Negotiating Dissidence: The Pioneering Women of Arab Documentary, by Stefanie Van De Peer

Despite their rich history, Arab films, in particular those made by women, have not received the international attention they deserve. Arab women filmmakers have been under-examined in academic and popular spheres. However, in recent years, the advent of more transnational viewing practices, combined with the emergence of a new generation of highly successful Arab women directors, has started to shift the status quo. Contemporary fiction filmmakers like Nadine Labaki and Haafia Al-Mansour have been commercially successful outside of their own national and regional contexts. However, women documentarists from the Arab world remain largely unknown and their films continue to be the subject of very little academic or popular attention. Underpinned by significant archival work, Stefanie Van De Peer’s fascinating and informative book, Negotiating Dissidence: The Pioneering Women of Arab Documentary, goes a long way to redressing this imbalance by bringing the films of a number of pioneering women documentarists from the Arab world to light. It is a refreshing, timely and welcome contribution to the relatively small and disparate body of work on Arab women filmmakers, which includes important texts like Gönül Dönmez-Colin’s Women, Islam and Cinema (2004), Rebecca Hillauer’s Encyclopaedia of Arab Women Filmmakers (2005), and Viola Shafik’s Arab Cinema: History and Cultural Identity (2007)

People largely perceive local government communications about COVID-19 as embodying greater honesty, credibility, and empathy than those of the UK government

Dominic Abrams, Jo Broadwood, Fanny Lalot, and Kaya Davies Hayon present the findings of research examining whether people from across the UK found communication about COVID-19 honest and credible, empathic, clear, accessible, and whether it met the needs of their community. They find that both UK and local government communications were perceived on average as fairly clear and as using understandable language, but that significant differences exist on other measures

The government must work with local government to support a place-based approach that puts social cohesion at the heart of levelling up

Trust in government is at an historic low. Yet levels of local trust in certain local areas in England that had strategically prioritised social cohesion before the pandemic have remained stronger than elsewhere. Jo Broadwood, Fanny Lalot, Dominic Abrams and Kaya Davies Hayon write that this may be reflecting the strength of relationships that were developed via local social cohesion programmes. These relationships could then be relied on as communities mobilised to support and protect the vulnerable during the COVID-19 crisis, further strengthening and deepening those connections

Green Hell: Detention, art, and activism in an English landscape

This paper revolves on the carceral practices of Morton Hall IRC (Immigration Removal Centre) and of the role of visual imagery in the campaigns against them. Morton Hall is located in Lincolnshire, a rural county in England with a long history of agricultural innovation. It observes and debates a sense of the dissonance between institution and location that Morton Hall shared with Manus Island in the Pacific, the site of another postcolonial prison camp also in a beautiful setting. We interrogate how the legacies of British colonialism in the Pacific might help to explain that shared incongruity between function and place. We discuss a public initiative that aimed to give artistic and activist expression to these insights by highlighting the physical, historical, and emotional connections between Lincoln, the surrounding countryside, and the IRC. The aim of this planned event, The Big Walk, was to show that there is no absolute spatial disconnect between places of incarceration and places of freedom. In describing and analysing the cultural legacy of the planned event, curtailed by the 2020 pandemic, we draw on the wider oeuvre of British-Croatian artist, Natasha Davis, which include a film (2020) commissioned to replace the Walk and yet draw attention to the landscape as layered by time and memory, a landscape that yields ups a cross-temporal narrative spored beneat

Refugee filmmaking: Editorial

The origins of this issue of Alphaville lie in collaborations between the Forced Migration Research Network (UNSW – University of New South Wales) and the Refugee Council of Australia, and in the inspiration afforded us by international colleagues and guests to Sydney (Fadma Aït Mous), Liverpool (Dennis Del Favero) and Lincoln (Hoda Afshar) universities. We have benefited from these academic alliances and invitations, but we also embrace the widest notion of hospitality, whereby the moment of arrival, the request for assistance and shelter, and subsequent decisions over citizenship and long-term residency are located in a moral environment of welcome and mutual learning. We trace and acknowledge our intellectual relationships here in so far as they have allowed us to articulate an emerging and shared recognition that refugee lived experience stands as the barometer for political civility and social health in our time

