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This article charts the development of a collaboration between poet Dr Caitlin Stobie and scientist Dr Paul Beales, resulting from their partnership in the Leeds Creative Labs: Bragg Edition. The authors show their motivations for working together and the philosophical conversations that developed as they discussed artificial life, synthetic matter, and shared terms from the humanities and sciences. Initial plans for the project were challenged and delayed in 2020; the authors discuss how they adapted to digital collaboration and secured follow-on funding for further outputs, mapping new possibilities for public engagement with materials sciences during the COVID-19 pandemic. In particular, Stobie and Beales consider the layering of biophysical research images with experimental poems which aim to convey complex yet complementary concepts from philosophy, without distorting the underlying scientific data. Leeds Creative Labs is a collaborative arts program that brings researchers from the University of Leeds together with creative professionals to encourage interdisciplinary play. Participants are paired together based on shared interests and asked to explore their ideas together without a specific brief. Unusually for a funded opportunity, there is no expectation for these collaborations to produce an output. The edition of the Creative Labs that saw Caitlin and Paul paired together focused on creative partnerships with scientists from the University’s Bragg Center for Materials Research. The Bragg Center combines fundamental and applied research with the aim to discover, design and create new materials. An interesting feature of this collaboration was the combination of visual representations of research from materials science and the oral/aural nature of experimental poetry: a dichotomy that has proven advantageous on multiple fronts.

Waves and water, the lens of a lighthouse, a lady’s looking-glass: reflecting surfaces abound in the writings of Virginia Woolf. These figurations, in turn, are repeated as a formative image, a reflective motif, in the theory of Rosi Braidotti. This article explores the material implications of both authors’ mirrors, arguing that they distort repronormative depictions of women as maternal figures. Particularly, I view the autopoietic theorization of desire in Braidotti’s oeuvre through the lens of Woolf’s major fiction and non-fiction from 1927 to 1941. With references to works including A Room of One’s Own (1929) and Three Guineas (1938), and particularly Between the Acts (1941), I argue that Woolf’s monstrous images inform Braidotti’s own writing, especially her 2002 monograph Metamorphoses: Towards a Materialist Theory of Becoming. Yet it is vital to stress that these feminist-materialist echoes exceed binarized understandings of reflections. Alternating between reverence for motherhood, suspicion of procreation, and criticism of reproductive services/technologies, both writers suggest that women’s reproductive health cannot be neatly determined by one overarching narrative. They advance an emerging concept of reproductive agency where abortive desires are dangerous and dynamic, steeped both in histories of gestational violence and feminist potential.

Using original archival research from Amazwi South African Museum of Literature, this article examines representations of abortion in three novels by Bessie Head

Anyone familiar with feminist scholar Sara Ahmed’s work will know that an interest in gender studies is often associated with the dour face of the ‘killjoy’. As the less scholarly (but equally femi...