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Hester’s research has fostered new approaches across two spheres – policy debate and creative practice. Her research has stimulated and informed discussions regarding public policy via her contributions to a series of UK think tanks, as well as to the international organisations UNESCO and Fundación Saber Futuro. It has also produced successful collaborations with arts venues and inspired innovative artistic activities internationally.

Public policy debates: Since 2015, Hester has particularly influenced the approaches of four public policy think tanks in the UK and, latterly, UNESCO and Fundación Saber Futuro. In all cases, her contributions involve foregrounding issues of gender in discussions about emerging technologies and the future of work, thereby ensuring that these three key areas are considered not as isolated phenomena, but as interdependent concepts. As one former Senior Researcher (now Director of his own think tank) puts it, ‘Think tanks are strange intermediary institutions in many ways, acting to interpret, translate and transform research from academic sources among others into public policy. In that, Helen’s work has been exemplary – incisive, always providing new ways of thinking through questions of work, justice and power, while communicated in a way non-specialists can digest and draw upon – and has been both hugely valuable and impactful’ [S1].

In 2018, Hester joined the Board of Advisors for Autonomy (a progressive think tank concentrating on the current crisis of work) and has since been involved in several projects relating to her research. She directly contributed to a major report on working time reduction, ‘The Shorter Working Week: A Radical and Pragmatic Proposal’ (2019). The report received widespread media coverage, as well as endorsements from trade unions, economists, and major political figures such as Clive Lewis MP and Katja Kipping, co-leader of Germany’s Die Linke party. Kipping declared that the report is ‘’. a radical proposal and it is necessary. The special focus on the question of gender equality and the double burden of women is one of its key points’ [S2]. The report had a significant impact on debates about working time in the UK; it was referenced in the 2019 report ‘How to Achieve Shorter Working Hours’ by Lord Robert Skidelsky [S3], commissioned by the Labour Party. Shortly after the publication of S3, the four-day working week became Labour party policy. The announcement of a move towards a 32-hour week over the course of a decade – included within the Labour Party Manifesto 2019 (p.62, Working Time) – followed the proposals laid out in Autonomy’s report exactly. This went against the advice offered by Lord Skidelsky, suggesting a strong preference for Autonomy’s recommendations. Indeed, the then-Shadow Chancellor, John McDonnell, called the report ‘a vital contribution’ to the debate. [S2]

Hester also served on the advisory board for one of Autonomy’s specific projects – a 2020 report on the future of work in the Valencian community, which proposed a working time reduction strategy for the region. The regional government commissioned the research as part of its planned ‘futureproofing’ of the labour market, and the Regional Secretary for Employment stated that Autonomy’s suggestions would ‘. inspire our coming action plan’ for work in the community. Eight months after the report came out, the regional government allocated €4 million to support companies seeking to implement a four-day week without loss in pay for workers. At the time of writing, the Spanish treasury is also debating subsidising a four-day week, in a move that has been attributed to the influence of developments in Valencia. [S2]

Autonomy’s Valencian report also considered care infrastructure in the region, and Hester’s research was central here. The Director of Autonomy said: ‘We have a number of foci, including unemployment support, working time, education and work, and gender and work. Regarding the latter in particular, Helen’s work has been foundational – particularly her work on gender infrastructure, the politics of time and automation’. Hester’s contribution to the project included collaboration with architects on proposals for long term care centres, intended to respond to the needs of an ageing population while also improving the lives of care workers (paid and unpaid). The resulting designs were included in the report, which received coverage in both the Spanish press (including in Levante, the region’s most widely read newspaper) and the British media (including in the Independent and Daily Mail). [S2]

