Early independent production entrepreneurs in UK television: agents of a neo-liberal intervention

This essay focuses on the operation of the UK independent television production sector in the context of the entrepreneurial aspirations of company owners in the 1990s. The calculative practices used running these small and medium sized companies are examined and the experiences in managing them are mapped as they negotiated an evolving fitness landscape. Analysis is provided of the strategies adopted including the need to develop reputation and relational contracts to secure a constant flow of commissions. Conclusions are drawn about this transitional phase of entrepreneurship in this sector ahead of Government intervention in the market through imposing new terms of trade between independent production companies and broadcasters

Narratives in landscape photography: the narrative

The aim ofthis thesis is to use practical and theoretical research to investigate the relationship of transitional landscapes with narrative. As transitional landscapes I refer to the photographic depiction of unorganised spaces situated between the rural and urban zones. The research engages in practical fieldwork and theoretical study. It comprises a written thesis and a visual output (photographic project). The theoretical part examines the historical framework focusing in the postmodern re-evaluations oflandscape photography. My research investigates if the iconographic austerity of transitional landscapes leads to interpretive austerity or on the contrary enhances their range of interpretations. The research methodology is influenced by theories that acknowledge the importance of the reader and it is qualitative and experimental. The research employs as key method visual questionnaires, which focus on the capacity of single images to prompt narrative interpretation. The groups of people that the questionnaires are distributed to, vary in their approach and regard of landscape and narrative. The results from this survey indicate how we perceive transitional landscapes, the type of narratives they suggest and what prompts them to interpret the images as specific narratives. The main findings ofthe study revealed that: 1. The iconographic austerity of transitional landscapes appears as a fertile ground for narratives as indicated by the high percentage of respondents who wrote narratives, the high percentage of narratives compared to descriptions and transformations and the respondents approach more as narrators rather than observers. 2. The respondents seemed to wish to categorise the transitional landscapes more as an urban or rural environment rather than a transitional environment. 3. A darker, closer to black & white landscape image is more responsive to narratives rather than the normal exposure and colour version of the same landscape image. Furthermore, transitional landscapes seem more narratively responsive in their blurred version. 4. Transitional landscapes create more pessimistic than optimistic responses justifying landscape theories based on the psychological approach to landscape. The findings are employed as a creative tool, creating the form and the content of the photographic project, which also incorporates the actual stories of the respondents for transitional landscapes. The photographic project displays two main narrative strategies in photography: a) Narratives created solely by images and b) Narratives created from combinin~ text and image. It progress from strategy a to b in four steps, gradually shifting from vertical panoramic landscapes to horizontal panoramic 'wordscapes'. The original co.ntribution to knowledge is in both the artwork and the method of producing it as I am extendmg the boundaries of what is currently considered as the landscape genre not only in terms of collective authoring but also about the transition of the visual sign to the word sign, thus examining our processes of making sense of signs and the subjective nature of interpretation. In my.concerns for transitional landscapes, I am investigating an aspect of a landscape genre, which has been marginalized in both traditional photographic history and subsequent critical debates

Josef Fares’ Zozo as accented cinema

In 2005, the Lebanese-Swedish filmmaker Josef Fares, who had attained recognition in Sweden through the immigrant comedies Jalla! Jalla! (2000) and Kopps (2003), presented his third feature film and first drama, Zozo, inspired by Fares’s own migration to Sweden. Set in 1987 Beirut, Zozo portrays a ten-year boy who loses his parents during the Lebanese Civil War and who journeys to reunite with his grandparents already settled in Sweden. In Sweden, Zozo is forced to learn the host country’s language quickly and to understand the unwritten rules of his new culture. Like his grandparents, he will probably always have an accent and be recognizably the “other.” The film became Sweden’s national submission to the 78th Academy Awards for Best Foreign Language Film and its nomination not only raised questions on what Sweden and Swedishness mean in a contemporary global world, but it also reexamined the problems of nationality, location, identity, and historical memory in a borderless Europe. In this essay I argue that Zozo is an illustration of accented film, which means the film is neither Swedish nor Lebanese, but a combination of both. Influenced by his deterritorialization from Lebanon and his current life in Sweden, the cinematographic stylistic choices of Josef Fares exhibit a “double consciousness” - multiple cultural identities at once. To further understand the Lebanese and Swedish elements in the film, I analyze how elements such as chronotopes (time-space), border crossing, epistolarity, and double consciousness are inscribed in the film. In addition, I use Laura U. Marks’ concept of fossils, radioactive recollection-objects. By employing Hamid Naficy’s accented cinema theory, I hope to explain how Josef Fares is neither Swedish nor Lebanese, but an individual with multicultural identities, which reflect in the elements of the narrative and cinematographic style.Germanic Studie

