Transnational Audiences Research Articles

Doing expertise multilingually and multimodally in online English teaching videos

The use of online videos as a teaching resource is gaining importance. It opens up opportunities for the creation of knowledge, as educational content can now be accessed by anyone with an Internet connection. This democratisation of access to knowledge can also be seen in the language learning context, where English language teachers create online videos for a transnational audience. In this paper, we present a case study of how two online English teachers ‘do expertise’ in their lessons, drawing on their multilingual and multimodal repertoire so that expertise is talked into being. We conducted semi-structured interviews and analysed them by interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA) to make sense of the teachers’ experiences of designing online teaching materials, and how their expertise was talked into being in the process. The aim of this paper is to contribute to understanding of expertise in the context of online language teaching. We argue that online teachers ‘do expertise’ by drawing on their multimodal design knowledge, pedagogical knowledge and linguistic knowledge.

Casting My Brilliant Friend’s Authentic Stardom

Using the The HBO/Rai co-production My Brilliant Friend as a case study, this essay addresses the understudied arena of casting, particularly in relation to the creation of the “authentic stardom” of the child and adolescent nonprofessional performers. Drawing from personal interviews with Laura Muccino and Sara Casani, two of Italian television’s most important casting directors, excerpts of which are included throughout the essay, I consider the gendered practices of casting in relation to Muccino and Casani’s epic search for the four nonprofessional child and adolescent girl performers who made the characters from the novel come to life. I focus on the casting and reception of the child and adolescent female actors in the series. In particular, this essay engages with performances of adolescence as these performances relate to the productions’ desire to represent an authentic experience of youth in postwar Italy that is exported to transnational audiences.

Digital humor against essentialization: Strategies of Baltic Russian-speaking social media users

This paper asks what happens to the civic identity of people who have hybrid, transnational identities during times of geo-political tensions when the interests of individuals' historical/symbolic homeland clash with those of individuals' country of current residence. We focus our inquiry on the digital spaces where much of identity work and exercise of citizenship takes place today. Inspired by the concepts of “digital acts of citizenship” (Isin & Ruppert, 2015) and “affective publics” (Papacharissi, 2015), we report the results of a case study that explores the performative, playful forms of digital citizenship enacted by members of the Russian-speaking audiences in the ex-Soviet, Baltic countries of Estonia and Latvia. Against the backdrop of the on-going crisis in Ukraine, members of this group tend to use these forms of digital citizenship to resist the emotionally charged pre-election discourse of essentialization and securitization, and to de-politicize complex, painful issues of geo-politics and nation-building. The strategies utilized by them reveal that transnational audiences actively employ digital devices in order to maintain their hybrid identity, and civic autonomy and dignity and to “make peace” during times of geo-political conflict.

Ritual culture phenomenon in Igbo films: a study of Money is Money

Film as a means of communication is a very potent instrument for image making, cultural diplomacy, propaganda, education, information and entertainment. The Nigerian film industry (Nollywood) ranks among the first three top world filmmaking industries in terms of the quantity of productions, popularity amongst Nigerians and the transnational audiences. Culture is the bedrock of Nollywood’s thematic film expositions. One can, therefore, conclude that Nollywood is Nigeria’s cultural ambassador. Although Nollywood films are quite potent in celebrating and promoting Nigerian cultures, some of these films have come under thematic criticisms as they glamourize negative, ritual themes in the name of culture. It is against this backdrop that this article examines the occult ritual of cultural phenomenon in Prince Emeka Ani’s Money is Money (2005) and the negative image it portends for Nigeria globally. The film depicts Andy (Kanayo O. Kanayo), an Igbo youth who deploys occult means as an instrument for making money even at the cost of his life. This paper uses content analysis and literary methods as tools to interrogate the preponderance of the occult themes in Nollywood movies. The findings show that Nigeria has several acceptable cultures as raw materials that could positively portray Nigeria’s cultures globally. However, the unceasing preoccupation with “juju”, the relentless celebration of dark rituals and diabolical cults could make viewers cultivate the perception of reality portrayed by these films. Money is Money celebrates the non-attractive side of Nigeria. Therefore, it is recommended that the Nollywood film professionals tell the global audience acceptable culturally based value themes about Nigeria.
 Keywords: Igboland, Ritual culture, Nollywood film professionals, Igbo film, Nigerian cultures

