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The purpose is to present proposals to foster what we call a socially meaningful transparency practice that aims to enhance public understanding of data-based systems through the production of accounts that are relevant and useful to diverse publics, and society more broadly.

The authors’ proposals emerge from reflections on challenges they experienced producing written and visual accounts of specific public sector data-based systems for research purposes. Following Ananny and Crawford's call to see limits to transparency practice as “openings”, the authors put their experience into dialogue with the literature to think about how we might chart a way through the challenges. Based on these reflections, the authors outline seven proposals for fostering socially meaningful transparency.

The authors identify three transparency challenges from their practice: information asymmetry, uncertainty and resourcing. The authors also present seven proposals related to reduction of information asymmetries between organisations and non-commercial external actors, enhanced legal rights to access information, shared decision making about what gets made transparent, making visible social impacts and uncertainties of data-systems, clear and accessible communication, timing of transparency practices and adequate resourcing.

Socially meaningful transparency aims to enhance public understanding of data-based systems. It is therefore a necessary condition not only for informed use of data-based products, but crucially for democratic engagement in the development of datafied societies.

The paper contributes to existing debates on meaningful transparency by arguing for a more social, rather than individual, approach to imagining how to make transparency practice more meaningful. The authors do this through their empirical reflection on our experience of doing transparency, conceptually through our notion of socially meaningful transparency, and practically through our seven proposals.

This paper aims to present a critical discussion of theoretical concepts that drive the main contributions of the academic partners, by highlighting the contrasting perspectives and identifying areas of commonality.

The paper follows a contextualised approach to debating the issues of access and participation for people with ID in learning environments. Each discipline considers the user of ICT within a social context but draws on the theoretical domains and published literature associated with its own area.

Resonances are to be found across the academic disciplines in terms of an ecological or holistic view of the person with ID as a user of a learning environment. This is what binds the multi‐disciplinary perspective together.

This paper is a rare attempt to integrate three distinct academic disciplines to provide a coherent picture of the theoretical perspectives underpinning research by the authors into the development and use of an ICT system for people with learning difficulties.

This chapter explores how the narrative-based walking simulator What Remains of Edith Finch ludifies traditions of Gothic fiction. Combining Gothic themes of death, the family and the family curse, the game involves the protagonist investigating her abandoned childhood home where every family member died a dramatic and untimely death. Sealed rooms, preserved since their inhabitants’ demise, contain shrine-like displays including a document of some form allowing players to experience the last moments of each Finch. Play involves penetrating these spaces, according to the ludo-Gothic emphasis on boundary crossing, piecing together interactive narrative fragments consistent with Gothic fiction’s patchwork storytelling. In accessing each lost manuscript, players engage in a generically specific process of multi-media trans-subjectivity, experiencing various first person perspectives and engaging with numerous gameplay interfaces. The title’s series of ambiguous unreliable narratives, its refusal of a consistent subjective position, and unreal dream-like sensation contribute to the game’s Gothic atmosphere. In a restriction of videogame agency and control, consistent with horror games, no player option is available other than to complete each pre-determined death. Gothic pastiche, a compulsion to repeat the past, and the embalming processes of photographic media are variously employed across these sequences. Play evokes the melancholy heroine, consumed by maternal loss, masochistically replaying her family’s sorrowful past, hunting for lost objects and exhuming the ghosts of her history. With its nested narrative, morbid preoccupation and ambivalent supernatural presence, the game effectively translates Gothic traditions into the videogame medium.

Games are rapidly becoming a site where cultural ideas are explored and consumed and have recently become an arena for debate around representations of gender. This chapter draws attention to key debates occurring in the field of video games that are also applicable to film studies. This interdisciplinary approach demonstrates the relevance to game studies of a rich vein of scholarship on the gendered action body in film studies. Drawing on research by Yvonne Tasker (1993, 2015), Lisa Purse (2011) and Jeffrey Brown (2011), this chapter seeks to unpick the tensions around gender and violence in the reception of The Last of Us Part II (Naughty Dog, 2020), particularly regarding the surprisingly vehement backlash against the unconventionally muscular deuteragonist Abby.

