This panel seeds possibilities for the spectacularly rupturous age we find ourselves in. By introducing the idea of “rupturous,” we deliberately adjectivize the conference theme of “ruptures” to indicate its capacity for mischievous inventiveness and responsiveness. We aim to strengthen the ability of researchers to revisit assumptions, (re)learn to listen, and incorporate lived experience in our responsibilities as citizens in the worlds we inhabit. By asserting and exploring playful feminist approaches to understanding constantly-disrupted creative labour systems and cultural production processes, the several authors involved are able to engage in research work today that can have broad socio-cultural-political impact tomorrow. Rather than pining after rapturous and ultimately failed aspirations for equity and inclusion across global economies of values, ethics, and praxis in culture sectors as in other work spheres, the panel takes a stand on critical boundary-sitting, slipping and slopping in unruly ways. These research initiatives are about openings among and between disciplines, histories, and fields of practice. Panel members rethink and rework feminist methodological and epistemological trajectories and dynamics in a time when global politics seeks to overwhelm and undermine fairness and balance at every turn. Each of these four papers articulate how activism within research is increasingly critical and crucial, even while to do so becomes more dangerous and fraught.

The first paper reports on recent work in the creative industries and with graduate students in the academy to identify glittery slippages and wise ruptures as perplexing but also optimistic strategies for dealing with the advent of AI. It introduces ways in which individuals and organizations are exploring how to resist the totalizing and overwhelming effects of this particular technological shift. The authors land on the mobilization of artistic intelligence as one way to create openings for discussion and analysis of the challenges AI presents.

The second paper works towards the creation of the Slop Manifesto. This theoretical intervention builds on long histories of unruly feminist manifestos to unpack and think through three “gatewords” crucial to this Manifesto: access, play and productivity. By examining a series of media narratives and social media artifacts, the authors illuminate ways in which feminist media studies examinations of cultural labour lay groundwork for refusals and resistances to socially corrosive vernaculars in the genAI context.

The third paper in the panel focuses on the spectacular reworkings of historical portraits through the use of genAI softwares such as Deep Nostalgia, using a combination of coded critical discourse analysis and visual analyses to offer up an original approach to conduct digital humanities research with populist historical topics. The presentation concludes by walking us through an experiment conducted to test the ways in which genAI homogenises and flattens the racialized and gendered norms established in their training data. It will come as no surprise (but incorporates a remarkable breakdown of details) that the portraits that emerge fetishize whiteness and reinforce modern gender normativity.

The fourth paper brings us into another empirical investigation, this time of early-career game developers and their unruly strategies for resisting the subsumption of the professional’s individual needs and modes of being in service to genAI. Resistances to genAI among game developers range from small-scale artisanal products to union and collective strategies to challenge and contest capitalism. To imagine expansive futures for sustainable creative careers and work, these resistances enable developers to operate as interlopers in their own spaces of possibility.