The Institute of Public Policy Research (IPPR; a think tank with interests including public services, economic justice, and technoscience) twice commissioned Hester to write about feminist perspectives on care work for their journal Progressive Review and drew upon her research in the field of gender, technology, and work while developing a series of proposals around automation. IPPR’s Commission on Economic Justice discussion paper ‘Managing Automation: Employment, Inequality, and Ethics in the Digital Age’ (2017) included an acknowledgement of Hester’s contribution [S1]. The paper’s lead author described her work as ‘hugely helpful in informing’ the paper, ‘particularly relating to the politics of working time, ensuring policies sought to embed justice into social reproduction as a fundamental element of a just economy, and a more critical approach to the nature, direction and use of technologies and technical systems’ [S1]. The paper generated widespread coverage from outlets such as the BBC, the Financial Times, and the Telegraph, with much of the reporting concentrating on IPPR’s call for government oversight of automation to help prevent increasing inequality and a widening gender pay gap. The paper’s analysis and arguments underpinned the Commission’s final report, ‘Prosperity and Justice: A Plan for the New Economy’ (2018), which formed the basis of discussions with Labour and the Liberal Democrat’s economic teams [S1]. John McDonnell compared it to the Beveridge Report, arguing it ‘deserved to have the same impact’ [S4].

The New Economics Foundation (NEF). This think tank promoting social, economic and environmental justice, whose activities include campaigns for universal basic services and a shorter working week, consulted Hester while developing proposals for new forms of public control of cultural and social resources. She commented on a draft working paper and then participated in a closed roundtable in December 2016. Her contributions were among those integrated into the resulting 2017 report, ‘Building a New Social Commons: The People, the Commons, and the Public Realm’. The Head of Work and Pay at NEF has confirmed that Hester’s ‘work has been a source of inspiration for NEF’s thinking over a number of years. In particular, we have sought Helen's input into our treatment of themes of care work and reproductive labour. NEF’s developing "universal basic services" policy agenda has put social care and childcare work at its core and as such we've found Helen's careful thinking about the role of technology in relation to the care economy particularly useful’ [S5].

Hester’s work has also had an influence upon the activities of Doteveryone (a think tank which seeks to explore how technology is changing society). The interim CEO – commenting on Hester’s participation in the discovery project ‘Inclusive Futures’, which addressed how imaginative approaches to the future might offer a starting point for rethinking technologies today – noted that her contribution (which drew upon the research underpinning R1, R2 and R3) was ‘very valuable, and led to the development of a significant programme of work’. The project resulted in the 2017 white paper ‘Space invaders: Reclaiming the future through rebellious stories and diverse voices’, commissioned by the innovation fund Nesta. This paper draws directly upon Hester’s words (attributed to ‘roundtable participant’) and includes her in its thanks and acknowledgements [S6]. Its publication resulted in funding for a follow-up project, which sought to foster the participation of women and girls in the STEM industries. In 2018, Doteveryone sought Hester’s views on the topic of care, AI, and automation as part of its ‘Better Care Systems’ project. This project resulted in a report entitled ‘Better Care in the Age of Automation’ (2019), which generated considerable interest from specialist trade publications for the home care industry. [S6]

More recently, Hester’s research (including R1) has been cited in the UNESCO report ‘Steering AI and Advanced ICTs for Knowledge Societies’ (2019), which advocates for a human rights centred, open, accessible, multi-stakeholder approach to the development of artificial intelligence. The report identifies gender as a cross-cutting issue in relation to AI, and it is in this context that Hester’s research on technology and reproductive labour is repeatedly cited. Her work is used in discussions about the gendering of workplace technologies and the automation of secretarial and emotional labour, as well as in support of claims about the exploitation and perpetuation of cultural ideas about gender and work in the design of digital voice assistants. In August 2019, Hester was invited to sit on the report’s review board. One of the report’s authors commented that her feedback ‘helped us to understand diverse feminist perspectives on technology, especially tech-positive cyberfeminism’, and noted that her ‘contribution to our chapter on Gender was invaluable and we made major changes to [a key section] as a result’. [S7]

Hester’s work has also recently proved influential for the newly formed Chilean think tank Fundación Saber Futuro, which aims to explore technology and the governance of knowledge from a Global South perspective. In extending an invitation to collaborate with the Foundation, the Executive Director wrote ‘…your work, in general, was significant […] for the ideas that encourage the creation of the Foundation. Here your book Xenofeminism, that was translated and published by the Argentinian publishing house Caja Negra, had a great impact, which is very important for us because it includes thoughts and ideas that, at least in Chile, are still far from the public discussion’. [S8]

Creative practice: Hester’s research on technology and gender politics has had a substantial impact upon programmes organised by arts and cultural institutions – most notably, the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) and Science Gallery London (SGL). Hester has been invited to collaborate with the ICA on the programming of public events related to her research on an ongoing basis since 2015. The Curator of ICA’s Talks and Live performance programme stated that ‘Hester’s work has built around it a community of committed artists, writers and activists, and not only has our continued collaboration born fruitful discussions and new conversations, but it has developed a new community of thinkers here at the ICA’ [S9].