This chapter asks what happens when the ‘spectacular’ and ‘hard’ bodies of the action heroine enter the soft virtual world of the video game. A focus on whether Abby's body is realistic in the reception of the game leads to a discussion of the ontological status of games as a virtual medium. I argue that the process of motion capture and the real-world reference of CrossFit athlete Colleen Fotsch trouble the conventional dichotomy that understands the medium of games as virtual and film as indexical. Throughout, I use the more ambiguous and ambivalent historical reception of the body of Lara Croft as a useful point of contrast. I argue that the obsessive, hysterical response to Abby's muscular body is indicative of larger tensions between conservative ‘hardcore’ fandoms and the industry's recent drive for progressive change. By denying Abby's authenticity such players also deny female access to traditional masculine pursuits and identities, whether that be bodybuilding or gaming. This is because virtual female action stars, just as much as their real-world counterparts such as Linda Hamilton, trouble the gendered norms that underpin both second-wave feminist accounts of muscular women and the audience of hardcore video game players. As Fron, Fullerton, Morie, and Pearce (2007) critique in their article ‘The Hegemony of Play’, a double standard therefore exists in which such women must justify the reality of their musculature through a kind of ‘proof of process’. Ultimately, I conclude that a similar demand is made of the emergent female audience of gamers, who are continuously made to justify their right to play in a traditionally male space.

If law's foundational promise lies in the belief that it promotes the social good, then we need to reassess the limits of that promise. Exploring the often problematic translation of legal goods into social ones, the central claim is that the legal discipline has been limited by a “legal imperative” that manifests itself in an excessive focus upon law as a social tool and attitude of complacency in the face of law's limits. Seeking to displace this approach, the author argues for an attitudinal shift that expresses honesty about limits, greater social inquisitiveness and care about law's promise.

Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy and Michelle Robinson Obama are two First Ladies of the United States whose racial-ethnic, personal, and family characteristics made them the objects of inordinate public fascination. Using Patricia Hill Collins's concept, the “outsider within,” this chapter explores Kennedy and Obama's emergence as cultural icons and their marginal relationship with the white Protestant American governing class. As wives of presidents and specific to her generation, each woman brought superior professional credentials to their public roles. As cultural icons who differ from the white racial frame, they are subjected to excessive media scrutiny, evaluation, and supervision. Both women exercise cultural agency from their positions as cultural icons, particularly utilizing ceremonial activities and the power of the White House to oppose cultural erasure and exclusion of minority groups and to provide models of social inclusion. Analysis of their roles highlights the continuing importance of wives to the acquisition and maintenance of power and to the role of elites in offering models of social justice.

The following article is a “Q&A interview” conducted by Joanne Pransky of Industrial Robot Journal as a method to impart the combined technological, business and personal experience of a prominent, robotic industry engineer-turned entrepreneur regarding the evolution, commercialization and challenges of bringing a technological invention to market.

The interviewee is innovator Helen Greiner, Founder and CEO of CyPhy Works. Ms Greiner describes her technical and business experiences delivering ground robots into the industrial, consumer and military markets, which led to her pioneering flying robot solutions.

Helen Greiner received a bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering and a master’s degree in computer science, both from MIT. She also holds an honorary doctor of engineering degree from Worcester Polytechnic Institute. Greiner is one of the three co-founders of iRobot Corp (Nasdaq: IRBT) and served as iRobot’s Vice President of Engineering (1990-1994), President (1994-2008), and Chairman (2004-2008). She founded CyPhy Works in 2008. Greiner has also served as the President, Board Member for the Robotics Technology Consortium; a Trustee for MIT; and is currently a Trustee for the Boston Museum of Science.

Inspired as a child by the movie Star Wars, Greiner’s life goal has been to create robots. Greiner was one of three people that founded iRobot Corporation and developed a culture of innovation that led to the Roomba Autonomous Vacuuming Robot. There are now more than 12 million Roombas worldwide. She also led iRobot’s entry into the military marketplace with the creation and deployment of over 6,000 PackBot robots. Greiner has received many awards and honors for her contributions in technology innovation and business leadership. She was named by the Kennedy School at Harvard in conjunction with the US News and World Report as one of America’s Best Leaders and was honored by the Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International with the prestigious Pioneer Award. She has also been honored as a Technology Review Magazine “Innovator for the Next Century” and has been awarded the DEMO God Award and DEMO Lifetime Achievement Award. She was named one of the Ernst & Young New England Entrepreneurs of the Year, invited to the World Economic Forum as a Global Leader of Tomorrow and Young Global Leader and has been inducted in the Women in Technology International Hall of Fame.