are increased the more time fathers are able to spend with their children.

Wider benefits

Mothers also benefit from having their partner off work and with them, particularly during the first weeks and months after giving birth.

I collected diary entries and held interviews with new parents about their parental leave. The difference that fathers taking extended paternity leave at the time of birth made to mothers was palpable. All these mothers reported a smoother and happier transition to parenthood.

On the other hand, mothers whose partners returned to work at two weeks or earlier reported significant challenges. Some even said they felt “traumatised” when the paternity leave ended. “It’s harrowing when the father goes back to work,” one mother told me. “I was, like, hysterical from lack of sleep and not being able to breastfeed.”

As more and more births are via caesarean section – an estimated 31% in the UK – it is even more important that mothers have a partner present at this time. Mothers who have a c-section have limited mobility and will generally require greater levels of support for longer than mothers who have a vaginal birth.

Beyond the family, fathers’ participation in leave is also good for gender equality. Fathers who take leave are more likely to share parenting tasks later and demonstrate more understanding around what parenthood involves.

These benefits are magnified when fathers take leave alone – whether through shared parental leave taken alone in the UK or, as in some European countries, an extended “daddy’s quota” of leave taken after the mother returns to work.

This can also have knock-on benefits for gender equality in paid work. The gender pay gap in the UK is 7% – women working full-time earn 7% less per hour than men. As documented by Nobel prize winner Claudia Goldin, the biggest factor in the gender pay gap is the transition to parenthood. A greater uptake of leave by fathers can shift the established roles of mother-as-carer and father-as-breadwinner.

Besides all these documented benefits of paternity leave, perhaps one of the most potent is that fathers too are part of a family. To deny them independent and well-supported access to parental leave, at least in a comparable way to mothers, is simply unjust. They shouldn’t miss out on this valuable time with their children – and nor should children miss out on time with their fathers.

About the Author

Katherine Twamley is Professor of Sociology, UCL and author of the open access book Caring is Sharing? Couples navigating parental leave at the transition to parenthood

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

This June, UCL Press marks a decade of open access publishing and over 19.5 million global downloads.

Launched in June 2015 as part of UCL’s commitment to open research and scholarship, UCL Press provides scholars with the opportunity to publish their monographs, journal articles and textbooks via open access, meaning that they are free to download online anywhere in the world. 

UCL Press broke the mould as the UK’s first fully open access university press and over the last ten years has published over 380 scholarly monographs, 11 textbooks and has built a portfolio of 15 scholarly journals.  

The pioneering Open Access (OA) programme spans many of the major academic disciplines, from history to philosophy and the sciences to anthropology.  

With global collaboration in mind, UCL Press publishes not only UCL authors but also independent scholars and authors from other academic institutions around the world.  

UCL Press’s global reach extends to 242 countries and territories, with the United States topping the list of countries with the highest number of downloads, followed by the UK, then India.  

The most downloaded title in the UCL Press list continues to be How the World Changed Social Media by UCL Professor of Anthropology Daniel Miller and a collective of eight other global anthropologists. The title has been downloaded over 930,000 times in over 227 countries and territories since its publication in 2016. 

More recently, UCL Press has also established an open access textbooks programme to provide free, high-quality digital textbooks for students.  

Books published by UCL Press have won critical acclaim, including Geographies of Solar Energy Transitions edited by Siddharth Sareen and Abigail Martin, which won the American Energy Society’s Award for Best Edited Book. A Contemporary Archaeology of London’s Mega Events by Jonathan Gardner also won the London Archaeological Prize for the best book about London archaeology. 

Marking the occasion, Dr Paul Ayris, Pro-Vice-Provost (Library, Culture, Collections & Open Science) and Chief Executive of UCL Press, said: “From the start, UCL Press was about breaking down barriers. Traditional academic publishing often locks knowledge behind paywalls, with monographs costing academic institutions and the public money and selling just a few hundred copies. 

‘UCL Press flipped this model of publishing on its head. It was the UK’s first fully open access university press, making OA publishing more accessible to both early career researchers and experienced scholars alike.’ – Paul Ayris

As part of the university’s commitment to an open science future, UCL Press receives funding from UCL to support its open access publishing model and deliver global impact for its publications.  

