In the 1970s, companies from Western Europe initiated a series of complex moves towards the reterritorialisation of their production chains. These moves involved ample mobilities of capital, transfers of technology, and a wide range of managerial practices for the reorganization and flexibilization of labour. While there is a rich literature documenting how the Global South has been historically constituted as a reservoir of natural resources and cheap labour in-between the twin logics of empire and capital, the move towards socialist East-Central Europe has received less empirical attention and has definitely remained undertheorised. My project tackles this issue through an analysis of the incorporation of the Romanian car industry in global commodity chains between the late 1960s and 2017, with a further focus on an automobile factory located in the Southern part of Romania, in the city of Craiova. I build on this case to investigate the global changes in production politics that marked the period between the late socialist decades into the present, and their impact on the Romanian workers’ generational experiences. The project brings its contribution to current scholarly efforts to better understand the advance of flexible capitalism in peripheral and semi-peripheral regions of the world, as well as its capacity to create new “economies of impermanence”, which directly shaped biographical structures of possibilities for several generations of employees. To achieve this goal, my research follows a less travelled path: instead of reifying “socialism” and “capitalism” as separate economic systems, I analyse the transformation of the Romanian factories into an extended workbench for Western European companies as an encounter between the logic of socialist accumulation and the crisis-led “spatial fixes” materialized globally since the 1970s. A deeper knowledge of their entanglements is crucial for understanding the past, present, and future of global production.

The goal of IMSquared (IM2) is to develop and validate a repository of immersive metaphoric experiences (IMMEs) aimed at restoring physical and emotional wellness in tandem and to provide a brain-body-media computer interface (BBMCI) and toolkit that facilitates visual-gestural interaction, neural-behavioral analysis, generation and optimization of IMMEs with implications for physical therapy (neurorehabilitation) and commercial therapeutic applications. The development and validation of IMMEs will draw on state-of-the-art research across cognitive science/AI, cognitive neuroscience, and computational linguistics looking at the embodiment, neural coding, and the psychological reality of various conceptual metaphors relating to wellness and health. According to conceptual metaphor theory, abstract concepts are structured through cross-domain mappings with more concrete domains due to co-occurrences between these concepts during development. For example, our experience with upward motion becomes associated with well-being (e.g., getting up in the morning), while downward motion becomes associated with ill-being (e.g., lying down when sick), leading us to conceptualize good and bad things in terms of verticality (e.g., “lifting her spirits”, “feeling down”). Growing behavioral evidence suggests that much of thought may be metaphorical in nature and that the relevant physical experience can have consequences for emotion and behavior, yet the systematic investigation of conceptual mappings and their embodiment within HCI, particularly involving media-gestural interfaces, in wellness research is lacking. In summary, IM2 paves the way for more neurocognitively-inspired HCI-wellness research influenced by our understanding of minds, brains, machines, and our new abilities to interact with virtual semantic content, transforming our approach to addressing wellness and health during recovery.