Seeking Transnational, Digital-native News From Latin America: An Audience Analysis Through the Lens of Social Capital

ABSTRACT Digital-native news sites from Latin America are changing the region’s industry. These news organizations are accessed nationally and also across national boundaries. This study examined, through the theoretical lens of social capital, factors contributing to the creation of transnational audiences for these news organizations. A survey of audiences for these independent news sites in El Salvador, Guatemala, Mexico, Nicaragua, Peru, and Venezuela indicated that economic and network capital predicted transnational digital-native news use. Transnational audiences were more likely to be younger, female, and with higher income than their national counterparts.

Sense-making of conflicting political news among Baltic Russian-speaking audiences

ABSTRACT This article offers a theoretically explained model for analysing the strategies of vernacular sense-making used by transnational audiences in times of political disagreement. The analysis proceeds from the findings of earlier studies that reveal that audience members interpret news in a geopolitically indoctrinated manner despite their exposure to alternative information from geopolitically opposing sources and their general critical stance towards the objectivity of the media in political conflicts. The authors of this qualitative study among Latvian and Estonian Russian-speaking audiences explain how geopolitical convictions are (re)established through interpretations of news reports about politically conflicting events involving Russia vs. Western states. The results reveal that despite of the widespread scepticism and mistrust towards media organizations, the members of audiences strive for independence in their sense-making. In general, there are no signs of a degradation of deliberation as an ideal among the audiences. Nevertheless, the use of moral-cultural heuristics and the search for ‘authentic’ information from personal networks contributes to the enduring hegemony of Russian geopolitical narratives.

‘I Am Also Having Mother Once, and She Is Loving Me’: Reading Cary Joji Fukunaga’s Beasts of No Nation in a Post-Network Era

AbstractThis article examines Cary Joji Fukunaga’s film adaptation of Uzodinma Iweala’s Beasts of No Nation, with a special focus on the final scene, in which a counsellor is assigned to help the protagonist deal with the trauma of having been a child soldier. While the casting of a black African actor as the counsellor in Fukunaga’s film may appear to detract from the novel’s interrogation of the uneven power relations between Africa and America, an interpretation oscillating between novel and film reveals that there may be some benefits to erasing the white saviour figure from the scene. The erasure of a white American character not only redirects the focus to relations among Africans but also comments indirectly on the circulation of transnational films via streaming services such as Netflix. Reading in between adapted text and adaptation also yields some important insights about Beasts’ critical engagement with the politics of circulation, reception, and consumption of child-soldier narratives at a time when such narratives have become popular among transnational audiences.

La recepción transnacional del fútbol gallego. El caso de la peña “Lionel Scaloni” del Deportivo La Coruña

Con este trabajo me propongo contribuir a la reflexión sobre la recepción del fútbol gallego en Buenos Aires a partir del caso de la peña “Lionel Scaloni” del Deportivo La Coruña desde la perspectiva de la televisión transnacional. El tipo de abordaje propuesto se basa en el análisis etnográfico, presencial y virtual. El análisis de este caso muestra los límites de utilizar al grupo étnico en los estudios sobre las audiencias de televisión trasnacionales. En cambio, se hace evidente la necesidad de recuperar una noción relacional del espacio.

Beyond Breitbart: Comparing Right‐Wing Digital News Infrastructures in Six Western Democracies

Right‐wing online news media have emerged in many countries as an important force in the media landscape, positioning themselves as an alternative to a perceived political and media mainstream. This article studies these sites as a cornerstone of right‐wing digital news infrastructures in six Western democracies (Sweden, Denmark, Germany, Austria, the United Kingdom, and the United States). Drawing on content analyses of websites and social media accounts on Facebook and Twitter as well as on audience metrics, the article analyses content supply and audience demand structures, as well as organizational and thematic characteristics of seventy alternative right‐wing online news sites. We find that a country’s media and political context, in particular the representation of right‐wing positions in the political and legacy media sphere, can explain variation in the supply of—and demand for—right‐wing news across countries, but is mitigated by transnational audiences. At the same time, we can account for cross‐national heterogeneity of news sites, ranging from sites with a “normalized” appearance to more radical sites that clearly set themselves apart from legacy news outlets in terms of their thematic categories, their funding strategy, and their organizational transparency, leading to various types of digital right‐wing “alternatives” to mainstream news.