A celebratory 10th Anniversary panel discussion, featuring speakers from the worlds of universities and publishing will take place on Tuesday 10th June 2025. 

If you are interested in publishing your book, journal or journal article with UCL Press, please visit ‘Publish with Us’ on: www.uclpress.co.uk 

Links

• Download UCL Press books and journals for free. 
• View all UCL Press statistics
• UCL Press 10th Anniversary: Open Access Monograph Panel Event (Online) – Tuesday 10 June

Space Syntax, a collection of the late Bill Hillier’s work that reflects the progression of his influential ideas across his career, published in April. In a post that originally appeared on Mapping Urban Form and Society, Professor Laura Vaughan reflects on Bill Hiller’s legacy, the future of Space Syntax, and a launch event that took place in May.

It’s hard to believe that it’s three years since I first wrote to leading space syntax scholars John Peponis (Georgia Tech) and Ruth Conroy Dalton (Northumbria) with the idea for an edited volume of Bill’s key papers. We had the mad notion that it would be quite a simple process. In some ways it was: we selected papers that weren’t available elsewhere for which Hillier was first author, choosing pieces that entailed significant theoretical and methodological insights, with a bias to the earlier articles and book chapters that established the foundations of the discipline of space syntax.

Edited by me, Laura Vaughan, John Peponis, and Ruth Conroy Dalton, the book offers access to essential papers on the origins and development of the discipline of space syntax, ranging from pieces on architecture as a professional and research discipline, through to later articles that present a theory of the spatial structure of the city and its social functions. By bringing together writing from across Bill Hillier’s career span of half a century, with specially commissioned introductions by a wide range of international experts in the field, we aimed to contextualise his key ideas.

The selection of contributors was relatively straightforward, as we did so on the basis that they had written something relevant about the piece in the past and/or were from adjacent fields that we felt that could add an interesting angle to Bill’s ideas. Inevitably, this consequently led to many space syntax theorists not being included.

The main themes in Bill’s work were summarised for the book’s introductory chapter, recontextualising their historical development in an extended piece written by the three editors led by John Peponis. Both he and Ruth checked, and revised where necessary, formulae and graphs that had been corrupted in earlier publications.

All the pieces were reformatted from the original, frequently poor quality photocopied papers. This involved, as well as rekeying the text of many of the earlier pieces, checking and revision of references, with additional editorial endnotes. The book also includes a list of published works by Bill Hillier. The illustrations were redrawn by a team led by Ruth Conroy Dalton, working with Emad Alyedreessy, while Nick (Sheep) Dalton, author of the original space syntax suite of software, wrote the code to generate new syntax graphs in several instances. An essential index to the book was prepared by Garyfalia (Falli) Palaiologou.

The launch held a panel discussion to reflect on Hillier’s legacy and explore future directions for the field of space syntax, with prompting questions from the event’s chair, Kimon Krenz. Linked to below are the brief papers prepared by John Peponis and Ruth Conroy Dalton, as well as those of several of the panellists.

Introduction to Bill Hillier, by John Peponis

Where Might Bill Hillier Have Gone Next? Reflections on the Future Directions of Space Syntax, by Ruth Conroy Dalton

Charting the Adjacent Possible: Future explorations for Space Syntax as a socio-spatial theory, by Vinicius M. Netto

What innovative cognitive frameworks or methods could revolutionise the way we understand human interaction with space? by Michal Gath-Morad, University of Cambridge

Can space syntax better accommodate the social, institutional, and behavioural nuances that define how people truly use and experience space? by Kerstin Sailer

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About the author

Professor Laura Vaughan is Director of the Space Syntax Laboratory at the Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London, where she is Professor of Urban Form and Society. Following an architectural design degree at the Bezalel Academy of Art and Design, Jerusalem, Israel, she studied for an MSc and PhD at the Lab. After several years working with Bill Hillier at Space Syntax Limited, she returned to UCL in 2001 as lecturer and Programme Director, MSc Advanced Architectural Studies (now MSc/MRes Space Syntax). She has been the Lab’s Director since 2014. In addition to co-editing Space Syntax, she also edited Suburban Urbanities (UCL Press, 2016) and is author of Mapping Society (UCL Press, 2018).

