ABSTRACTS
Welcome
Johanna Gibson – Why We Need Interdisciplinary Aesthetics in Commercial Law
Introducing FIVE LEAF Institute for Law and Aesthetics, this opening address will set out the critical importance of aesthetics in legal research, scholarship, and education, the methodological value of arts and humanities perspectives and interventions in law, and the particular significance for contemporary research and policy in commercial law.
Fashion and Luxury
Erik Gustaffson – Fashioning the Future: Interlinking Industry, Sustainability, and Higher Education in Fashion Design
The fashion industry as we know it is facing major challenges and consequently a potential disruptive state. Both policy reports and academic research have for a long period of time been pointing at prevalent unsustainable practices from an environmental as well as social/ethical perspective (Buchel et al., 2022). At the same time, the ever-increasing speed of technological development has the potential of rewriting the game field completely, for design processes as well as production and consumption (Gustafsson et al., 2025). Despite these well-known challenges and changes, to a large extent we can still observe that old dominant logics within the fashion industry prevail (Nouinou et al., 2023). This begs the question of how these issues can be met as to form a new future of fashion.
Recent studies of current practices in the fashion industry show how actors increasingly see the value and potential of digital technologies. At the same time, there are struggles not only with resource constraints, but also a lack of understanding for the new types of knowledge required to implement a change that can have real sustainable effect (Gustafsson et al., 2025). We put this in relation to the current state and future needs of fashion design education, arguing that this ever evolving state that the fashion industry now operates under also means that education as such needs to take a stance, not necessarily rooted in following the latest trends and developments, but rather to form education in fashion design in such a way that graduates have higher levels of resilience (Folke, 2006). Our proposition is that this is achieved through evidence-based education with high prevalence of research interaction and involvement in teaching and practice. This interaction further expands the students’ abilities not only in relation to aesthetic knowledge, but more importantly so their aesthetic reflexivity (Ewenstein & Whyte, 2007).
Mark Jetsaphon Niyompatama – Clothing Silhouettes in High Fashion: Consumers and Copies
This paper specifically examines the status of clothing designs’ silhouettes within the intellectual property framework, and the interaction with sculptural forms in other forms of creative work including the fine arts. In silhouettes of clothing, they are readily apprehended culturally as sculptural forms. In high fashion, and from the perspective of fashion designers and consumers, fashion design garments are feasibly compared to art and to sculpture, because through their silhouettes they can communicate meaning, social significance, cultures, history, a badge of origin and amass substantial economic values. Meanwhile, they can be perceived as a functional work in that their silhouettes cover a wearer’s body. Hence, the silhouette is different from sculpture from this awareness. Accordingly, this paper draws upon art history, cultural theory, and the luxury fashion industry to consider consumer perspectives on clothing silhouette, originality, and the copying norms of the fashion industry.
Marìa José Munguía Romero – A Practical Framework for Designing Circular Trainers
Fast fashion has dramatically increased the market share of fashion goods with short life spans and low recyclability rates, contributing negatively to the overall environmental sustainability of this sector. Current regulations are forcing the industry to migrate to more sustainable practices to reduce its environmental footprint. However, significant progress is still required in this sector.
The increasing popularity of trainers has made them a must-have accessory among consumers and a target for fast fashion brands and retailers. Nevertheless, the environmental effects of the overconsumption of these products are not widely known. 95% of trainers end up in landfills at the end of their lifecycle due to the high number of materials utilised in their manufacture and the significant amount of adhesive used in their construction. Making their disassembly a fundamental challenge to their recyclability. Research has shown that currently, no design tool is yet available to reliably assess trainers from a Circular Design perspective, which highlights the need for an assessment tool that can fill this gap to increase their recyclability rates.
Current regulations, such as the Eco-design for Sustainable Products Regulation, the EU Ecolabel for Footwear and the EU Strategy for Sustainable and Circular Textiles, acknowledge the importance of circularity and enhance active participation in increasing products’ recyclability rates. Bio-Inspired Techniques and existing legislation have been used to develop a framework that sets recovery at the centre of trainers’ end-of-life. Through an analysis of publicly available Guidelines for Circularity, a set of 9 Circular Guidelines has been developed to advise designers in their decision-making process to create more circular trainers. Through these Circular Guidelines, the framework was developed operating in four fundamental areas: Repairability, Reverse Logistics, Repurposing and Remanufacturing.