Transnational audiences and Asian American performance in the musical "KPOP"

This essay contends with the question of how K-pop, audience performance, and race are intertwined by examining the award-winning musical KPOP. Through its immersive multimedia structure, KPOP reveals how the complex and racialized intertwining of mediated idol and mediated audience complicates the performance of Asian and Asian American identity, and ultimately leads its audience to a different space than an us-versus-them binary.

TRANSNATIONAL TV EXPOSURE BEHAVIOUR OF LAO AMERICAN WOMEN

This research explores transnational television, especially exposure to Thai soap operas, and the behaviour of Lao American women nowadays, for remembering their homeland and reminding them of the ethnic and cultural identity of Laos. Questionnaires and interviews were used to collect data in Minnesota, United States, where Thai television soap operas are on a wave of popularity. This research shows that the majority of middle-aged Lao American female audiences habitually watch Thai television programmes, including soap operas, for two to three hours every day via the Thai Global Network satellite channel or websites on the Internet. Thai television viewing considered as a cultural practice becomes the daily routine in the living room between 6 and 10 p.m. Drawing on transnational audiences and uses and gratifications communication theory, the study concludes that the television exposure behaviours of Lao American women as transnational audiences partly connect their memories of their homeland with the pleasures of viewing soaps, while at the same time reflecting the current lack of socioeconomic citizenship status amongst Lao American women due to their poverty, labouring jobs and the inequality of gender roles in family life. &nbsp

Crossmedia Flows of Documentary Images and the Transnational Communicative Figuration Surrounding Gestational Surrogacy in India

The article is based on the assumption that documentary films are an important ‘ channel of mediation’ (Strathern, 2002, Journal of Molecular Biology, 319(4), 985–993) that helps make visible the changing configurations of family, kinship and social reproduction. It further assumes that documentary images of egg donors, medical procedures, fertility clinics, delivery or labouring bodies of surrogates, and handing over of a ‘commodified’ newborn baby to the commissioning parents effectively convey the repercussions that gestational surrogacy has for all the medicalised bodies which are involved in the transnational processes of reproduction. Widely circulated and received documentaries such as Google Baby (2009), House of Surrogates (2013), Ma Na Sapna: A Mother’s Dream (2013) or Can We See the Baby Bump Please? (2013) often function as a starting point and major reference for the debate about this complex issue. But while academic or journalistic articles mostly refer to individual films and on the theme in focus, the different context(s) of the medium itself are less reflected upon. Documentary filmmaking is of course always situated in a specific sociopolitical context, and this in turn shapes the way in which the visual medium make us, as non-experts, see and learn. It also forms the basis of our quest for more knowledge and better understanding, that is, in this case of the transnational entanglements in the field of assisted reproductive technologies. In addition to that, like any other medium or media-related practice today, documentary filmmaking is also embedded in profoundly transformed media environments, networks and communicative practices. In order to understand how information and knowledge about split parenthood and gestational surrogacy is mediated to transnational audiences and framed in public discussions, it is thus necessary to shed light on the interconnectedness of different media forms and framings through which the communication around this complex topic has formed. Instead of a close reading of selected documentaries, the article therefore attempts to trace and contextualise the crossmedial and translocal itineraries of three key images and central tropes that have influenced the framing of transnational reproduction and gestational surrogacy in India significantly: (a) the medical authority-cum-media actor (i.e., internationally well-known fertility expert and doctor in charge, Dr Nayana Patel), (b) the surrogacy hostels and dormitories (i.e., the central symbol of constant surveillance and control of surrogates) and (c) the metaphor of ‘rented/hired wombs’ (i.e., the notion of a passive provision of body parts and understanding of gestational surrogacy as active labour).