Read her blog to find out more about her work: Mapping Urban Form and Society.

The European European Accessibility Act (EAA) comes into force in June 2025. Angela Thompson, UCL Press Production Editor, writes about a recent training course that she attended, and the recent changes that UCL Press has implemented to make content more accessible.

I recently attended a training course on Accessibility and Publishing, run on behalf of the IPG (Independent Publishers Guild) by Simon Mellins, a publishing industry accessibility expert.  With the European Accessibility Act (EAA) coming into force in June 2025, the course was well attended by a wide variety of publishers keen to ensure they understood the implications of the Act and how to ensure their digital content meets the requirements outlined by this important legislation.   

In terms of how the EAA impacts the publishing sector, the Act requires that various types of products and services, including e-books and e-readers, are accessible to all. It aims to remove barriers to content, and to ensure that users with disabilities are not disadvantaged.  Importantly, it gives readers the power to demand that publishers make materials accessible.   

The course gave clarity to what the EAA – and accessibility in publishing more generally – means in practice. That is, content needs to: work well with assistive technology; have a flexible and dynamic layout; provide alternative renditions of content (for example, alternative text descriptions for images); and have accessible metadata and e-commerce. 

The course was usefully structured around these key areas, with a detailed session on drawing up alternative text for images. The training concluded with a session focused on strategy and how to implement the EAA requirements on a practical level across an entire publishing programme. 

Whilst meeting the requirements of the EAA is not without its challenges, much of the training reinforced and clarified our approach at UCL Press, rather than presenting any surprises or concerns. For example, we are now including alternative text as standard for all new titles, and have a programme underway to draw this up for our backlist. We have accessibility guidelines in place for our authors to follow, and we are addressing our metadata to ensure accessible features of a publication are communicated through the supply chain.  Other accessibility requirements, such the need for content to be easy to navigate, including clear headings and a logical structure, should be at the heart of all good publishing, not just in relation to addressing the EAA. However, the discussion on this certainly helped focus the mind on the importance of well-organised, well-written content for all readers. 

As well as addressing challenges, the course focused on opportunities; not least that bringing content accessibility to the forefront of what we do ensures wider dissemination and new readerships, but also that this ‘semantically rich’ content is ideally placed to meet the requirements of new technologies, future platform changes, and of course any future legislative changes.  

The key takeaway is not to panic, and to draw up a realistic plan that works towards making all content accessible, and to have a clear and timely procedure in place for dealing with accessibility requests as they arise. We will certainly ensure we have all this in place at UCL Press in readiness for the EAA. 

Join a free online discussion on how we think about ‘authorship’ for AI-assisted writing, where the boundaries might lie, and what the future might look like.

📆 June 6th 2025

🕐 2 – 3:30pm BST

Sign up: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/authorship-in-the-era-of-ai-tickets-1323581220059

With the rapid growth of AI tools over the past three years, there has been a corresponding rise in the number of academics and students using them in their own writing. While it is generally agreed that we still expect people to be the “authors” of their work, deciding how to interpret that is often a nuanced and subjective decision by the writer.

This panel discussion will look at how we think about ‘authorship’ for AI-assisted writing – what are these tools used for in different contexts? Where might readers and publishers draw their own lines as to what is still someone’s own work? And how might we see this develop over time?

Speakers:

• Dhara Snowden, Textbook publisher at UCL Press
• Ayanna Prevatt-Goldstein, Head of the UCL Academic Communications Centre
• Rachel Safer, Executive Publisher for Ethics & Integrity at OUP and a member of the Committee on Publication Ethics

This session is open to all.

About the Festival of Open Science and Scholarship

The Festival of Open Science and Scholarship is organised by teams at UCL, LSE and the Francis Crick Institute. Running from 2-6 June the festival includes a combination of online, hybrid, and in-person events across a range of topics including: 

• Special collections and co-production
• AI and its impact on authorship
• Open Research in the Age of Populism
• Scaling up Diamond OA journals 
• Reproducibility and qualitative research
• Navigating data sharing with personal data

The full programme and booking is available via the Open@UCL blog.