In 2017, Hester worked directly alongside the ICA’s in-house team to programme the ‘Post-Cyber Feminist International’ – a 5-day series of workshops, performances, and discussions, building from ideas first outlined in R5 (the text in which the term ‘post-cyber feminism’ was coined). This event, in which participants explored the ways in which feminist and queer practices might shape the future of technologies, reached a total audience of 1,349, and generated substantial media coverage, including positive review articles in The Guardian and Frieze (which praised the series for ‘raising urgent questions’) [S9]. In the wake of the event, the art market website artnet called post-cyber feminism that ‘latest big idea to storm contemporary art’ [S9]. The curator from the ICA noted that the idea of post-cyber feminism has had a continued impact upon the agenda of arts institutions internationally, including inspiring a 2019 exhibition in Zurich [S9].

Hester’s impact upon cultural institutions has been extended through her recent work with SGL, which hosted the season ‘GENDERS: Shaping and Breaking the Binary’ in the spring of 2020. The season consisted of an exhibition and a public programme, which brought together scientific researchers, students, local communities, artists and theorists. When inviting Hester to act as Researcher in Residence for the programme, the season’s curator wrote that ‘ Xenofeminism (2018) has been influential upon the development of my curatorial research for the gender season. This text and the conversations we have had thus far represent an impactful discourse for the overall direction of the season’ [S10]. R6 was central to the original conceptualization of the exhibition, with key passages of the book being referenced in the curator’s initial proposal to SGL.

Hester actively contributed to the season via participation in a collective project exploring issues of gender, technology, and work in inclusive approaches to reproductive healthcare. She led a series of workshops addressing labour in relation to hormonal ‘transition periods’ such as menopause, puberty, pregnancy, and gender transition, and worked with an interdisciplinary team to design a prototype “cultural probe kit”. This kit was a collection of creative tasks, made available for visitors to interact with, which encouraged new kinds of reflection on and engagement with the theme of gender and reproductive transition. A free drop-in session took place on March 8 and formed a ‘cornerstone of the International Women’s Day programme’ at the gallery [S10]. The curator described the workshop as doing ‘a fantastic job of communicating incredibly complex and personal talking points in a manner that was accessible and interesting to our audiences’ [S10], and reported seeing members of the public participating in the drop-in session for up to an hour at a time.

In addition to influencing the work of cultural industries professionals within institutions, Hester’s research has also had a demonstrable impact upon individual creative practitioners. Her research has inspired and supported the work of artists across various media, several of whom explicitly reference Hester’s work in paratextual materials. These artists include:

• Laura Yuile, a multidisciplinary, installation-based, and performance artist who has exhibited internationally. Yuile’s 2019 durational performance piece ‘Once You Care, You’re Future’ (performed in New Hunt’s House, London, in March 2019) is directly inspired by the theories of reproductive labour advanced in R6. In her initial proposal for the work, Yuile cites the book directly and has said that Hester’s work has been ‘very informative in my thinking towards this performance’ [S11].

• The duo Alla Poppersoni and Alexander Sahm (who collaborate together under the name BBB_) titled their May 2017 performance piece ‘I’d rather be an iPhone than a woman’ – a direct quote from R1. This was also the title of BBB’s recent album. The pair reference Hester in statements, interviews, and paratextual materials [S12].

• R1 also provides the title of a work by the Swedish artist, Arvida Byström. Byström has claimed that her 2018 piece ‘You’d rather be an iPhone than a woman’ is ‘very specifically named after a quote from [Hester’s] text “Technically Female: Women, Machines and Hyperemployment”’. The caption to a reproduction of the image on her Instagram outlines some of the article’s ideas about gender, technology, and work [S11].

