"The Media for Democracy Monitor (MDM) assesses the performance of leading news media in mature democracies with regard to the three core dimensions of democracy: freedom, equality, and control. After monitoring 10 countries in 2011, the MDM project expanded to cover the leading news media of 18 dem
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ocracies in 2021. In this book, the most salient results from the MDM were selected to undergo cross-country and longitudinal comparison, searching for patterns and tendencies across countries, with a particular focus on the influence of digitalisation. Some of the key results are the ubiquitousness of the news media’s financial crisis, increasing consumption gaps as younger generations prefer online platforms, and persisting gender inequalities, both in news content and in newsrooms. However, the volume also shows that the reach of news media remains high, the watchdog role and investigative journalism are increasingly relevant in daily practice, and that public service media, in general, continues to play a vital role for democracy. These results have implications for media policies, regulations, and practices to improve news quality and, ultimately, democracy worldwide." (Publisher description)
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"The article demonstrates how Portugal lacked a true policy of imperial broadcasting which led it to become dependent on colonial stations for the dissemination of colonialism. The broadcasters established in the Portuguese Empire dedicated significant airtime to the dissemination of Portugal’s co
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lonial mission but also promoted local identities with programming echoing the lifestyle of the colonial elites. Thus, the article argues that while the Portuguese authorities considered the cultural expressions and identities of the white residents in Africa as peripheral, these perceived themselves as part of a new devolved center. This ‘peripheral centre’ gained particular ‘visibility’ on the airwaves." (Abstract)
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"This OA book investigates the methodological and ethical dilemmas involved when working with digital technologies and large-scale datasets in relation to ethnographic studies of digital migration practices and trajectories. Digital technologies reshape not only every phase of the migration process
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itself (by providing new ways to access, to share and preserve relevant information) but also the activities of other actors, from solidarity networks to border control agencies. In doing so, digital technologies create a whole new set of ethical and methodological challenges for migration studies: from data access to data interpretation, privacy protection, and research ethics more generally. Of specific concern are the aspects of digital migration researchers accessing digital platforms used by migrants, who are subject to precarious and insecure life circumstances, lack recognised papers and are in danger of being rejected and deported. Thus, the authors call for new modes of caring for (big) data when researching migrants' digital practices in the configuration of migration and borders. Besides taking proper care of research participants' privacy, autonomy, and security, this also spans carefully establishing analytically sustainable environments for the respective data sets. In doing so, the book argues that it is essential to carefully reflect on researchers' own positioning as being part of the challenge they seek to address." (Publisher description)
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"Urgidos por los gritos de las comunidades afectadas por la minería y los gemidos de la madre naturaleza, en comunión con el llamado del papa Francisco y del CELAM, la Agencia de Cooperación Katholische Jungschar (DKA) y la Red Iglesias y Minería (IyM) animamos un espacio ecuménico para interca
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mbiar reflexiones en torno a las Teologías, Ecologías y Extractivismos. En este espacio ecuménico de reflexión, contamos con la participación de teólogos y teólogas de América Latina, Europa y EUA. Dispuestosas a escuchar, dialogar, aprender y compartir sus saberes, experiencias. Las reflexiones colectivas, ayudaron también a fundamentar teológicamente la Campaña de Desinversión en Minería, animada por IyM y el Proyecto Oro e Iglesia, impulsada por DKA. Metodológicamente este Grupo de Reflexión se organizó en tres Ejes Temáticos: 1) Perspectiva ética teológica: en el que buscamos iluminar las prácticas del modelo político y económico extractivista que se ha establecido, en la modernidad, como dogma para el crecimiento. Este modelo que se sustenta en una financiarización utilitaria de la naturaleza para salvaguardar el capital especulativo mediante el control de la Madre Tierra y del futuro [...] 2) Teología litúrgica: diálogos abiertos, sobre la Liturgia y la opción evangélica preferencial por los pobres ¿cómo entender la utilización del oro, la plata y los diamantes en nuestras personas y particularmente en nuestras Iglesias? [...] 3) Teología Poscolonial: reflexionó la sobreexplotación de la naturaleza, con la consiguiente devastación territorial por parte de la minería y las empresas multinacionales. Hemos avanzado en actualizar y proponer una versión “moderna” del colonialismo: asumimos que para compartir “un principio de esperanza” post extractivista, es urgente descolonizar nuestro pensamiento, el imaginario y los poderes/saberes que actualmente tenemos." (Presentación, página 2-4)
