Critical Documentary Research Articles

A critical documentary analysis on HIV/AIDS policies in Indonesia

A critical documentary analysis on HIV/AIDS policies in Indonesia

Socio-pragmatic Aspects of the Kurya Nicknames against First Names Given after Birth

This study investigated the socio-pragmatic aspects of nicknames in Kurya, a Bantu language spoken in northwestern Tanzania. The study was motivated by the fact that the available literature on personal names does not offer adequate information about what determines the selection of a Nicknames assigned to a person in the Kurya community and whether nicknames are semantically related to the personal names given after birth. The study employed a qualitative approach and a case study design. Its data were collected through interviews and critical documentary analysis whereby a total of six Kurya nicknames were obtained. The data were then analysed on the basis of Cognitive Semantics Theory and construal principles in particular. The findings indicated that Kidanga, Isokhero, Engoko, Iriraghiri, Esalighoko, Irongo, Bhulenya, Etena, Inchupa, Inchughu, Amaghuha, and Kerabhoko are Kurya nicknames whose assignment was influenced by behaviour, color, structure or articulation. It was noted that most of the Kurya nicknames do not have any symbiotic relationship with their bearers’ first names given after birth; the few which appear to be in a semantic relationship with first names come just by chance. Based on the findings, the study concludes that nicknames have a very important role in any community since they reflect the construal cognition of human nature and nurture. So, communities are advised to value their personal names even though nicknames have taken over. This is because personal names are our official identities and are the ones that are supposed to appear in official documents such as identity cards unless it is stated otherwise.

A socio-linguistics Analysis of Semantic Changes in Sukuma Loanwords from Kiswahili Language

The purpose of this paper is to account for the semantic changes of Swahili loanwords in Kisukuma language. The reason behind this analysis is that the existing studies have touched this topic not deeply, hence offering curtailed explanations of the phenomenon. Cognitive Grammar and Assimilation theory were used as the basis of analysis in the study. The former assumes that lexemes are not stable, thus they can have both core and peripheral senses while the latter assumes that the two different elements tend to get assimilated into the related elements. The study used a case study design whereby Sukuma language was the case. Four Sukuma informants from Ngudu District in Mwanza Region, Tanzania were selected purposively as they speak Kisukuma fluently. Then, fifty Swahili lexemes loaned to Kisukuma were collected. Semi-structured interviews, observations, introspection and critical documentary analysis were used as instruments for data. The study revealed that the Swahili loanwords in Kisukuma have undergone semantic changes technically known as generalization, specialization and shifting. Based on the findings, the study provided certain conclusions and corresponding recommendations.

Eduardo Mondlane: the lifelong learner, adult educator, and African scholar-revolutionary

Anchored on Mondlane’s biological mother’s advice that he ought to ‘go to school in order to understand the witchcraft of the white man, thus being able to fight against him’ and on the argument that what he learned as a child informed his learning as an adolescent and as an adult, this study developed a profile of Eduardo Mondlane as a lifelong learner, adult educator, and African scholar-revolutionary. The study is based on a critical documentary analysis of primary sources found in the archives of Northwestern University, Syracuse University, and Oberlin College, and corroborates the fact that most of Mondlane’s education in Western academic institutions took place during his adulthood. For instance, he completed high school already as a 27-year-old adult, began higher education in his late 20s and completed a bachelor’s degree at the age of 33, a master’s degree at the age of 36, and a Ph.D. at the age of 40. The study concludes that the trajectory of Eduardo Mondlane provides insight into the complexity and richness of the lifelong learning journey for ordinary people, especially those from communities around the globe whose education is relegated to informal, therefore inferior status.

Inclusive education as a heuristic device

This work analyzes the configuration of analytical methods that consider inclusive education as a heuristic device. Therefore, it establishes a theoretical and political model to solve various problems, thereby breaking the knowledge production logic left behind by the normative logic of Logos. The objective is to explore the defining contours and the heuristic intelligibility grid to think about its field of problems of a neo-materialist nature. The method used was the critical documentary review. The work concludes that, to a certain extent, the dominant onto-semiotic conceptions of the field possess the ability to impose a signic rostricity based on caricature aspects and impose universal conceptions of difference. This particularly inaugurates acute political and ethical implications.