Kiera Vaclavik – Fashion: The Terra Incognita of Adaptation
Ever since Linda Hutcheon’s call to move beyond attendance to the usual Adaptation Studies suspects of book-based films (A Theory of Adaptation, 2006), there has been a steadily growing galaxy of works admitted into the fold. Opera and videogame, popular song, radio, telenovelas, circus performance, fanfiction and pornography have all found their place. One important and substantial domain which has a strong kinship with adaptation studies, but which has been almost entirely overlooked by scholarship to date, is that of fashion. Characterised by constant returning to the past, by re-invention, re-presentation and re-cycling – fashion regularly produces adaptations of pre-existing works across a wide range of formats. In this paper I’ll make the case for the inclusion of fashion within the realms of adaptation studies and set out what the study of fashion adaptation might involve. I’ll start with some initial attempts to map the terrain – dealing with broad questions about location, identification, evolution, creation and consumption. I’ll then focus on the specific example of a runway show by Thom Browne based on Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince (one of many fashion engagements with this literary work). Finally, I’ll set out a number of possible future avenues for research within this field, including moving beyond literature as source.
Film and Photography
Uche Bagot-Sealey – Authorship as Resistance: Black Women, Collaboration and Cinema
This paper considers the complex relationship between film authorship, copyright and Black women. As a minoritised group rarely afforded the resources to create and distribute their own cinematic narratives, Black women filmmakers are uniquely positioned to serve as the focus of an intersectional analysis of the harms perpetuated by the intellectual property regime. Resisting the impulse towards simple conclusions, the paper presents the often conflicting ways in which authorial designation can exclude Black women, but can also be co-opted as a tool for Black feminist resistance and liberation through collaborative cinema.
Lucy Bolton – The Aesthetics of the Rape Trial: Beauty, Dildos, and Torn Panties
In this paper I will examine the ways in which visual tropes and aesthetic evaluations dominate descriptions and representations of rape trials in the press and in cinema. By drawing on three main examples, I will demonstrate how judgements about beauty, sexuality and femininity are elicited through the elements of rape trials that the media focuses on, and how these are replicated and sustained through film. The three examples are the reporting of the Ealing vicarage rape in the late 1980s, the Newland case which forms the basis of the The Bed Trick, by Izabella Scott, and the 1959 Otto Preminger film, Anatomy of a Murder.
Ogulcan Ekiz – Looking at Photographs: Rules, Rules, and More Rules! Image Licensing in Academic Press
This paper follows up the author’s 2025 monograph Photographs and Copyright Law: Reproduction, Permissions, and Scholarship (Routledge). Photographs and Copyright Law provides insights into the practice of photography licensing in the academic publishing industry. It reveals that the strict permissions regime leaves no room to practice copyright exceptions, and the budgetary constraints of the UK higher education institutions prevent scholars from publishing relevant images in their research outputs. In preparing the monograph with Routledge, the author prepared sixteen photographs to be included in the title. Some were illustrative of his arguments, while most images were themselves the arguments. The published monograph features only four of these sixteen images as the author had to navigate through the strict permissions culture he has researched. In this context, the paper will provide an analysis of the author’s own experience in failing to publish photographs as part of his research and point out the key obstacles: the risk aversion of academic publishers in relying on fair dealing exceptions, the limited funding opportunities available to cover licensing expenses, and outdated licensing models that do not adequately accommodate e-books and online publications.
Theatre and Performing Arts
Aoife Monks - They Should Learn to Make Woollen Cloth and Advance the Manufacture of the Nation, or, Fatima’s Next Job Could Be In Cyber: A Lecture on Virtuosity
This paper investigates the challenges presented by virtuosity for the imagined basis of art in concepts of originality, property and personal expression. The virtuoso as a special category of performer arose during the Romantic period, just as copyright law began to rely upon the qualities of originality, invention, genius and expression as the properties of art and the artist. This is the source of virtuosity’s endless controversy and the ambivalence with which virtuosi are so often greeted by critics. Performers who are imagined capable of superhuman feats of technical mastery and physical endurance make clear how much theatrical performance relies upon the material and technical practices of the theatre, practices that were disavowed as artisanal by the newly emerging category of ‘the artist’. This paper will range from Sir Nicholas Gimcrack’s invention of the strentrophonical tube in 1676, the riots greeting virtuosity that lasted for 64 days at the theatre in 1809, to three holograms of the Irish dancer Michael Flatley that appeared in London in 2015. It will consider the legacies of these debates for the relationship between AI and art now.