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"[...] we have brought together relevant case studies to illustrate how content production and business relations can be reconfigured to generate fresh revenue sources, and to demonstrate which tools may be helpful along the way. These cases include special thematic projects, creative agency models,
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and native-only formats in digital and multimedia form that revisit the boundary negotiation between editorial and business departments. The Native Advertising Playbook casts new light on the complex, overlapping and increasingly coupled relations between consumers and clients that require significant alignment and coordination to succeed." (Executive summary)
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"Über das Medium Computerspiel findet zunehmend eine Auseinandersetzung mit psychologischen Traumata statt. Posttraumatische Belastungsstörung, Krankheit und Tod sowie Depressionen und Phobien sind hierbei vorherrschende Themen und Motive. Thomas Spies zeigt in einem historischen Überblick und in
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vergleichenden Analysen Tendenzen der kulturellen Repräsentation auf. Die Beschäftigung mit Titeln wie »Papers, Please«, »Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice« und »Disco Elysium« lässt deutlich werden, wie Computerspiele zunehmend medienspezifische Möglichkeiten finden, die Vielfalt und Komplexität traumatischer Erfahrungen zu vermitteln." (Verlagsbeschreibung)
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"Welcome to the world of melodrama—and to the melodramas of the world. This book introduces nearly one hundred cinematic masterpieces from various periods and different cultural contexts—ranging from early Hollywood to emergent and popular Bollywood, from Latin American and New German Cinema to
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contemporary Nollywood, from classic melodrama and commercial blockbusters to arthouse film and meta-melodrama, while also encompassing a number of other local forms and styles in their hybrid or revisionist varieties. Our collection features discussions of seemingly timeless stories of love and loss, demonstrating the possibility and power of melodramatic plots to portray the overcoming of differences and antagonisms. Yet it also reveals how the melodramatic code is time and again used for asserting political claims and articulating critique—and hence for (re)producing powerful dichotomies of good vs. evil, innocence vs. corruption, virtue vs. vice. Melodrama performs and rehearses moral conflict and emotional crisis management on a broad scale, involving intimate relationships and familial relations, on the one hand, and global constellations of oppression, violence, war, and regime changes, on the other. Thus, like no other genre, melodrama indeed makes the political personal and the personal political." (Introduction, page 13)
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"Der Vielfalt der Gesellschaft gerecht zu werden, stellt öffentliche Bibliotheken vor Herausforderungen. Der Band gibt einen Überblick zur strategischen und diskriminierungskritischen Organisationsentwicklung sowie zur Veranstaltungs- und Bestandsarbeit für diversitätssensible Öffnung. Eine Vie
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lzahl von Praxisbeispielen aus dem Programm „360° – Fonds für Kulturen der neuen Stadtgesellschaft" werden vorgestellt." (Verlagsbeschreibung)
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"The aim of this Open Science and Peacebuilding Toolkit is to provide an open, living collection of resources for innovation hubs operating in conflict or post-conflict environments, creating a joint framework for open science and peacebuilding in action. It seeks to enable makerspaces across the wo
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rld to contribute to sustainable development by becoming key players in creating circular economy structures. The toolkit is an open source document. It provides resources appropriate to communities at various levels of development and supports innovators in a range of sectors & throughout the entrepreneurial life cycle." (Introd, page 3)