What are photographs ‘doing’ in museums? Like the x-ray permeating objects to reveal internal structures, photographs permeate museum practices at all levels – display, collections management, conservation, retail, publicity and exhibition publications, for instance. Photographs inhabit museums in huge numbers. However, these photographs are rarely part of formally accessioned collections: despite their epistemic and historical presence, they are active yet invisible, there but not there. 

Museums are shaped and defined through photographic practices that constitute and reproduce values, hierarchies and knowledge systems, generally with little cognisance of the power of these practices. Such images and their uses are, as Crane has described them, ‘a lowly sort of thing’ that ‘appears or hides in many guises’. Consequently, this book is about the work of the photographs that are not part of a museum’s formal collection, although they might once have been, or might become so. It addresses a range of institutional conditions which exceeds ‘the collection’ as it is officially recognised.

Whether one is considering ‘the collections’ or the material accruals around them, museums are centres of calculation in Bruno Latour’s sense, where accumulated objects, networks, proximities and values become knowledge through an institution’s procedures and devices. Photographs are the unconsidered heart of these processes, as they accumulate and circulate knowledge, even more so in an age when digitally available photographs of objects are at the front line of ‘accessibility’. While it has been argued that museums have, for some time, been post-photographic in their increasing dependence on networked, digital and multimedia realms, it remains that beneath these developments of the last three decades or so, photographs as imaging practices remain central. Since the nineteenth century, photographs have widened the reach of what museums can do and how they can function. They form both the background and the spine of museum practice, from record keeping to questions of decolonisation, from archival accrual to retail source, to the degree that it has been impossible to think about museum function and praxis without encountering photographs.

This mass of photographs can be said to form an ‘ecosystem’: a finely balanced network of dependencies and connective tissue which create and underpin values, hierarchies and knowledge systems and which are present in the museum in dispersed multiple, folded and overlapping layers. The various sites of photographic activity, from the studio through collections management to exhibitions, are nodes in the ecosystem which have their own micro-cultures that mutually inform and conflict. They form massive and shifting bodies of photographic utility and practice which translate objects into certain kinds of things and displays into certain kinds of spaces. Photographs shape the texture and fabric of both internal professional procedures of museums and their external public face. 

They are, in sum, a key organising principle of museums and markers of its ’rhetoric of value’.

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About the Authors

This is an excerpt from the open access book What Photographs Do, edited by Elizabeth Edwards and Ella Ravilious and published by UCL Press/ V&A.

Elizabeth Edwards is Professor Emerita of Photographic History at De Montfort University, Leicester, and also Honorary Professor in the Department of Anthropology at UCL. 

Ella Ravilious is Curator: Architecture and Design in the Art, Architecture, Photography and Design Department at the V&A.  

Another busy month for the UCL Press books team, with 5 brilliant new open access titles spanning everything from architecture to COVID-19, classics and race to children’s play.

The first book published was Labour, Nature and Capitalism: Exploring labour-environmental conflicts in Kerala, India, ehich traces how the alliance between labour and capital manifests in the form of conflicts between organised trade unions and a local environmental movement in the context of the much-acclaimed Kerala model of development. It explores the history of the area’s local industrialisation, the presence of varied economic interests and exposes the barriers to forming solidarity networks among the working classes.

The fascinating Playing the Archive: From the Opies to the digital playground. This open access book investigates the vast collection of play experiences accumulated by Iona and Peter Opie in the 1950s and 1960s. It shares new stories and games gathered from today’s children, and compares the accounts told at these two points in time. Children are seen as creative, agentive and engaged participants in their play cultures.

Our third publication was Classics and Race: A historical reader. This important book provides scholars and students with an exploratory intellectual history of the various and complex relationships between Classics and racist and anti-racist thought-systems and politics.

The latest volume of the Culture and Health series was next up. Covid’s Chronicities: From urgency to stasis in a pandemic era is a fascinating account of the shifts that have occurred in the face of the pandemic, the state and community responses to it, its continuing toll on health services, economies, and communities and its compounding effects on people’s health, lives and livelihoods.

The final book to publish in April was Space Syntax: Selected papers by Bill Hillier, which provides a canon of works that reflect the progression of Hillier’s ideas from the early publications of the 1970s to his most recent work, published before his death in 2019.

As always, stay safe! We’ll see you next month!