"This volume, Shaping Global Cultures through Screenwriting: Women Who Write Our Worlds, tells stories of women who have worked with and within communities to bring the communities’ stories to life through screenwriting. In gathering these examples, we asked for stories that achieved some level
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of impact for the communities. Impact was considered across a number of indices. We wanted to show that attitudes have shifted, policies have been rewritten and the life experiences and ranges of possibility for some have changed for the better as a result of women’s work. We hope to show through our stories that film can change lives; that sharing stories matters; and that women are everywhere, using their skills in screen production for the good of many.
In her excellent book, Women in the International Film Industry: Policy Practice and Power, Susan Liddy (2020) offers ‘a wide-ranging, critical assessment of practice, policy and progress’ to establish the range and scale of gender inequality that currently exists in the world of screen production. She quotes O’Neill and Domingo (2015) to point out that social, economic and political conditions vary, and ‘combine in different ways to enable or constrain women’s agency and leadership’ in screen production (Liddy 2020: 1). In contrast, our book approaches the same problem from the opposite perspective: we seek to correlate the ‘policy, practice and power’ (Liddy 2020) with the actual work of women screenwriters. Our aim is to point out what women screenwriters, creators and filmmakers are doing in disparate corners of the world, and how their effort is positively impacting communities, shaping culture and creating change.
We argue that, despite the fact that women screenwriters are underrepresented in leadership roles in film industries worldwide, the impact of their films remains visible and palpable. We provide evidence that, as women step into the roles of screenwriter, filmmaker and collaborator, using known and emerging technologies, formats and genres under the broad scope of ‘screen production’, they raise the voices of other women and other communities. This volume shows the impact of women’s voices in creating real change for the communities whose stories are told through the topics and themes of these women’s screen works. Not least, this volume seeks to celebrate these women and their communities and bring awareness of that impact to broader communities worldwide." (Introduction, page 1)
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"This article investigates harmful political content in public WhatsApp and Facebook groups of the radical Right in Brazil. Considering harmful political content as that which generates direct damage to the quality, reasonableness, and plurality of public discussion, we investigate the enunciative a
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spects of four specific types of discursive action (uncivil, conspiratorial, hateful, and dangerous) and the non-enunciative aspects used for harmful types of communication and interaction. The database consists of 3,503,540 messages propagated in 1,676 public groups during the electoral process. Through a quantitative approach to a sample of 2,201 unique messages, we found, among other things, that (1) harmful content was more present on Facebook than on WhatsApp; (2) messages about the elections were associated with uncivil speech; (3) uncivil speech was usually associated with dangerous speech and opposed to conspiratorial speech. The results allow for more nuanced reflections on the actions and strategy of the Far Right in the digital public debate." (Abstract)
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"This research scrutinizes the content, spread, and implications of disinformation in Brazil’s 2018 pre-election period. It focuses specifically on the most widely shared fake news about Lula da Silva and links these with the preexisting polarization and political radicalization, ascertaining the
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role of context. The research relied on a case study and mixed-methods approach that combined an online data collection of content, spread, propagators, and interactions’ analyses, with in-depth analysis of the meaning of such fake news. The results show that the most successful fake news about Lula capitalized on prior hostility toward him, several originated or were spread by conservative right-wing politicians and mainstream journalists, and that the pro-Lula fake news circulated in smaller networks and had overall less global reach. Facebook and WhatsApp were the main dissemination platforms of these contents." (Abstract)
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"El análisis revela los desafíos al proceso de construcción de soluciones reguladoras que protejan derechos y sean efectivas para promover el acceso a información confiable. La desinformación está profundamente entrelazada con los procesos políticos y sociales, y no es posible pensar en soluc
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iones legales y reguladoras aisladamente del entendimiento de estos procesos y de los contextos nacionales y locales." (Resumen)
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