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"This book, produced on behalf of the IFLA Copyright and other Legal Matters (CLM) Advisory Committee, provides basic and advanced information about copyright, outlines limitations and exceptions, discusses communicating with users and highlights emerging copyright issues. The chapters note the sign
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ificance of the topic; describe salient points of the law and legal concepts; present selected comparisons of approaches around the world; highlight opportunities for reform and advocacy; and help libraries and librarians find their way through the copyright maze." (Publisher description)
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"Music and Digital Media is the first comparative ethnographic study of the impact of digital media on music worldwide. It offers a radical and lucid new theoretical framework for understanding digital media through music, showing that music is today where the promises and problems of the digital as
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sume clamouring audibility. The book contains ten chapters, eight of which present comprehensive original ethnographies; they are bookended by an authoritative introduction and a comparative postlude. Five chapters address popular, folk, art and crossover musics in the global South and North, including Kenya, Argentina, India, Canada and the UK. Three chapters bring the digital experimentally to the fore, presenting pioneering ethnographies of an extra-legal peer-to-peer site and the streaming platform Spotify, a series of prominent internet-mediated music genres, and the first ethnography of a global software package, the interactive music platform Max. The book is unique in bringing ethnographic research on popular, folk, art and crossover musics from the global North and South into a comparative framework on a large scale, and creates an innovative new paradigm for comparative anthropology. It shows how music enlarges anthropology while demanding to be understood with reference to classic themes of anthropological theory." (Publisher description)
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"Der vorliegende Band stellt erstmals die deutschsprachige Kinder- und Jugendliteratur in ihrer diachronen Entwicklung vom Mittelalter bis zur Gegenwart unter Genderaspekten dar. Die Kapitel zu den einzelnen Epochen geben dabei jeweils Überblicke über die relevanten Diskurse der Zeit und stellen e
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xemplarisch wichtige Werke unter der Genderperspektive vor. Indem gezeigt wird, wie Kinder- und Jugendliteratur einerseits die herrschenden gesellschaftlichen Genderkonstrukte reflektiert und andererseits neue Konzepte oder gar Utopien entwirft, widmet sich der Band einem aktuellen Thema, das über kulturwissenschaftliche Fragen hinausweist." (Verlagsbeschreibung)
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"The aim of this volume is to interpret photography as a specific tool that reifies reality, subjectively frames it, and fits it into various political, ideological, commercial, scientific, and artistic contexts. Without reducing the entire argument to the binary of ‘photography and power’, the
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authors reveal the different modes of seeing that involve distinct cultural norms, social practices, power relations, levels of technology, and networks for circulating photography, and that determined the manner of its (re)use in constructing various images of Central Asia. The volume demonstrates that photography was the cornerstone of imperial media governance and discourse construction in colonial Turkestan of the tsarist and early Soviet periods. The various cases show the complex mechanisms by which images of Turkestan were created, remembered, or forgotten from the nineteenth until the twenty-first century." (Publisher description)
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"En 2022 se ha observado una ralentización del nivel de la actividad económica (7,2%) en comparación al segundo semestre de 2021 y se pronostica que todavía caerá en 2023 (4,4%), a niveles insuficientes para la recuperación a los niveles pre-crisis. Una combinación de factores dan cuenta de e
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sos resultados, los cuales tienen que ver con el deterioro de la infraestructura y de los servicios básicos (energía, agua, seguridad, telecomunicaciones), el escaso acceso al crédito bancario, la falta de capital humano, el bajo nivel de ingreso real de los consumidores, el bajo crecimiento de la producción petrolera, así como los efectos de algunas sanciones. Si bien se superó la situación de hiperinflación que se produjo desde 2017, Venezuela todavía figura como la economía más inflacionaria del mundo, estimándose que puede cerrar este año 2022 en 125%." (Slide 6)
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"Against the background of the media commercialization reform since the 1990s in China and drawing on the case of »X-Change« (2006-2019), Wei Dong investigates the entanglements between emotion and subjectivity, ideology, identity and hegemonic power in the multimodal text of the program. The focu