Distrustful Complacency and the COVID ‐19 Vaccine: How Concern and Political Trust Interact to Affect Vaccine Hesitancy

We test the hypothesis that COVID‐19 vaccine hesitancy is attributable to distrustful complacency—an interactive combination of low concern and low trust. Across two studies, 9,695 respondents from different parts of Britain reported their level of concern about COVID‐19, trust in the UK government, and intention to accept or refuse the vaccine. Multilevel regression analysis, controlling for geographic area and relevant demographics, confirmed the predicted interactive effect of concern and trust. Across studies, respondents with both low trust and low concern were 10%–22% more vaccine hesitant than respondents with either high trust or high concern, and 26%–29% more hesitant than respondents with both high trust and high concern. Results hold equally among White, Black, and Muslim respondents, consistent with the view that regardless of mean‐level differences, a common process underlies vaccine hesitancy, underlining the importance of tackling distrustful complacency both generally and specifically among unvaccinated individuals and populations

The social cohesion investment: Local areas that invested in social cohesion programmes are faring better in the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic

Research has consistently observed that social cohesion (the strength of relationship between the individual and the state, and between individuals and their fellow citizens) rises in the aftermath of natural disasters or mass tragedies. However, this sense of “coming together” is often short-lived and comes back to pre-disaster level within a matter of weeks. But what happened in the UK as the Covid-19 pandemic progressed? The first stages of the Covid-19 pandemic saw an extraordinary increase in kindness and social connection with people organising spontaneously to support those affected through neighbourhood support groups, reaching out to isolated community members through telephone calls, and the ‘clap for carers’. However, as months pass social tensions appear to be rising again, along with increasing distrust of central government. Minority ethnic and religious communities have been accused of spreading the virus by not taking recommendations seriously, as have younger people – potentially fuelling increased tensions between groups within and across local communities. As the impact of the pandemic persists, so do the challenges for local authorities. Strong connections, local community knowledge and good relations have already proved important for local test, track and trace systems and to tailor health messages for diverse local groups and communities. With winter and tighter lockdown rules both imminent, we believe cohesion and integration will remain crucial in helping communities through the next six months and beyond. The “Beyond Us & Them” research project funded by the Nuffield Foundation aims to track people’s perceptions of social cohesion in different places in the UK. An important feature of the project is that we collect the views of people living in six different local authority areas (five of which are a part of the government Integration Area programme and all of which have invested in social cohesion over the last two years), as well as other places and regions. This brief report presents headline findings on trust and cohesion from comparisons between these local authority areas versus other places in the UK. These included broadly representative samples from Scotland, Wales and Kent (the most densely populated non-metropolitan county in England). We found that people in the six local authority areas were significantly less cynical about both national and local politicians and more accepting of government decisions and guidelines. They also reported stronger and better social relationships with other citizens, and warmer feelings towards immigrants compared to other areas. Taken together these findings indicate stronger social cohesion in the six local authority areas, despite the fact that respondents from these areas reported higher levels of concern and were experiencing higher local infection rates

Transnational Arab Stardom: Glamour, Performance and Politics

Stefanie Van de Peer - ORCID: 0000-0003-3152-2912 https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3152-2912Item is not available in this repository.Building on the work of star studies scholars, this collection provides contextual analyses of off-screen representation, as well as close textual analyses of films and star personas, thereby offering an in-depth study of the Arab star as text and context of Arab cinema. Using the tools of audience reception studies, the collection will also look at how stars (of film, stage, screen and new media) are viewed and received in different cultural contexts, both within and outside of the Arabic-speaking world. Arab cinema is often discussed in terms of political representation and independent art film, but rarely in terms of stardom, glamour, performance or masquerade. Aside from a few individual studies on female stardom or aspects of Arab masculinity, no major English-language study on Arab stardom exists, and collections on transnational stars or world cinema also often neglect to include Arab performers. This new book seeks to address this gap by providing the first study dedicated entirely to stardom on the Arab screen. Structured chronologically and thematically, this collection highlights and explores Arab film, screen and music stars through a transnational and interdisciplinary set of contributions that draw on feminist, performance and film theories, media studies, sound studies, material culture, queer star and celebrity studies, and social media studies.https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/transnational-arab-stardom-9781501393242/pubpu