Metka Potocnik – Humanity of Songs: Feminist Reflections on Copyright Law and Creativity
Copyright law protects works, when they are author’s own intellectual creation. With songs, the protection is split between owners of musical works, literary works and sound recordings, with room for performers’ protection, under certain conditions. Human voices themselves are not protected outside these categories. The most common reading of copyright works is presented as objective, reserving any artistic judgement for experts in the field. Lawyers operate under the veil of objectivity by abstaining from an in-depth understanding and analysis of music, its process of creation and any relationships among humans making it. The approach presumes to be so judgement-free that it considered music reproduced by non-human entities (AI, but not animals) or silence as meeting the definition.
And yet, the copyright system is not gender neutral. Using the Feminist Intellectual Property Studies (FIPS) Framework, I will investigate the origins of musical works and how they made it to the centre of most copyright systems. Next, I will expose the multiple consequences of this ‘music is work’ system, for composers, songwriters and performers alike. Through the lived experience of women and gender-diverse people making music in the UK it becomes apparent that current copyright laws do not empower diverse creators to make music, in the way that they want to make it. Too much emphasis is placed on the commercial aspects of music-making, while rejecting all other value of music-making and songwriting.
Eden Sarid – Queens of Creativity: Drag, Social Norms and Cultural Production Beyond Intellectual Property
Drag - a performance art where artists assume the persona and aesthetic of their opposite gender - has undergone one of the most remarkable cultural transformations of our time: from the margins of society to the global mainstream. But how did it get there, and what does that journey reveal about creativity, cultural production, performance, and the law? Drawing on over a decade of fieldwork and the voices of drag queens themselves, this study offers a longitudinal study of a subculture across such seismic change. Integrating law, sociology, queer theory, and economics into a unified analytical framework, the study proposes an original account of how creative subcultures organise, create, and flourish, and what that tells us about law, institutions, creativity and culture in an age of rapid social change.
Live Art and Performance
Marie Hadley – Navigating Grey Lines: Co-Producing Knowledge Across Disciplines and Boundaries
Navigating Grey Lines examines how artist–academic collaboration can operate as a method of socio‑legal inquiry, knowledge production, and public engagement. Focusing on Grey Lines, an interdisciplinary Art + Law project developed by intellectual property scholar Dr Marie Hadley and tattooist Dr Adam McDade that was exhibited in Australia in 2025, this paper offers a behind‑the‑scenes account of a relationship‑driven approach to interdisciplinary research.
At the level of content, the project brings copyright analysis into dialogue with the “grey lines” between copying and creativity, artist and service‑provider, and stencil and skin within professional tattooing. Beneath this inquiry, however, sits another story: one of evolving research methods and relationship‑building, which together co‑constructed a unique methodology for navigating time, movement, and shared embodied experience across geographical boundaries.
Drawing on examples that range from walks and bus rides, to birdsong and police sirens, dinosaurs and two‑headed wolves, and an expanding cast of research characters – both heroes and villains, the paper reflects on the value of research methods that support the flattening of knowledge hierarchies, letting go of pretence, and cultivating genuine collaborative partnership. Flexibility, intuition, embodiment, and relationality are positioned as essential methodological resources for doing interdisciplinary work authentically and meaningfully.
How might we bridge disciplinary boundaries and “do” artist–academic collaboration better?
Astrid Maria Heimer – The Creative Space: Involving Aesthetics, Embodied Consciousness and Material Engagement
Therese Jane Hardman’s four principles of creativity and intuition are scrutinized in this lecture and connected to theories of aesthetics, form, and embodied consciousness. In the second part, theory is activated through a demonstration of modelling a ceramic sculpture, describing the interplay between intuition and intention during the creative process of clay modelling. The term creativity has many definitions. This study focuses on perspectives from arts and crafts practices involving aesthetic knowledge used as both an abstract and a concrete analytical tool for creative processes and their aesthetic outcomes. The meaning of aesthetics works therefore as an objectivization of aesthetic assessment. As a driving force, aesthetics are examined due to the often marginalized comprehension that the term is synonymous with beauty based on purely subjective experiences. Of equal importance is that craft knowledge extends beyond technical skill, encompassing embodied action, sensory awareness, and the transmission of material culture.
