An excellent book that explores the role that radio plays in empowering women in West Africa, and specifically in Mali, Niger and Burkina Faso. Taking into account gender inequalities and language barriers, this book argues that radio is a significant source of information in these contexts, and beyond that is vital in building communities and trust. Heywood approaches this work through looking at a range of factors including politics, women’s role in marriage, inheritance, and journalism. The book provides a very important intervention into the question of whose voices are heard, and the role that local and community media play across a range of platforms. This work shines a light on a topic that is largely unexplored in scholarship and on top of that is beautifully written.
Andrea Medrado (University of Westminster) and Isabella Rega (Bournemouth University)
This book provides an engaging and powerful argument for South-to-South connections between activists for overcoming global problems, such as state repression, social inequality and climate crises. Using a rich ethnographic approach, the book explores the transnational exchanges between activists and artivists in projects in Brazil and Kenya, demonstrating the empowerment that can be achieved through research-informed activism. By analysing the formation of networks of digital activism in Brazilian favelas, the authors identify key features and strategies for challenging social injustice. In Kenya, they show the importance of self-representation through artivism as a positive response to negative media coverage of ethnic conflicts. Through these impactful projects, the authors illustrate the transformative potential of engaging in dialogue across the Global South and the importance of empathy, mutuality for solidarity in the face of shared social challenges.
Iqra Shagufta Cheema (Graceland University, Iowa) and Stefanie Van de Peer (Queen Margaret University)
This is an important book that offers an in-depth analysis of the films of Palestinian film maker Annemarie Jacir, whose oeuvre explores the politics of space through experimental modes of film making. The authors provide a rich discussion of the place of Jacir’s work in Palestinian cinema – a cinema necessarily of exile and diaspora. They offer a powerful theorisation of the experiences and meanings of being displaced both outside of Palestine and inside the Palestinian territories, which are central themes in Jacir’s work. From the spatial limitations of Jacir’s ‘roadblock’ movies, where immobility caused by check points and uncrossable borders find expression in fragmented aesthetics, to Jacir’s experimentation with ‘heterotopia’ in films contrasting the hopelessness and inability to live fully in the refugee camp with individual and collective experiences of marginal but vital ‘third spaces’ of hope, the authors of this book offer a theoretically impressive and beautifully written study of the work of this celebrated film maker.
Julia Giese (Loughborough University), Diwas Bisht (Loughborough University) and Aswin Punathambekar (University of Pennsylvania)
This is a fascinating, well-researched and archive-based article which looks at the efforts which the BBC employed, under the auspices of the Immigrant Programmes Unit and the Immigrant Programme Advisory Committees, in developing programmes for Britain’s ‘immigrant’ audiences in a period of significant inward migration to the country, through a deep dive into the BBC’s Written Archives. As well as describing the various strategies which the BBC devised to produce content which would, allegedly, cater for immigrant audiences, the authors also identified the institutional racism which lay beneath such strategies, which perpetuated ideas of inter-ethnic tension, primarily between British Asian and African Caribbean communities, as well as privileging assimilationist narratives at the expense of recognising the importance of multiculturalism and cultural diversity.
Tingting Hu (Xi’an Jiaotong–Liverpool University, China), Liang Ge (King’s College London), Ziyao Chen (Wuhan University) and Xu Xia (Wuhan University)
Much of the work published on masculinities and queer communities is situated within Western paradigms so this article makes an important and timely intervention to that scholarship in its focus on the Chinese context and the ways in which various parts of the Chinese state apparatus (including the media, policy and ancillary institutions), critique and attempt to regulate and indeed constrain what the authors call ‘soft masculinities’ which include danmei, a genre of cultural production which focuses on relationships between men. Because of the paucity of research on the topic, there is an extended context-setting section before the article progresses to discuss the methodology and findings of the study, identifying both strategies of censure because of a perceived ‘crisis of masculinity’ but also the challenges being mounted by supporters and creators of danmei, especially on social media platforms.
This is a well-written and engaging article on a significantly under-researched topic, although menopause has recently been very much in the public eye because of the efforts of several high-profile women whose lives have been affected by the onset of menopause. The article draws on a relevant and meaningful set of contemporary literature focused around neoliberal feminism and celebrity culture, within which the empirical heart of the work is contextualised. The orientation of the research is largely to ask what menopause does not look like, suggesting that its ‘face’ is overly focused around HRT, where women’s health is monetised and commodified, as well as highlighting the struggles women face when attempting to narrate their own experiences if they lie outside a white and/or middle-class space. The article makes a meaningful contribution to feminist media and celebrity studies in its original focus and call for a more nuanced intersectional understanding of menopause.
Alix Beeston (Cardiff University) and Stefan Solomon (Macquarie University) (Eds)
This is an ingenious collection that explores the feminist potentials of unfinished pieces of cinema — films that were lost or abandoned, films whose ambitions or creators were thwarted or interrupted. Through this frame, the book creates opportunities to examine the economic and material conditions that left these films and careers incomplete, and the lived experiences of those who tried to create them. The book has 14 chapters and a very substantial introduction that styles itself as an introduction, a theory, and a manifesto. This editorial shaping helps to make the book an inventive and coherent research intervention.
Karen Boyle (University of Strathclyde) and Susan Berridge (University of Stirling) (Eds)
This is an inclusive and diverse collection that explores the complex concepts, ideas and representations of gender and violence in media. With over 50 chapters, divided into four sections, the work presented uses intersectional approaches and examines case studies from over 20 countries, focusing on a broad range of media from television dramas to podcasts, from newspapers to social media. The editors provide a detailed introduction to the collection as well as to each section. They keenly signpost to connected chapters and guide the reader through the plethora of very well thought out and fascinating work.