Políticas migratorias y de diversidad sexual en Chile: tensionando la retórica del consenso posdictatorial

With the end of the civil-military dictatorship, Chile began a socio-political transition marked by a rhetoric of “consensus,” which resulted in the neutralization of differences, leading LGBTI+ and migrant experiences to situate themselves in a place of non-contradiction. This article aims to observe the tension in understanding citizenship in the post-dictatorship period based on the demands of LGTBI+ and migrants in the country. We present a critical documentary analysis —from a queer feminist approach— of sexuality and migration policies, which show a clear assimilationist slant based on an idea of “citizen” that does not disrupt transitional peace. Emphasis is placed on the contradictions between the grand narrative of the peace agreement and post-dictatorship cohesion and the invisibilizations that LGBTI+ and migrant collectives went through. Likewise, the generalist uses of diversity as a renewed form of assimilation are highlighted. The originality of this analysis lies in the fact that it provides an intersectional review of how policies are usually thought of under a single vector of difference —class, origin, or sexuality— without bringing to the forefront the articulation of differentiating social structures in which the new transitional process is structured. We conclude that, in the processes of differentiation that reified these norms, dissidents and migrants were labeled as a “problematic otherness,” over which government was exercised, mainly to avoid a deviation from the frameworks accepted as “normal” for the security of the recent Chilean democracy.

Counterarchives, Appropriation and the Disobedient Gaze: Archival Structures in Ursula Biemann’s Contained Mobility and Charles Heller’s & Lorenzo Pezzani’s Death by Rescue

In the past twenty years, an abundance of video works has emerged that engages with the global crisis of forced migration, many of which employ a critical documentary approach in their negotiation and exploration of these issues. Two such works, which are the primary objects of analysis in this article, are Ursula Biemann’s Contained Mobility(2004) and Charles Heller’s and Lorenzo Pezzani’s Death by Rescue: The Lethal Effects of the EU’s Policies of Non-Assistance(2016).The venture point from which both works are analyzed is the concept of the archive – a concept that on the one hand is of crucial importance to the production of knowledge and that, on the other, has coined contemporary art practices to a significant extent. After establishing a working definition of the term archive (in reference to seminal texts by e.g. Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault and Marlene Manoff) as a.) a discursive function, b.) as producing rather than merely recording reality and c.) a storage or container, both works are subjected to an in-depth formal analysis.The article explores how both works employ different – sometimes diverging – conceptions of the archive and how they are brought into dialogue with each other. Whereas both engage information in the form of data that was initally used for means of surveillance and control, Biemann brings these in conversation with what I term a ‘counterarchive’, whereas Heller and Pezzani employ their strategy of the disobedient gaze. Through these strategies, both works make new forms of knowledge visible and enunciable that had not been tangible before.

Responding to the Popular Demand: Itinerary for the Socio-Political Learning of Situated Agroecologies in Chile

Agroecology has proven to be successful in responding to the demands and needs of a collective due to the relevance of its approach and proposals, which are built collaboratively between all the actors under a specific context that focuses on the actions developed. This is facilitated when spaces of horizontal interaction are generated through dialogues between different perspectives and experiences. In this perspective, agroecological training in higher education, i.e., university level, requires structural changes that go beyond the incorporation of technical content. Based on a critical documentary analysis of the records generated in the implementation of teaching innovation projects, the learning itinerary in agroecology is presented, consisting of four certifications based on transformational learning and supported by active methodologies. The potentialities, including marketing potential, of the proposed learning itinerary relate to curricular design, the articulation of the itinerary, the suitability of the learning methodologies used, the performance of the teachers, and the participation of the students. It is concluded that the implementation of flexible itineraries allows for addressing the transformation processes necessary for an agroecological transition in which we see a convergence of students’ skills, the learning objectives, and the requirements of the various actors with which they interact.

Resisting extractive uses of the archive in Colombian experimental non-fiction

In the first two decades of the 21st century, a cluster of Colombian filmmakers developed a distinctive body of work engaging with the country’s histories of violence through critical documentary and experimental devices. A nuanced use of appropriated footage is a recurrent feature in these works, signalling their engagement with historical events through mediated representation and a ‘suspicion of the archive’ (Suárez 2020, 542). This paper identifies distinct patterns in the filmmakers’ relationship to the materiality of archive materials, focusing on selected works by Camilo Restrepo, Laura Huertas Millán, and Juan Soto. It argues that the remediation of digital found footage, personal and private archives enacts reflexive and distancing strategies in order to obstruct extractivist uses of images. In their choice and use of appropriated and archival moving images, filmmakers grapple with their own social and geographic positionality in ambiguous ways.