Interpreting the theme of Session 4, Live Art and Performance, opens a space for exploration—for presence and creativity—that evolves by merging body and mind through material engagement. This contrasts with the hierarchic position of mind before body. For creativity discourse, this means that the dominating position of design thinking needs to be considered and re-evaluated. This presentation is an example on how aesthetics and material driven processes can expand the creative space beyond ideas and new combinations, by going into greater depth in certain phenomena and uncovering new avenues for exploration
Rikke Luther – Mud … and the Earth System: Thinking the Ocean-Lands
Beneath our feet, landscapes are transforming. Muds are in motion. The Ocean-Lands: Mud Within the Earth System Humans examines the effects of the planet’s growing ‘mud-scapes’.
Human-time measures development through fragments of pottery – muds given solid form and purpose by human hands. Every mud is a mixture of soils and the never-ending circulation of water within the ‘Earth System’. Every mud mixes the political territories humans claim to hold and control with Earth’s systems humans scarcely understand, let alone control. In mud, the tiny scale of human histories mixes with the vast scale of the planet’s and that of the cosmos.
Within the developing Ocean-Lands - a littoral formed by the jurisdiction of nations and the infinite spaces of the ocean-commons and atmosphere – muds take on a new significance. Cultures that once measured themselves by longevity of their stories and the stability of the institutions they built, are humiliated; forced to admit they are merely the content of more powerful systems.
For millennia, ‘static muds’ facilitated culture, trade, and the exchange of ideas across legal boundaries. Those secure muds are now in motion. Glaciers and inland ice melt as mud-flats and swamps reclaim space from human occupation. Permafrost melts and sinks, as elsewhere land slips. Lakes recede, their beds dry and collapse. Seas of stones left by retreating inland ice leave flowers of a pre-human past, rich in quicksilver and uranium. Swelling muds slide toward the oceans, to join the garbled circulations of the Earth System.
Muds are a medium though which bacteria organise themselves. As Earth Systems bend and warp, their organisation changes. Though no politician could admit it, such micro-organisms created the territories they command. Primitive planktons two million years ago facilitated the creation of mountains by lubricating the movement of one slab of rock upon another under the pressure of moving tectonic plates. Human perspective compresses and distorts the ‘deep-time’ cycles of plankton and mountain. Yet, human-time now forces planetary systems to spin to our arrhythmic patterns. As the UN Environmental Program notes, humanity is edging toward a ‘transformative collapse.’
Architecture and Culture
Jaime Stapleton - Splat! Legal Architectures, Generic Imagination, and the Industrial Limits of the Earth System
This paper will draw on material explored at greater length in the essay ‘The Global Commons: In Context’, which is part of We Lost Control Again: Political and Cultural Architectures in the Time of Heat and Extinction, Rikke Luther, Jaime Stapleton and Esther Leslie (Archive Books, Berlin, 2026). That essay recounts the tangled history of a concept forged in the turbulence of the cold war, which appeared irrelevant under globalisation, but is today firmly back in the sights of governments and multinational extraction industries.
The full essay examines the origins of the concept of ‘a commons’, tracking a contextual history that moves from its emergence in England in the 11th century, to variant adaptions in later Britain’s American colony, before moving into today’s digitally augmented environment. Historical and cross-disciplinary analysis explores inherent problems in the concept and the twisted relationships it has created between nationalistic myths of origin, common law legal traditions, Catholic and Protestant religious beliefs, socialised theories of private property, and the development of today’s digital-technological oligarchy.
Stapleton asks whether this conceptual architecture - a residue of Britain’s empire and America’s 20th century political supremacy - can, and should, remain operational, given the frantic speed of human-led global heating and mass extinctions. He concludes the rapid changes the world is now experiencing are turning The Global Commons into a spectacularly dangerous method for framing the deep complexities of the Earth’s system and human societies.
Stina Teilmann-Lock – From Pylons to Nano Banana: Plagiarism in Architecture
This presentation examines plagiarism in architecture and considers how the increasing use of AI-models may come to reshape traditional notions of architectural plagiarism. We begin by discussing key issues that typically arise in allegations of plagiarism concerning architectural works, including both copyright-related questions and broader non-legal reasonings and assumptions about authorship, originality and creative expression. Against this background we explore the extent to which the concept of plagiarism can be meaningfully applied to AI-assisted architectural works.
Guilherme Vasconcelos Vilaça – The House as Vision and Site of Justice
In this talk, I explore the idea of justice as a house, a spatialized vision of justice defined by its materiality, that emerges as an aesthetic and affective experience channelled by the film form properties of the movies “Shoplifters” (Kore-eda) and "The House That Jack Built” (von Trier). A core goal is to highlight ways in which architecture and culture can be shown to be essential for law’s worldmaking powers thus helping us to (re)imagine law, justice, and community.