Representing community mobilisation on film: learning through and about movements and their struggles

This article offers a brief critical overview of some the challenges associated with media representations of community-based protest and social movements. It is followed by a discussion of three Irish documentary films - The Pipe, Meeting Room and The 4th Act - that have profiled community struggles in Dublin and Mayo. The article proposes that, taken together, the films are problem-posing texts, of potential relevance to any readers seeking to learn with and through the praxis of community development and social movements. Generative themes raised by the films include: the hegemony of particular conceptions of development and solidarity and the denigration of alternatives; the repressive character and responses of the state when faced with dissent; and the meaningfulness of and constraints on the tactics ‘chosen’ by oppressed and peripheralised communities

More letters from lockdown...Creative responses to Covid-19

Covid 19: Dilemmas for a Developing countryComing out of Dar es Salaam airport into a hot, humid night in October 2020, I was relieved to have taken off the mask I had compulsorily worn since I had left Edinburgh in the early hours of the morning. I had had my temperature checked when we landed and filled in a form to say where I would be staying. That was the end of any restrictions or checks, despite the fact that the world was in the middle of a pandemic which had claimed so many lives and destroyed livelihoods. When I got back home to Edinburgh, people asked questions about Covid restrictions in Tanzania and were clearly surprised and even shocked to hear that there were none. Why would a country not protect its citizens from this disease? Why would its President encourage people to pray together in crowded churches? Why not impose lockdowns and restrictions for their safety

Spitzer View of Massive Star Formation in the Tidally Stripped Magellanic Bridge

The Magellanic Bridge is the nearest low-metallicity, tidally stripped environment, offering a unique high-resolution view of physical conditions in merging and forming galaxies. In this paper we present analysis of candidate massive young stellar objects (YSOs), i.e., {\it in situ, current} massive star formation (MSF) in the Bridge using {\it Spitzer} mid-IR and complementary optical and near-IR photometry. While we definitely find YSOs in the Bridge, the most massive are $\sim10 M_\odot$, $\ll45 M_\odot$ found in the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC). The intensity of MSF in the Bridge also appears decreasing, as the most massive YSOs are less massive than those formed in the past. To investigate environmental effects on MSF, we have compared properties of massive YSOs in the Bridge to those in the LMC. First, YSOs in the Bridge are apparently less embedded than in the LMC: 81% of Bridge YSOs show optical counterparts, compared to only 56% of LMC sources with the same range of mass, circumstellar dust mass, and line-of-sight extinction. Circumstellar envelopes are evidently more porous or clumpy in the Bridge's low-metallicity environment. Second, we have used whole samples of YSOs in the LMC and the Bridge to estimate the probability of finding YSOs at a given \hi\ column density, N(HI). We found that the LMC has $\sim3\times$ higher probability than the Bridge for N(HI) $>10\times10^{20}$ cm$^{-2}$, but the trend reverses at lower N(HI). Investigating whether this lower efficiency relative to HI is due to less efficient molecular cloud formation, or less efficient cloud collapse, or both, will require sensitive molecular gas observations.Comment: 41 pages, 20 figures, 6 tables; accepted for publication in ApJ; several figures are in low resolution due to the size limit here and a high resolution version can be downloaded via http://www.astro.virginia.edu/~cc5ye/ms_bridge20140215.pd

Representing community mobilisation on film: learning through and about movements and their struggles

This article offers a brief critical overview of some the challenges associated with media representations of community-based protest and social movements. It is followed by a discussion of three Irish documentary films - The Pipe, Meeting Room and The 4th Act - that have profiled community struggles in Dublin and Mayo. The article proposes that, taken together, the films are problem-posing texts, of potential relevance to any readers seeking to learn with and through the praxis of community development and social movements. Generative themes raised by the films include: the hegemony of particular conceptions of development and solidarity and the denigration of alternatives; the repressive character and responses of the state when faced with dissent; and the meaningfulness of and constraints on the tactics ‘chosen’ by oppressed and peripheralised communities