Special Issue: Arts

Ailie Rutherford is a visual artist, curator and the founder and artistic director of Feminist Exchange Network, a Glasgow based collective led by women and other marginalised genders which uses social and activist art to explore feminist economics in practice and in relation to women’s lived experience. Ailie’s feminist economic artworks have been shown internationally including Unbox festival (India), Institute of Network Cultures (Netherlands), Supermarkt (Germany), Rum 46 (Denmark), Van Abbemuseum (Netherlands), Sheffield DocFest (England), and Documenta 15 (Germany). In 2023, artist Ailie Rutherford was commissioned by the University of Glasgow and Glasgow Women’s Library (GWL) to create an exhibition and workshop series as part of the project ‘Women in multiple low-paid employment: pathways between, care and health’ (2020-2024). The academic project was the first to study the nature and extent of women’s multiple low paid employment (MLPE) in the UK. Ailie Rutherford led a series of workshops at GWL entitled ‘Mapping Women’s Work’. The resulting exhibition Pouring Out, Pouring In shared prints and other outcomes from the workshop series wherein the women involved mapped out their multiple paid and unpaid roles, thinking together about what a more equitable economic system might look like. This excerpt is from the Pouring Out, Pouring In exhibition booklet, co-authored by artist Ailie Rutherford along with lead researcher Louise Lawson, at University of Glasgow, and GWL curator Caroline Gausden. It describes the process and shares prints and other outcomes from the workshop series which visualized the complex nature of work and care for many women. Pouring out, Pouring In demonstrates how artistic work intersects with the Degrowth Agenda to collectively research and develop alternative socially just futures. The work is funded by the Nuffield Foundation, an independent charitable trust with a mission to advance social well-being.

In Céline Keller’s Who is Afraid of Degrowth?, the publicly accessible debate on degrowth is curated and restaged in a comic format. Keller’s illustrations not only visualize the conversations as they happen across a range of platforms—from snappy, heated retorts on “X,” to long scholarly treatises, memes, and infographics floating around the web—but contextualizes them within the network of references and influences. Moreover, drawing on Victor Fei Lim’s framework for multimodal discourse analysis, Keller’s own stance within the debate becomes clear through the illustrations and her staging of the mise en scene and the mise en page (to apply Geraint D’Arcy’s terms, 2020). This review examines how Keller not only indexes the argument for and against debate, but inserts her own arguments through the visual plane, showing how Who is Afraid of Degrowth? imagines an alternative to the current patterns of public discourse.

The essay explores how speculative fiction and sound art can serve as powerful tools for envisioning and promoting desirable futures. We take extractivist practices in Mozambique as a starting subject of indignation. Reflecting on how artistic mediums allow for an emotional and imaginative critique of real-world issues, such as neocolonialism and environmental exploitation. We argue that fictions shape societies and that our world is driven by dominant narratives - such as capitalism or growth metrics like GDP - that often obscure alternative ways of living and being. By blending speculative fiction with sound art, our theater play The Dynamic Ministry of Insubordination aims to challenge these prevailing dystopian narratives that dominate our cultural and political landscapes. Through our theater and radiophonic play, we critique the exploitation of resources and labor, exploring the absurdity of modern practices through the lens of a post-capitalist, animist future. We call for a reclaiming of imagination to foster hope and envision utopian futures. The work highlights the need to shift from an anthropocentric worldview and embrace a more holistic understanding of existence, where humans, non-human beings, and inert matter share agency. Through artistic expression, we wish to question established hierarchies and inspire paradigm shifts that promote more sustainable, equitable, and joyful futures.

The role of art in the degrowth movement, and vice versa, is a largely unexplored but promising research theme which can help us to understand the aesthetic dimension of radical social-ecological transformations. This article is the first review of the current state of this discourse. After introducing the context and relevance of analysing the relationship between art and degrowth, a database of 44 articles was compiled from published peer and non-peer-reviewed literature in scientific journals, book chapters, and art magazines. The results categorize the literature into three different clusters: Art for Degrowth (how can art amplify and communicate the degrowth vision), Degrowth for Art (analyses of potential transformations in the (institutionalised) art world in line with degrowth), and Art as Degrowth (the non-productivist and slowness of art making as a prefiguration of degrowth practices in everyday life). The clusters were then examined from a sociology of the arts perspective using Howard Becker’s (1982) theory of art worlds, looking specifically at the perspectives, conceptualisations, and contradictions of art and degrowth publications in each respective cluster. Juxtaposing the three clusters revealed strong disciplinary differences between how degrowth scholars, art writers, and art theorists defined “art” and “degrowth”, and how they assess their relationship. The implications of this observation are reflected upon and framed as power struggles in the discussion of the paper. Lastly, the article outlines a desideratum of future research which could facilitate a more fruitful connection between the art world and the degrowth community.