De entrada por salida Precariedad del trabajo y exclusión de trabajadoras domésticas en Sinaloa

This article analyzes the conditions of domestic workers in Culiacán, Sinaloa. In this work activity there are working conditions that show the workers are inserted in the precarious ness, exclusion and job insecurity. A critical documentary review was carried out on the concepts of precariousness, exclusion and insecurity from the perspective of labor sociology. The field work was carried out in the city of Culiacán from 2016, 2017 and 2019 in which 10 semi-structured interviews were applied to the female workers. In these narratives, the conditions of the workers are described who use family, neighborhood and friendship social networks for their labor insertion.

The Four Critical Links of SARS-CoV-2 in Latin America and the Caribbean: Challenges for Health from the South

Based on a review of the country experiences and the critical documentary analysis of contents, policies and actions, this paper characterizes the critical links in the response to the public health emergency of SARS-CoV-2 with comprehensive, reproducible claims, unique, monocultural and universal applied both to the State and to Latin American and Caribbean societies.

Vaccine Hesitancy and Differential Susceptibility to Media Coverage: A Critical Documentary Led to Substantial Reductions in Human Papillomavirus Vaccine Uptake in Denmark.

To investigate whether negative media coverage of the human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine led to a decrease in the uptake of the first dose of the HPV vaccine (HPV1) in Denmark and, importantly, whether some groups of individuals were more susceptible to negative media coverage. We measured HPV vaccine uptake of 12-year-old girls born in 2001 to 2004 using Danish administrative data. A quasi-experimental design was employed to assess whether a documentary that was critical of the HPV vaccine and aired in March 2015 affected HPV uptake. The documentary led to a quick and substantial decrease in the monthly propensity to vaccinate, which dropped 3 percentage points-or about 50%-in response to the documentary. Responses differed substantially across subgroups, and girls from families with high socioeconomic status (SES) were more susceptible to the negative media coverage. Susceptibility to negative media coverage varied substantially across subgroups, highlighting the need for policy makers to appropriately target and differentiate initiatives to improve vaccine compliance rates.

A preparação dos padres para lidarem com a situação de morte no Brasil: uma revisão documental e crítica

Na atualidade encontramos muitos estudos voltados à situação de morte, em várias áreas do conhecimento. Talvez o interesse atual esteja relacionado às transformações sociais, culturais e tecnológicas das últimas décadas que atingem a vida humana e também a situação de morte. As pesquisas proporcionam avanços na compreensão e na forma como as ciências abordam concretamente a situação. Nesse contexto, a Igreja Católica é convocada a repensar as orientações aos clérigos para o trabalho específico junto aos que estão morrendo e aos enlutados. A partir dessas considerações, este artigo se propôs a realizar uma revisão documental crítica de como a Igreja Católica considera, em seus documentos oficiais, a preparação dos clérigos para lidar com a situação de morte, com orientações para a prática pastoral no Brasil, a partir do Concílio Vaticano II. Foram selecionados doze documentos, a partir de três critérios: temporal, objetivo dos documentos e tipo de publicação. Todos os documentos foram analisado e foram destacadas as referências que eles apresentam com relação ao objetivo deste artigo. O resultado mostra a relevância das formulações teológicas e dos documentos direcionados às práticas rituais, entretanto somente o ritual não garante a boa preparação dos presbíteros. Observa-se uma lacuna quanto a reflexões e orientações específicas para a prática pastoral dos padres. Considera-se ainda que esse trabalho deve contar com as contribuições das ciências que muito produzem sobre o assunto.