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s lies on the ways in which emotions are appropriated and disciplined by regimes of power and identity, and the ways in which affect - in this case primarily kuqing (bitter emotions) communicated by the material and the body - have the potential to challenge or exceed existing relations of power in the mediascape. Wei Dong shows how Chinese reality TV provides a historical and theoretical opportunity for understanding the affective structures of contemporary China in the dynamic process of fracture and integration." (Publisher description)
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"Memes dienen nicht nur der popkulturellen Unterhaltung oder der Kunst, sie werden auch in der Politik, in lokalen und internationalen Wahlkämpfen oder auf Demonstrationen verwendet. In ihrer typischsten Form sind sie Text-Bild-Gefüge, die sich digital mit viraler Geschwindigkeit verbreiten und tr
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ansformieren. Joanna Nowotny und Julian Reidy nehmen sich dieses Internetphänomens aus kulturwissenschaftlicher Perspektive an. Sie betreten Neuland, indem sie einzelne Memes kasuistisch analysieren und ihre Erkenntnisse systematisieren, um diese digitale Kommunikationsform definitorisch neu zu bestimmen – in stetem Bezug zu anderen digitalen Phänomenen wie dem trolling." (Verlagsbeschreibung)
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"Wars in films are […] always more than just the staging or presentation of a historical event; they offer an interpretation of these events that usually corresponds with other aspects, e. g. society's evaluation of war per se, or wishes about how specific events related to war should be commemora
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ted within the public conscience. Of course, films can also act as a medium to criticize war, but the functionality of the filmic stagings of collective violence is usually determined by the interaction between producers and the audience of the film. The following chapters try to provide a variety of insights into these relationships, and although they focus on different time periods and aspects related to the semiotics, narratives, and perceptions of war in film, they all circle around certain questions related to war films in general. These are: 1. To what extent do war films present historical events that are already socio-culturally embedded within national narratives, and to what extent do their semiotics support or challenge common views about wars and collective violence? 2. Which conscious or subconscious images or visual semiotics are used within war films to connect the audience to the film and its narrative? 3. How do films create, transport, or intensify the perception and interpretation of wars within societies? To answer these, each of the contributions of the present volume engages with specific war films and connects their respective war-related motifs and narratives with these questions." (Introduction, page 7-11)
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"La acción mundial por el clima aparece como una de las prioridades, cuando no como la principal prioridad, de la agenda internacional. […] Los países deberán implementar planes de acción multidimensionales que contendrán regulaciones orientadas a que las distintas industrias minimicen al má
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ximo sus impactos medioambientales, incluida, por supuesto, la industria editorial. No resulta exagerado señalar, por tanto, que esta transición hacia prácticas mucho menos nocivas para el medio ambiente constituye uno de los mayores retos que deberá enfrentar el sector editorial en un plazo que puede ser más corto de lo que se piensa. El desafío es mayúsculo porque no solo se trata de utilizar papeles que cumplan unos estándares determinados, que es lo que se suele tener en mente cuando se habla de edición ecológica o ecoedición, sino que implica calcular y mitigar los impactos ambientales del libro desde el proceso de edición hasta su llegada a manos de los lectores. Con este dosier, el Cerlalc busca contribuir a instalar este tema en los sectores editoriales de sus países miembro. Los artículos aquí reunidos ofrecen elementos para entender las múltiples dimensiones del impacto ambiental de la industria editorial y dan algunas pistas para empezar a pensar una hoja de ruta de a cara a la transición. Es, en cualquier caso, una primera aproximación, que esperamos sirva para iniciar un diálogo entre las partes interesadas. Como se señala en uno de los artículos, la ecoedición no es solo medir, mitigar y comunicar los impactos ambientales de la edición, producción y comercialización de un libro, sino que es también un acuerdo del sector." (Editorial, páginas 5-7)
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