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Inês de Castro on Youtube: Re-Gendered Narratives
No full textSince the fourteenth century, when Inês de Castro was laid to rest in her magnificent tomb in the Monastery of Alcobaça, artists have told the tragic story of the Galician noblewoman who was assassinated for political reasons and became Queen of Portugal after her death. Inês embodies beauty, love, innocence, and saudade, and figures prominently in the lusophone cultural imaginary. Plays, novels, poetry and feature films offer representations of the Dead Queen that range from tragic and defiant to sentimental and trite. In new media, the moving im- ages that currently vie with iconic figurations of the legendary colo de garça are YouTube videos about the love of Inês and Pedro. Responding to homework assignments in Portuguese history or literature courses, primary and secondary school students engage with the love story and create new narratives – plays, animation, and videos – that attract thousands of viewers. In this paper, I consider a selection of YouTube videos made by Portuguese and Brazilian students that tell the familiar love story in a unique way, taking varying degrees of poetic license with their sources, the medieval period and the medieval woman. Some are original and irreverent while others simply glorify dead poets. Through a feminist lens, I analyze the mediated embodiment of Inês de Castro and interrogate the inflexible and hierarchical binary dualisms of man/woman, masculine/feminine, and public/private to posit a fluid conception of historical adaptation and the gendered representation of iconic figures.
Image Credit: Still of Encenação D. Pedro e D. Inê
Crowdsourcing Documentary Making: Social Protest, Social Media, and Engagement
No full textThe creative commons documentary Preempting Dissent (2014) builds upon the book of the same name written by Greg Elmer and Andy Opel. The film is a culmination of a collaborative process of soliciting, collecting and editing video, still images, and creative commons music files from people around the world. Preempting Dissent interrogates the expansion of the so-called “Miami-Model” of protest policing, a set of strategies developed in the wake of 9/11 to preempt forms of mass protest at major events in the US and worldwide. The film tracks the development of the Miami model after the WTO protests in Seattle 1999, through the post-9/11 years, FTAA & G8/20 summits, and most recently the Occupy Wall St movements. The film exposes the political, social, and economic roots of preemptive forms of protest policing and their manifestations in spatial tactics, the deployment of so-called ‘less-lethal’ weapons, and surveillance regimes. The film notes however that new social movements have themselves begun to adopt preemptive tactics so as not to fall into the trap set for them by police agencies worldwide
Engaging in a newspaper cartoon thematic analysis to understand the socioeconomic, health, political, and environmental impact of COVID-19 in Sri Lanka
No full textIntroduction: Newspaper cartoons are viewed as an effective means of communicating important social concerns.
Method:An exploratory content analysis of newspaper cartoons was done during the COVID-19 outbreak in Sri Lanka . Cartoons from eight daily online newspapers published from 15th of March to 15th of April 2020 were included. “corona”, “COVID-19”, or “Sri Lanka” were used as keywords. Thematic analysis was used to identify the different perspectives of cartoons.
Results: Background of COVID-19 pandemic, health, social, economic, political, and environmental aspects emerged within a sample of 87 cartoons. Thirteen common themes were identified as COVID-19 as a pandemic, COVID-19 has become a crisis for Sri Lanka, prevention is the priority, knowledge deficit leads to breaking health advice, efforts to control virus outbreak, shifting socio-cultural practices, effects of lockdown, rich man’s virus – poor suffer the most bringing the global economy to its knee, coronavirus is driving the black market for essential stuff, seeking strategies to hold the election, applying health precautions in election activities and other political involvements.
Conclusion: Cartoons were effectively used to give broad health and other messages to the public during the COVID-19 outbreak in Sri Lanka. Newspaper cartoons can be used as an effective mode of disseminating information during a crisis
Older Syrian Refugees’ Experiences of Language Barriers in Postmigration and (re)settlement Context in Canada.
No full textThis research explores older Syrian experiences of language barriers in Canada\u27s post-migration and resettlement context. Guided by the ecosystemic model, the qualitative descriptive method was used to describe the experiences of six older adults (three women and three men, 55-year-old and over) living in the Greater Toronto-Hamilton Area. Results suggest the lack of English proficiency affects refugees\u27 resettlement and, in particular, older adults at risk of abuse. Language barriers influence older adult refugees because it limits their ability to navigate the Canadian systems, exacerbate their dependency on adult children, increase social isolation, and decrease employment and income opportunities. Participants\u27 commitment to learning English comes from their conviction that fluency has an essential role in shaping their experiences in Canada. Conclusions can help policymakers identify specific interventions to address language barriers among older adult Refugees
Proposed Methodology for Transmedia New Story Analysis: A Comparative Study of The Float Project (2009/10), in Brazil and The Great British Property Scandal: Every Empty Counts (2012) in the UK
No full textThe study of transmedia in journalism is still evolving. Although news organizations around the world have been spreading stories through different and complementary platforms and screens, this does not necessarily constitute the use of transmedia concepts. Usually, the same story is simply distributed across multiple screens. Transmedia news reporting, in our view, would involve the expansion of content and engagement of the audience, instead of repetition and propagation. This article studies examples of possible applications of the transmedia concept to the news report, by examining The Float Project (Flutuador), in Brazil and comparing it to a potential model of engagement, The Great British Property Scandal: Every Empty Counts (2012) in the UK. The theoretical framework is provided by Henry Jenkins (2006), Carlos Scolari (2009), Kevin Moloney (2011), Renira Gambaratto (2013) Alzamora and Tárcia (2012) and proposes an evolving analytical model as a methodology for understanding transmedia applied to news features. The study points to major investments in building potential transmedia news reports by Globo Networks and suggests the necessary involvement of other departments and institutions to achieve full engagement and social relevance, as occurred in the UK project
Off the Wall with Shchedryk
No full textThis paper examines how music and juxtapositions can ground a story in a longer history where the potential of images and cutting points become a dialectics of point, counter-point, and fusion in a revisitation of archetypal images and as a co-authorship of reception. A visual dialogue evolves in the film Shchedryk (2014) through a remediation of scenes from Sergei Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin (1925), Alexander Dovzhenko‘s Earth (1930) and Norman McLaren’s experimental film Synchromy (1971). People who do not have recourse to the dominant culture are through recipient-co-authorship able to replay things in more sophisticated ways. Judith Butler’s idea of the performative and of subjects re-performing an injury (Butler 1993) can be introduced to the multi-screen experience. Foregrounding the wounding aspect as visual images is about ‘bad pleasure’ (O’Brien & Julien 2005). If realness is a standard by which we judge any performance, what makes it effective is its ability to compel beliefs and embody and reiterate norms (Butler, 387).
Image Credit: Frame from Shechedryk, directed by Kalli Paakspu