A Meta 17 do PNE 2014-2024: Vencimento salarial dos professores da Rede Estadual de Ensino de Mato Grosso do Sul

O artigo analisa a valorização do profissional docente da rede estadual de ensino de Mato Grosso do Sul, no período de 2007 a 2017. O trabalho foi delineado metodologicamente por abordagem critica dialética, estudo documental e bibliográfico, a partir de aproximações possibilitadas pelo estudo dos Planos de Carreiras, Cargos e Remuneração para o Magistério. Com vistas à materialização da Meta 17 do Plano Nacional de Educação (PNE) e suas estratégias, expressas por meio das condições de seus vencimentos salariais, analisa a evolução dos vencimentos inicial e final para professores com jornada de 40 horas. Constatou-se que a particularidade do Plano Estadual de Educação (PEE) do caso do estado de Mato Grosso do Sul mostrou-se tímido na produção de impactos significativos em termos de ganhos e/ou aumentos no vencimento docente, no limite reproduzindo os dispositivos do PNE, como, a princípio, indicavam as políticas de fundos contábeis.

Documental Político en Norteamérica: Una herramienta de contrainformación y configuración de las identidades políticas

This article discusses the political documentary in North America in the early twenty-first century. Michael Moore (U.S.), Jennifer Abbot, Mark Achbar, and Joel Bakan (Canada), directors of The Corporation (2003), as well as Carlos Mendoza, founder of Canal 6 de Julio, distinguish themselves for making critical documentaries that question political establishments and their implications. In order to understand the role of the documentary in the historical world, the article resorts to film theory and advancements in videoactivism. This article’s contribution consists in showing key aspects of certain historical processes of political denunciation and the contemporary production of documentary film.

What Are the Main Challenges Impeding Implementation of the Spatial Plans in Egypt Using Ecotourism Development as an Example?

In Egypt, highly technical plans are drawn up, but nobody puts them into practice. They always end up gathering dust on the shelves of national agencies or local government without being utilised to make improvements to local economic or environmental well-being. This is because such plans did not reflect the stakeholder interests nor deal with their conflicts. The collaborative planning approach is exalted as one of the best methods to help reach a consensus between the stakeholders about the issues and to advance shared solutions and then increase the likelihood of successful implementation of a plan. However, the stakeholder collaboration and engagement practice in Egypt remains ineffective. This research seeks to investigate and understand the challenges and barriers that have hindered the efficiency of stakeholder engagement during ecotourism planning as a sectorial case study by focusing on two case studies, and critiquing existing experiences of ecotourism development planning based upon a conceptual framework for investigating and understanding those challenges. Evidence was drawn from a critical documentary review, and combined with observation and semi-structured interviews with 56 ecotourism experts and stakeholders. The analysis suggests that the stakeholder engagement was tokenistic, and the central government was still dominant. This is a result of three groups of challenges including deficiencies in operationalising stakeholder engagement and challenges associated with the government and non-government stakeholder groups.