• Hester’s research has also informed the practice of pioneering new media artist Shu Lea Cheang who is currently engaged in a long-term residency at Hôtel-Dieu Hospital in Paris. The resulting project, ‘UNBORN 0X9’, is a performance questioning the cyborg future of parenting. The co-producer of the project, Ewen Chardronnet, said that Hester's work in R6 was particularly ‘influential in terms of the development of the project and was one of several key conceptual and theoretical reference points’ [S11].

• The artist Benjamin Efrati views his work ‘Xenoxenism’ as – to quote the project’s website – ‘an extrapolation of xenofeminism’. The project began in 2015, and has resulted in performances, illustrations, a digital album, and a multimedia installation which premiered as part of the 2017 Nuit Blanche festival in Paris. The installation included an animated short, featuring a fictionalized version of Hester alongside various influential feminists from history, with dialogue voiced by an actor [S12].

Caston’s research has fostered new approaches in policy debates, industry creative practice, archival preservation, education, and public engagement with music video, as a result of partnership work with the BFI, the BPI, British Council, and the GRAMMY Museum.

PUBLIC POLICY: Caston’s research has led to a comprehensive change at the BFI, deemed by Royal Charter the organisation responsible for the conservation of British moving image and the formulation and implementation of moving image policy, funding and training. Prior to 2015, the BFI’s work excluded music video, regarding it as an element of the music industry, based on a misunderstanding that music video was part of the advertising and music industries, as the former Head of Research at the BFI has testified [S1]. Given that music video was also excluded from the archival, policy and training activities of the British Phonograph Industry, music video heritage was neither being conserved nor the interests of its industry members represented within the music industry (BPI) or film industry (BFI). The Creative Director of the BFI states that as a result of Caston’s work the BFI now recognises music video as a significant sector of the screen industries and says that music video is now taken into account in policy discussions and decisions about the strategic development of the screen industries in Britain. [S2] It was recognised when, in 2017, Caston, was asked to contribute to the BFI’s Film Policy and Education Roundtable consultation for the BFI’s next five-year strategy - Film Forever 2. Data from her research [R2, R3 and R6] was imported into the BFI’s career tracker database which informs education and training policy (launched officially in 2018).

PUBLIC APPRECIATION & ENGAGEMENT: Caston’s research has created greater access to music video for new audiences and has offered curators a revised paradigm through which to exhibit the work – as shown by her public presentations for Sky, TRT, BFI Southbank, the SoundTrack_Cologne Festival, and the FRAME Dance Festival as well as her public engagements for the DVD [S3]. By the end of 2020, 1,312 copies of the boxset had been purchased on Amazon with an average score of 4.7 out of 5 stars across 90 global ratings and positive reviews by members of the public (S4). Press reviews showed that the box set had been successful in changing people’s mind about the negative gender stereotyping of British music video, partly as a result of the juxtaposition by Caston of videos representing masculinity and femininity. The reviewer for Cubed wrote, “seeing Girls Aloud's Sexy! No No No… framed as a portrait of femininity rather than just a late-noughties girl band video is just one example of how the collection breathes new life into certain long-forgotten releases”. The innovative role of Annie Lennox’s representation of gender was re-examined by Caston for Sky Arts TV series Video Killed the Radio Star in 2018 (audience 25,000 UK only), and the role of The Spice Girls in bringing feminism into popular culture was examined in the same series Sky Arts series later that year (audience 25,000 UK only), paving the way for a revised public appreciation of the contribution of music videos to popular culture. Caston was also invited by Turkish international channel TRT to re-consider the impact of the videos of Janet and Michael Jackson on Black representation in film in 2018. In 2019, she was asked to present Steve Barron’s work to an audience at the BFI Southbank to reconsider his influence as a filmmaker on subsequent Hollywood narrative film.