Corey Schultz (University of Nottingham Ningbo China) and Cecília Mello (University of São Paulo)
This is an invaluable addition to Routledge’s ‘Communicating China: Past, Present, Future’ book series but works extremely well as a stand-alone volume examining the state of Chinese film in the 21st century. Schulz and Mello bring together ten essays under three key themes of movements, genre and intermedia, and their editorial introduction emphasises the prognosticating function of the themes, which underlines the contemporary plurality of Chinese film, its trends and scholarship. Cogently written, the introduction navigates not merely the diverse content of the volume, but its intervention into the larger discourses pertaining to the field of Chinese ‘film’ in its broadest conception and offers interest and insight to the specialist and non-specialist reader alike.
This thesis attempts to address what it calls the absence of the cultural and social history of wrestling in a British context and its fandom. Overall, it is well researched in looking at the specific elements which constituted British wrestling right up to the present day, paying especial attention to its popularity on British television (although it predominantly concentrates on the 80s, while it was far more family TV entertainment in the 70s), the changes that came about following its removal from ITV and its decrease in popularity from the 90s onwards. This transformation from a much more general working-class entertainment into a niche subcultural one is well accounted for, both in the literature review and the subsequent chapters. Key explanations are provided, from Thatcherism and her neo-liberal agenda to the more specific role played by the rise of the WWE, to the increased global developments and interaction of the sport, to the US dominance and the ideological basis for the transformation. The ethnographic research with its combination of online semi-structured interviews coupled with the auto-ethnography of the writer brings forth the many different views, past and present, of the respondents’ involvement with the sport, as wrestlers or spectators/fans. The findings are subsequently well structured and incorporated into the doctoral study to reveal the multi-faceted cultures and experiences of the sport in the British context. Undoubtedly this study is a tour de force in the historical and contemporary formation of wrestling entertainment and sport, as well as a ‘passionate’ study to use the word adopted by the researcher in relation to the ‘national wrestling community’.
This thesis is a solid study of the concept of ‘Afro-pessimism’, that is the idea that the African continent is doomed, and the reasons for its pernicious and continued existence in the Western media discourse. The investigation of the concept is actioned through the study of five INGOs, and their ideological and operational practices in two countries of Eastern Africa, Kenya and Uganda. But before the thesis zoom in on the workers involved in the five INGOs studied via ethnographic methodologies, it outlines the general communication context of the thesis, which revolves around the relationship between these types of organisations, their privileged relationship with Western media and the public from which they rely on for their funds. This relational aspect is investigated further via postcolonial theory combined with theories of moral economy which according to the author seems particularly relevant in a postcolonial context. This section in turns underpins the thesis which overall, via both the ethnographic study and the theoretical framework, manages to prove that the very existence of INGOs cannot but be predicated on Afro-pessimism. What need would there be if historical oppression had really ended, for INGOs operations in Africa and/or for their quasi-exclusive representations of reality, at the expense of everything else? This thesis answers this question very satisfactorily and with profound postcolonial insights.
This PhD examines the notion of the “beach body” from a sociocultural body image perspective. It offers original insights into how historically swimwear-clad female bodies have been constructed and negotiated by society, culture and the mass media before moving on to discuss and empirically explore, how this links to women’s experiences of embodiment at the beach and on social networking sites (SNS). A sequential, mixed methods cross-cultural study consisting of qualitative focus groups and a quantitative survey yielded original and engaging insights. Qualitative data suggest women across cultures have internalised relatively homogeneous ideas about how female bodies in swimwear should look and that these affect how they think, feel and behave in relation to their bodies prior to and during summer, and beyond. The survey presents evidence that viewing normative beach body images on SNS links to heightened appearance concerns during summer, whereas viewing non- normative bodies, engaging in physical activity and relaxing at the beach correlated with positive body image outcomes such as heightened appearance evaluation and decreased self-objectification and thin-ideal internalisation. Findings may be used advance understanding why many women today feel more vulnerable than usual about their bodies and what might be done to address such feelings. Overall, the dissertation effectively draws out the many layered complexities of understanding women’s relationships with their bodies in culture that seek to objectify them and undermine their sense of corporal agency and power. For women to feel better about themselves, they need to take power and control over their agentic bodies, defining the beach and beach body experiences on their own terms, rather than accepting the normative, passive, to be looked at-ness of the objectified beach body in heteronormative capitalist culture.
This innovative inter-disciplinary project adopts an approach combining media analysis of Indian newspaper’s coverage of air pollution with advocacy, harnessing creative film practice to present powerful personal narratives about the effects of climate change on people’s lives. The co-created documentary films were made with young filmmakers.
Haytham Fathy Elsayed Mohamed (University of East Anglia)
This original practice-based research works across both written and filmic content, with a clear integration between the two to the extent that it would be difficult to pry them apart. Both thesis and film argue that the representation of gay men in Egyptian cinema not only has been historically problematic but rather regressed considerably over the years. This discussion is presented through a critical reflection on twenty-three feature films as case studies and interviews with academics and Egyptian filmmakers. Research questions in this creative-critical PhD are presented in visual form in the documentary, complemented by a review of the trope of homosexuality in broader Arabic cultural contexts and the ethnographic value of the interviews.
A substantial scholarly work presented through an informative and engaging podcast. The work sets out to critique the notion of academic podcasting and as such push at the nature of practice research. This audio documentary presents the findings of collaborative research between cinema and psychology, focusing on experiments with film and psychoanalysis in the nineteen fifties to seventies. This transdisciplinary work is a fitting subject for this novel approach to presenting academic research, communicated through both form and content.
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