This paper discusses the value of curated art-science-activism collaborations that explore local to global environmental limits from a social and behaviour change perspective. This socially engaged ethos uses art as verb as a practise to generate participatory and collaborative engagement in communities. It seeks to shift social norms by fostering conscious immersion and intimate connection to nature through participatory and collaborative processes delivered in partnership with creative, scientific and ecological organisations. The approach sets the tone for contemplating human impact and promoting desirable pro environmental behaviours through creative perspectives, curative actions, scientific information and decision-making strategies. This connects with the Degrowth agenda that seeks the development of alternative futures that provide for human and non-human wellbeing within planetary boundaries. Although art and creativity can generate empathetic personal connection, a shift in social norms arises from engaging citizens pragmatically through collective processes of deeper reflection and active engagement and a strategy for fundamental change that is multi-disciplinary and towards the collective good.

In response to the consequences of unchecked economic growth, this article calls for a redefinition of success within a post-growth framework. It draws on Neri Oxman and John Maeda’s advocacy for interdisciplinary collaboration to explore how techno-empathy and design can address societal challenges. Design, traditionally seen as solving specific problems, is reimagined in the Mindful Design Studio at Wroclaw Academy of Art & Design, emphasizing environmental, social, and ethical considerations. Techno-empathy, which uses technology to foster understanding, guides these projects. Examples include an RFID-equipped closet for conscious clothing management, a "20 seconds" bathroom installation for mindful water use, and "Plant Station", which deepens plant-owner connections through interactive sound. These projects address issues like overproduction and thoughtless consumption, encouraging reflection and sustainable attitudes. They also counteract the negative effects of economic growth, such as faster life pace and declining empathy. Citing Professor Richard Wiseman's research, the paper shows how mindful design and techno-empathy promote sustainable lifestyles and healthy social habits, aligning with the "slow life" concept. The article features the "Light it Up" project, an Alternative Participative Product Concept, evolving from the "Deplastification" initiative by Dominika Sobolewska. This ethically provocative design tackles plastic pollution through a DIY interactive lamp that requires users to collect beach plastic and assemble the lamp from recycled materials. By integrating gamification and mindfulness, "Light it Up" not only engages users in environmental stewardship but also exemplifies post-growth innovation by merging design with ethical considerations to inspire meaningful social and environmental change.

Annagreta König Dansokho is a freelance artist, political scientist, and psychotherapist. Born in 1967, she studied political science and rhetoric in Germany and transcultural psychiatry in Paris. Her multicultural background led her towards her fields of expertise which range from artistic research and concept art to psychotherapy and the overcoming of traumatic events. Her art is interwoven with the topics of migration, identity, injustice, and power. The artistic project presented here, Touché: A Mediterranean collection, circles around a world driven by capitalism and profit-orientation. The tragic dimension of illegal migration unfolds here through a fictitious narrative, in which a fabric producer offers materials suited for the crossing of the sea. The clothes that make up the Mediterranean collection are something like a symbol bearer. They represent the interconnectedness between North and South, colonizers and colonized, abusive economic exploitation and hope for a better life. The clothes designed for an illegal crossing of the Mediterranean become, in Annagreta’s project, a product shaped by marketing and branding—an idea behind, and therefore a parody of, our consumer-driven attitude: everything is for sale as long as there is a demand for it. Any product can be advertised for and sold, no matter how dark and immoral its origin or purpose is. This art project unveils this darkness and, at the same time, brings awareness to the possible processes, actors, and stories behind the “curtain.” The project’s connection to the degrowth movement is an implicit one. Annagreta’s artwork triggers associations and emotions without being a direct critique of the hegemonic attitude of the “West” and its capitalist patterns of action. Being even playful at times, her project enables us to understand the paradoxes at stake in complex issues like migration and the mechanisms of the global market and thus indirectly contributes to imagining an alternative scenario.

This article introduces (Un)Natural Language, an art software and an interactive online archive that documents and examines how words make worlds by capturing the underlying ecological threats in government project documents. The project weaves together ecology, linguistics, and computational technology to offer a new analytical lens for language use in urbanization. Through a custom-labeled dataset and a fine-tuned BERT model, the system classifies individual sentences in project appraisal documents, returning visualized analyses that reveal patterns of pro-growth and ecologically detrimental discourse. Merging net art, environmental activism, and natural language processing, (Un)Natural Language offers a novel framework for interpreting public documents by uncovering hidden narratives of extractivism and economic expansion. The article begins by outlining the context and concepts of the work, followed by a description of its operation, design, and technical implementation. It concludes with reflections on the project’s contributions to ecolinguistics, machine learning, and net art. The project reclaims computation as a space for reflection rather than control—inviting viewers to rethink the language shaping our ecological futures.