Indigenous radio and digital media: Tautoko FM’s national and transnational audiences

Abstract In this article, we posit that Māori radio as it is structured in Aotearoa/New Zealand is at the same time national, international and transnational. Based on a research project that we carried out with the radio station Tautoko FM, we show that this station caters for national Ngāpuhi audiences, that it engages in international networking with other iwi-based radio stations and that it has invested in transnational connections with diasporic audiences. As a result, it has constructed a public sphere for both national and transnational indigenous audiences. This is facilitated by the changing nature of radio as a medium, which is evolving into a multimedia experience incorporating broadcasting, live streaming, websites and social media. Māori radio in Aotearoa/New Zealand is one example of a global trend in which indigenous communities have adapted new media technologies to re-centre notions of national identity. The digital media landscape allows them to form indigenous media networks, to narrate indigenous experiences in new ways and to acquire attention for indigenous struggles.

Global ghosts: Latin American directors’ transnational histories

This article examines nineteenth-century travel routes and transcultural encounters as imagined in recent films by Latin American directors working abroad and on transnational productions. The examples discussed are Lisandro Alonso’s Jauja (Into the Unknown) (2014), Alejandro González Iñárritu’s The Revenant (2015), Guillermo del Toro’s Crimson Peak (2015), Raúl Ruiz’s Mistérios de Lisboa (Mysteries of Lisbon, 2010) and Valeria Sarmiento’s Linhas de Wellington (Lines of Wellington, 2012). The diverse settings and genres of these films frame stories of the cultural, political and economic change wrought by the nineteenth century’s networks of human mobility and global power. The films have been selected not only because they examine the past through a globalized, intercultural lens, but also because they were explicitly made for transnational audiences and represent the contemporary conditions of transnational production, distribution and consumption. From the networked meta-narratives of Mysteries of Lisbon to the neo-western colonial frontier of The Revenant, the nineteenth century is represented through visual design and in both realist and non-realist modes, but consistently evoking transnational interconnectedness and its relationship to political and economic change, even where that change is not the explicit focus of the story. The invocation of the emergence of global modernity, its visual recreation from the present day, suggests a kind of spectrality, in which the hauntings of both past and future confront and define us now, and inform the ethics and aesthetics of contemporary globalized encounters. Our consumption of these imagined pasts, with their implicit and their explicit ghosts, has the capacity to provoke an ethical reflection on the present. The past is not a space of pure fantasy or escape, but irrevocably present in our lives. The nineteenth century is no simple exotic object of desire nor canvas for fantasy when it is read through the process of imperialism and emergent global capitalism.

Book Review: Transnational Audiences: Media Reception on a Global Scale

Book Review: Transnational Audiences: Media Reception on a Global Scale

Mediating a Disney-style Islam: The Emergence of Egyptian Islamic Animated Cartoons

As early as the 1930s, Egypt was the first Arab country to establish an animation production. While the majority of productions in the eight-decade history of the industry have been aimed at a national audience and conveyed through locally relevant messages, a growing number of films and series on Islamic topics targeting a transnational Muslim audience have emerged since the 1990s. This article examines the growth and characteristics of Egyptian Islamic animated cartoons and the Islamization of animation. It explores how the Egyptian state’s politics in the 1990s and its tightening affiliations with al-Azhar, the country’s highest religious authority, paved the way for such a production. Through a close study of the case of Qisas al-Qur’an (Stories from the Qur’an), the country’s most significant production to date in terms of budget, quality and distribution, this article provides an introduction to the characteristics of Egyptian Islamic animation.

African Students Watching CCTV-Africa: A Structural Reception Analysis of Oppositional Decoding

The ‘going global’ strategy of China’s outbound media has been running for about ten years. The main beneficiary, China Central Television (CCTV) has enhanced its global presence through institutional expansion. The growing influence of CCTV-Africa, as one of CCTV’s major media hubs overseas, is arousing wide discussions in regard to its agenda and journalistic practice as one part of the state media of China. How the role of CCTV-Africa is interacting with the grander structure of Africa-China multilateral relations has been the main focus of scholars’ discursive enquiries. Despite the increasing focus of scholars on the institutional behaviours or media content of CCTV-Africa, the subject of audience reception is under-studied. This research aims to contribute to the field by analysing media reception of a specific group of African students in China from the perspective of structural theories of international communication. Based on the findings of in-depth individual interviews with 38 interviewees (with a particular focus on the oppositional decoding of four interviewees) and frame analysis of CCTV-Africa news, this research reached a theoretical conclusion, concerning the articulation of the alternative reception of transnational audiences. Although the decoding positions of such an audience can be polynary the objective environment (intranational political and economic agenda as structural dominance) limits the projection of alternative opinions into constructive articulation in real life.