As a result of screen and panel discussion at the FRAME dance film panel, Caston’s research has also impacted the contemporary dance world. Xxxxxx Xxxxxxxx XXX (choreographer, director, TV presenter) called Caston’s curated dance collection an ‘.amazing catalogue of videos that changes the way we think about dance. Truly fantastic”. The CEO of Sadler’s Wells invited Caston to a discussion of future collaborations with resident choreographers for their third digital space. In August 2018, Caston gave a screening entitled ‘Political Radicalism in British Music Videos’ at the SoundTrack_Cologne Festival in Germany, 22^nd-25^th August 2018 to an audience of 168 journalists, filmmakers and members of the public. The Festival is Europe's leading specialist congress for music and sound in film, games and the media, attended annually by 2,000 plus professionals. The theme of political radicalism was picked up by journalist John Nicolson who interviewed Caston for his Talk Radio show 4/10/2020 regarding videos included on the DVD that the BBC had banned.

The continuation of this public engagement for future generations of the British public is ensured because there is now a national strategy for the collection and conservation of music video as British moving image heritage on which curators and cinemas can draw for public events. Before 2015, much of this heritage was at risk and lost, only partially available on YouTube. None of the publicly funded charitable organisations charged with ‘preserving the nation’s moving image archives’ held catalogued digital collections for public, research or educational access. Now, following Caston’s research, the BFI has an active collecting policy in music video.

In 2018, following their involvement in Caston’s research project, two major British film directors Xxxxx Xxxxxxx and Xxxxx Xxxxxx donated their entire private film collections to the archive. Both donations enabled public engagement events at the BFI Southbank. In 2018 Caston located not only a 35mm but also an original 16mm print of the missing film print of the 1968 Manfred Mann ‘Mighty Quinn’ video, an important landmark in promo editing history. Caston’s AHRC research grant paid to have the 16mm print (the 35mm disintegrated when removed from the can) digitised and colour restored by the UK’s leading colourist with the original film director Xxxx Xxxxx (xx xxx xxx) attending. The original 16mm of Flowered Up’s 1992 ‘Weekender’, a landmark example of a promo / narrative short film was located in the director’s attic and a full digital restoration undertaken with Caston’s research funding.

During lockdown a special BFI promotion of the DVD boxset was run with 120 sold to their members who were unable to visit the closed cinemas at the BFI Southbank for archival screenings. Information about the videos will be publicly accessible from the BFI’s Collections Information Database along with a short history of the British Music Video industry on the BFI’s website by Caston.

The British Library also now has a substantial digital video collection. In 2018, the entire digital music video archive of Warp Records, one of the most influential and prolific producers of innovative music videos through the 1990s and 2000s, was given to the BL as part of a formal donation agreement facilitated by Caston to complement the BL’s audio archive of Warp Records. Furthermore, where previously there had been no ‘template’ in the software databases of the BFI and BL for the multiple authorship of music videos as collaborative audio-visual works combining integrated IP entities (tracks authored by musicians and films authored by writer/ directors), there is now a new template shared by both the BFI and BL, designed by Caston in a consultation with the database managers.

EDUCATION & TRAINING: Since the mid-2000s, Caston’s influence on education and training in the UK screen industries has been delivered through her role as Governor of Film London, the capital’s strategic publicly funded agency for screen. Previously teachers lacked a resource that enabled them to teach music video historically. Caston’s research has resulted in changes to school education through her collaboration with the English and Media Centre, an independent educational charity serving the needs of secondary and FE teachers and students studying music videos for the GCSE and A-Level Media Studies curricula. The Media PGCE Course Leader at Goldsmiths and editor of Media Magazine says, “Not only has my knowledge of the industry improved but also my teaching of the industry units in media and the choice of videos I use has been impacted by Caston and her DVD collection which I use in my teaching” [on the PGCE]. Emily Caston’s expertise and research has had a significant impact on the work we do with Film and Media Studies students completing A level and vocational courses in schools and colleges across the UK”. Caston’s contributions include two talks at the Media Magazine Conference (attended by 400 students & teachers) and writing for the magazine. During the first pandemic lockdown in 2020, Caston’s digital research and DVD were used as a teaching resource (called Leap into Media) for A-Level students unable to attend school. With over 515 institutional digital subscriptions and a circulation of over 800 hard copies, the magazine has considerable reach. [S5] To support the Leap into Media lockdown initiative, Caston secured a discount for all secondary school students to purchase the DVD at the price of £5 (a reduction from £30).