For a Concrete Aesthetics: Against Avant-Garde Film c. 1930

For a Concrete Aesthetics: Against Avant-Garde Film c. 1930 Jennifer Wild (bio) Because it is in the earth considered as a whole (earth, water, air) that geniuses must be sought. —Robert Desnos, “Pygmalion and the Sphynx” (1930) On June 14, 1930, before the members of the Spectateurs d’Avant-Garde ciné-club, Jean Vigo delivered a lecture famously calling for a renewal in filmmaking he described as “social cinema.”1 Pronounced before the second screening of his critical documentary A Propos de Nice (FR, 1930),Vigo sought neither to magically “unveil” (révéler) this new category to his audience nor to “suffocate” the term with too much formulation.2 Rather, he strived to activate an understanding of social cinema by casting its central aims within a two-fold relational structure. First, he underscored the spectator’s own relationship to films by setting out to “awaken” their “latent,” thus established if unrecognized or repressed, “need” for “good films.” Second, he stressed the potential of a “good film’s” relational subject-matter itself, pin-pointing films “dealing with society and its relationships with individuals and things.” Insofar as Vigo’s emphasis on spectatorial and image-based relationality anticipates Guy Debord’s critical thought decades later that examined the “social relationship between people that is mediated by images,” here I want to situate Vigo’s thought within a line of inquiry that emerges among different factions of the avant-garde working in France during the late 1920s and early 1930s.3 In these years defined by the transition to sound film, a host of artists, writers, and filmmakers made a decisive turn toward a “concrete” rather than an abstract picture of revolution and revolutionary aesthetics. By 1930, the rejection [End Page 67] of certain forms of experimental or abstract film style had become a political imperative insofar as the formal experiments of the 1920s, which often depicted interior states or subjective experiences, were broadly deemed to be a fraudulent engagement with film’s most inherent and material political aesthetic potential. By the early 1930s, traditional forms of filmic experiment were thought by many associated with the artistic avant-garde to conceal the film image’s capacity to function as, echoing Vigo, social aesthetic thought, and also to degrade its ability to question the socio-political dimensions of the human being’s relationship with the world’s materiality. Even as Vigo took Luis Buñuel’s “experimental” or Surrealist film Un Chien Andalou (SP, 1929) as his central example of a social cinema, he did so in order to critically counter the formalist strains of “pure cinema” that had become staples of avant-garde filmmaking in the 1920s. Unlike film experiments by Henri Chomette (who coined the term “pure cinema”) or Germaine Dulac who theorized its formal parameters, Vigo argued that social cinema “avoid[ed] the overly artistic subtlety of a pure cinema which contemplates its supernavel from one angle, yet another angle, always another angle, a super-angle; technique for technique’s sake.” Rather than pursuing an empty exploration of filmic plasticity or formal reflexivity, Buñuel’s film, he argued, held the spectator with a powerful “grip” that effectively killed “our spinelessness, which makes us accept all the monstrosities committed by the men dropped upon the earth.” With a camera that functioned “more than one’s everyday eye,” this example of a social cinema provided the viewer with the reciprocal capacity to “see our ingenuousness which turns to cowardice in contact with a world which we accept, this world of exaggerated prejudices, of self-denials and of pathetically quixotic regrets.” An achievement of such magnitude could not be had by purely formal or poetic means, but only with a “savage” approach to poetry that exposed the societal frame guiding the relationships between individuals and “things.”4 Insofar as social cinema engaged a subject matter that forcefully stimulated desire for the cinema, thereby opening a new and powerful relationship with the spectator, above all else these subjects, Vigo argued, “ate meat.”5 With this fleshly metaphor, Vigo advanced a political aesthetics that traded in the material relations and needs of the human being within a social frame. This metaphor resonates with...

Catholic religion teachers in Chile: an approach to identity building with regard to existing mission-profession tension

Religion classes are found throughout the entire school system in Chile. These are mostly conducted by Catholic teachers who form their own professional identity from internal demands (imposed by the Catholic Church) and external demands (imposed by the school culture, social media, students and their families). This paper presents a reference framework for the professional teacher identity and analyses the linguistic structures and persuasion strategies present in three documents that directly question this group of teachers, building an identity profile of them. Discursive mechanisms are identified which legitimise identity traits. The way in which said productions influence the thoughts and actions of their readership is also analysed. A documentary study design is used based on critical documentary analysis. The investigation shows breaks in the discourse and an existing tension between the mission and the profession, underlining that the Catholic religion teacher is first and foremost an evangeliser. The performance capacity of this discourse on the listeners is discussed along with the effect of the almost complete absence of references to teaching professionalism and the possible influence on the development and results of the subject.

Política audiovisual europea y diversidad cultural en la era digital

Se estudia la implementación de la Convención UNESCO de 2005 sobre diversidad cultural en la formulación de las políticas europeas destinadas al audiovisual digital. Partiendo de un análisis documental crítico se constata la influencia del tratado, aunque más en la esfera de la promoción que de la protección y con una función más legitimadora de lo existente que generadora de nuevas iniciativas.

Mediatizing Gaza: An Introduction

This full-length article introduces a special issue on the mediatization of Gaza. Beginning with a discussion on the ‘remarkable’ debate that took place on the MeCCSA mailing list during the Israeli bombardment of Gaza in July-August 2014, the article goes on to consider the role of the media in the conflict, and the relation between media and war, more generally. The article provides an overview of recent events in Gaza, the critique of media coverage of the conflict and recent literature on mediatization theory, before summarising the contents of this special issue of Networking Knowledge. The issue features articles on media coverage of Gaza by BBC World, the Jerusalem Post and Haaretz; the use of social media by the Palestine Solidarity Movement and young adult Palestinian refugees in Lebanon; critical documentary photographs of ‘unspectacular’ violence; and data visualisations of audio and visual tweets during the 2014 assault on Gaza. It closes with an interview with Helga Tawil-Souri on the ‘digital occupation’ of Gaza.