Book Review: Transnational Audiences: Media Reception on a Global Scale

Book Review: Transnational Audiences: Media Reception on a Global Scale

The presentation of Catalan universities’ linguistic reality to a transnational audience

This article seeks to explore critically the discourse strategies used by three Catalonian universities on their English-medium websites, directed at (prospective) transnational students, investigating how their higher education (HE) linguistic environments are portrayed. In recent decades, Catalan regained its status of lingua academica alongside Spanish; the use of Catalan in HE is regarded as vital for its long-term sustainability. In this context, efforts to attract transnational students jar with concerns raised about the hegemonic dominance of English as an academic lingua franca. After reviewing salient themes in the literature on the changing landscape of HE in Europe, we describe the linguistic and sociopolitical context of Catalonia in particular, and adopt Fairclough’s three-stage discourse analysis framework to our text analysis. Texts are described and considered in terms of how they can be seen to either reproduce or challenge these emergent themes. Results show that the websites identify English as the world’s undisputed academic lingua franca, and a linguistic gateway to international success. Simultaneously, the websites focus on the social and cultural significance of their local language to its foreign audience, trying to escape the risk of cultural and linguistic harmonisation that has been denounced in English as a Medium of Instruction (EMI) in other comparable contexts. Cet article cherche a explorer de maniere critique les strategies de discours utilisees par trois universites catalanes sur leurs sites web en anglais, a l’intention d’etudiants transnationaux (prospectifs). Il etudie la maniere dont les environnements linguistiques de l’enseignement superieur sont presentes. Au cours des dernieres decennies, le catalan a retrouve son statut de lingua academica aux cotes de l’espagnol; l’utilisation du catalan dans l’enseignement superieur est consideree comme essentielle pour sa viabilite a long terme. Dans ce contexte, les efforts deployes pour attirer les etudiants transnationaux suscitent des inquietudes quant a la domination hegemonique de l’anglais en tant que lingua franca academica. Apres avoir passe en revue les principaux themes de la litterature sur l’evolution de l’enseignement superieur en Europe, nous decrivons le contexte linguistique et sociopolitique de la Catalogne en particulier et nous adoptons le cadre d’analyse du discours en trois etapes, elaboree par Fairclough. Les textes sont decrits et consideres en fonction de la facon dont ils peuvent etre percus comme reproduisant ou contestant ces themes emergents. Les resultats montrent que les sites Web identifient l’anglais comme la lingua franca academica incontestee du monde et la passerelle linguistique vers le succes international. Simultanement, les sites Web mettent l’accent sur l’importance sociale et culturelle de la langue locale aupres de leur public etranger, en essayant d’echapper au risque d’harmonisation culturelle et linguistique qui a ete denonce dans des etudes de l’anglais comme moyen d’instruction (EMI) dans d’autres contextes comparables.

Bridge builders, world makers: Transcultural Studio Ghibli fan crafting

Abstract Whilst global hits such as Pokémon utilized what Marc Steinberg calls anime’s media mix, implementing a multiple-platform narrative world in an attempt to synergize/converge a franchise, what are we to do when one finds a dearth of official merchandise available to transnational audiences? What are the reasons or politics for such a decision that seems to run counter to a long sociocultural history of such media ecology? Equally as important, what do fans do when their championed fan objects offer a relatively restricted media palette? This article looks at how Studio Ghibli has, to a degree, negotiated and/or rejected the traditional ‘anime media mix’. This is not to say that Ghibli is void of media mixing; rather, via online communities, one has seen a growing presence of fan-crafts whereby audiences are making their own Ghibli objects. In doing so, these transcultural fan-made Ghibli objects extend fan ideologies linked to the studio, expanding on what Susan Napier terms ‘MiyazakiWorld’ (2006: 49, 2007: 193). Much like Miyazaki’s philosophy, this is not entirely rejecting industry, but offering creative alternatives. The fan-as-producer of Ghibli objects is doing so through convivial construction. Thus, this article offers new insights into global audience practices and affective meaning-making around Ghibli that goes beyond the films themselves.