INDUSTRY & ECONOMICS: Throughout the period from 2017 to 2020 there has been high industry engagement as a result of Caston’s influence from her prior industry career as an executive producer (1993-2003) and a founding member of the Music Video Producer’s Association. There were 85 industry practitioners (directors, producers, commissioners and editors) who served as research consultants; the three industry-wide consultations events attracted a total of 373 attendees; a further 198 participated in online research (through the project Facebook page), and 28 participated in focus groups. As a result of their involvement, filmmakers report having become more innovative and challenging in their work. An award-winning director writes that, “.the project has encouraged me to look for opportunities” to use the greater creative freedom offered in music videos than other screen media to explore “.current cultural themes” and “.to be more radical in our representations of gender and ethnicity”. [S6] Editors at the Ibiza International Music Video Festival, the leading international event for the music video industry, at which Caston presented screenings in 2017, 2018 and 2019, talked of pushing their editing styles further and beyond conventional generic expectations as a result of seeing some of the neglected experimental work of the 1960s and 1970s. [S7] More industry practitioners are now voluntarily conserving their work for future audiences. Freelance directors and producers are not only keeping active archives of their work in a way they had not done previously, but also in some cases paying to have their work digitally mastered and upgraded to new formats for archival conservation. [S6] From 1966 to 2016 it was the norm for production companies to destroy their paper business archive on dissolution; following their involvement in our project, several companies have embarked on a process of conserving their data and work on solid-state drive archives for future access.

Several women creatives have come forward to claim authorship of works previously attributed to men in production cultures often steeped in patriarchal and masculine ideologies of authorship. Xxxx Xxxx instated her right to be credited as director of two of the videos in the national collection which were previously attributed in authorship to male directors, and this historic correction has now been made in the national archives. Xxxxxxx Xxxxxx, a pioneering female founder of the one of the leading 1980s companies, having been uncredited as a producer at that time, has had her name re-instated in the credits. Xxxxxx has said that there was a pressure at the time for women to be ‘invisible’. The credits for the landmark collection contain these revisions and were published in R2 and reprinted in R3.

One of the most significant shifts in industry practice occurred in the recording industry’s copyright exploitation and moral rights policy. For fifty years, the music video industry had acted to suppress the identity of the filmmakers responsible for making music videos, in favour of advancing the notion of artist musicians’ as the authors of music videos. This was embedded in legal contracts with filmmakers which denied them the legal right of attribution to their work and to any and all moral rights in the videos, despite the fact that almost all of the original video scripts (treatments) were generated by the directors rather than the musicians. In Britain from 1981 to the early 2000s, this was entrenched further by MTV’s decision in the UK not to credit directors (a different policy to the USA). As a result of these contracts, music video directors and producers have no moral rights to any of their works, have no right to release their videos, and earn no royalties from the commercial exploitation of the videos (e.g., on sales of DVDs and CDS). For the release of the DVD Boxset and as a result of an arrangement Caston secured with the Chair of the BPI, all of the British record labels (with one exception) agreed to reverse this policy and waive the royalties due to them and their artists from commercial sales in order that the boxset could be set at a RRP affordable by students and libraries. The record labels also agreed to undertake all the legal work necessary for these arrangements (individual contracts with each of their recording artists) without payment on a pro bono basis. The eventual DVD, containing newly digitised and mastered works, was promoted by the BPI on their website and marketing materials.

International industry impacts were also seen. In 2019, the GRAMMY Museum in Los Angeles decided that British music video should form part of the exhibited history of music video. After taking a digital donation of the British landmark videos, the museum signed a partnership agreement with Caston at UWL to further public engagement in the USA with British music videos since the 1960s. In 2018, following an official reception for Caston’s research team at the British Embassy, (R6, S8), a workshop to mark 40 years of British Council work in Cuba and a talk at the Havana International Film School attended by 120 students from over 40 countries, Cuban practitioners said they would henceforth produce more theoretically critical music videos. At the core of Caston’s work in Cuba was a series of workshops at the Danze Contemporanea de Cuba with a young female Cuban director, recent graduates of the dance school, and Cuban rap artist Telmary. Mentored by Caston and British director WIZ, the Cuban team experimented with the choreographic and cinematographic techniques of British dance videos identified in R4, to create a new music video.