Nature value of the environment in Poland and its protection

Published in: Natural environment of Poland and its protection in Łódź University Geographical Research, edited by E. Kobojek and T.Marsza

A monument to the player: Preserving a landscape of socio-cultural capital in the transitional MMORPG

This is the pre-print version of the Article. The official published version can be accessed from the links below - Copyright @ 2012 Taylor & Francis LtdMassively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs) produce dynamic socio-ludic worlds that nurture both culture and gameplay to shape experiences. Despite the persistent nature of these games, however, the virtual spaces that anchor these worlds may not always be able to exist in perpetuity. Encouraging a community to migrate from one space to another is a challenge now facing some game developers. This paper examines the case of Guild Wars® and its “Hall of Monuments”, a feature that bridges the accomplishments of players from the current game to the forthcoming sequel. Two factor analyses describe the perspectives of 105 and 187 self-selected participants. The results reveal four factors affecting attitudes towards the feature, but they do not strongly correlate with existing motivational frameworks, and significant differences were found between different cultures within the game. This informs a discussion about the implications and facilitation of such transitions, investigating themes of capital, value perception and assumptive worlds. It is concluded that the way subcultures produce meaning needs to be considered when attempting to preserve the socio-cultural landscape

Of highland-lowland borderlands: local societies and foreign power in the Zagros-Mesopotamian interface

Narratives of civilization are spun from the juxtaposition of a civilized self with that of a barbarous other. Such an opposition is never more easily constructed than from the distinctiveness of lowland and mountain topographies, environments, and life-ways. Studies of highland-lowland relationships across different periods, places and disciplines also place the two realms in conceptual opposition and only rarely engage in depth with the interaction that must underwrite all negotiations of identity. We can trace the first attested construction of such a dichotomy in the texts and iconography that detail Mesopotamia’s interaction with the Zagros highlands in the later third and second millennia BCE. The recent opening of the Kurdish Region of north-east Iraq to international archaeological research now provides us with the opportunity to investigate Bronze Age communities located in transitional and highland landscapes and their relationships with the lowlands. In this paper we take a critical approach to the conceptualization of highland-lowland interaction in the past and in modern scholarship and formulate a bottom-up, archaeological approach for the investigation of highland-lowland encounters. Drawing on our recent work in the Upper Diyala/Sirwan river valley, we present crucial new settlement and material evidence, which challenges traditional interpretations of the region as a homeland of mountain tribes and begin to write a more balanced, local account of socio-cultural development and external interaction between this borderland region and a series of Bronze Age imperial powers

Institutions From Above and Voices From Below: A Comment on Challenges to Group-Conflict Resolution and Reconciliation

Fletcher explores how assumptions about justice have succeeded in establishing a new international consensus on necessary processes of rebuilding societies, some pitfalls of this approach, and recommendations for new directions for the field of transitional justice. A central assumption animating the moral, political, and legal cases for transitional justice is that those responsible for unleashing and conducting mass violence that devastates countries and the lives of civilian residents should not get away with their criminal acts. And further, supporters of justice assume that a legal response is necessary in order to promote reconciliation. He thinks that the appropriate role of the law depends critically on the situation, including the cultural identities involved and the timing of the response, and that the international community should rethink its rush to aid conflict resolution with criminal tribunals

Affordances of Historic Urban Landscapes: an Ecological Understanding of Human Interaction with the Past

Heritage has been defined differently in European contexts. Despite differences, a common challenge for historic urban landscape management is the integration of tangible and intangible heritage. Integration demands an active view of perception and human-landscape interaction where intangible values are linked to specific places and meanings are attached to particular cultural practices and socio-spatial organisation. Tangible and intangible values can be examined as part of a system of affordances (potentialities) a place, artefact or cultural practice has to offer. This paper discusses how an ‘affordance analysis’ may serve as a useful tool for the management of historic urban landscapes