Video Essays Research Articles

Mapping the Anomalous in Caryl Phillips’s “Heartland”

[sic] – a Journal of Literature, Culture and Literary Translation focuses on theoretical, empirical and artistic research in the fields of culture, literature and literary translation. [sic] thus welcomes the submission of works that focus on various theoretical or empirical problems within the fields listed above, as well as original translations. By publishing research papers, video essays, reviews, literary criticism, interviews and literature in translation, [sic] wishes to offer a wide, interdisciplinary approach to dominant, but also marginal and/or currently unrecognized as well as emerging literary and cultural trends and practices and in this way open a dialogue between proponents of different approaches to the said areas. As such, [sic] is seen as an international platform for scholars, practitioners and artists dealing with culture, literature and literary translation.

A Critical Discourse Analysis Approach to Othering: Depiction of the Syrian Refugee Experience in Turkish Children’s Literature

[sic] – a Journal of Literature, Culture and Literary Translation focuses on theoretical, empirical and artistic research in the fields of culture, literature and literary translation. [sic] thus welcomes the submission of works that focus on various theoretical or empirical problems within the fields listed above, as well as original translations. By publishing research papers, video essays, reviews, literary criticism, interviews and literature in translation, [sic] wishes to offer a wide, interdisciplinary approach to dominant, but also marginal and/or currently unrecognized as well as emerging literary and cultural trends and practices and in this way open a dialogue between proponents of different approaches to the said areas. As such, [sic] is seen as an international platform for scholars, practitioners and artists dealing with culture, literature and literary translation.

6 Poems

[sic] – a Journal of Literature, Culture and Literary Translation focuses on theoretical, empirical and artistic research in the fields of culture, literature and literary translation. [sic] thus welcomes the submission of works that focus on various theoretical or empirical problems within the fields listed above, as well as original translations. By publishing research papers, video essays, reviews, literary criticism, interviews and literature in translation, [sic] wishes to offer a wide, interdisciplinary approach to dominant, but also marginal and/or currently unrecognized as well as emerging literary and cultural trends and practices and in this way open a dialogue between proponents of different approaches to the said areas. As such, [sic] is seen as an international platform for scholars, practitioners and artists dealing with culture, literature and literary translation.

Drugost ženskog/vještičjeg tijela: institucionalne prakse o(d)značivanja

[sic] – a Journal of Literature, Culture and Literary Translation focuses on theoretical, empirical and artistic research in the fields of culture, literature and literary translation. [sic] thus welcomes the submission of works that focus on various theoretical or empirical problems within the fields listed above, as well as original translations. By publishing research papers, video essays, reviews, literary criticism, interviews and literature in translation, [sic] wishes to offer a wide, interdisciplinary approach to dominant, but also marginal and/or currently unrecognized as well as emerging literary and cultural trends and practices and in this way open a dialogue between proponents of different approaches to the said areas. As such, [sic] is seen as an international platform for scholars, practitioners and artists dealing with culture, literature and literary translation.

Mali Clancy

[sic] – a Journal of Literature, Culture and Literary Translation focuses on theoretical, empirical and artistic research in the fields of culture, literature and literary translation. [sic] thus welcomes the submission of works that focus on various theoretical or empirical problems within the fields listed above, as well as original translations. By publishing research papers, video essays, reviews, literary criticism, interviews and literature in translation, [sic] wishes to offer a wide, interdisciplinary approach to dominant, but also marginal and/or currently unrecognized as well as emerging literary and cultural trends and practices and in this way open a dialogue between proponents of different approaches to the said areas. As such, [sic] is seen as an international platform for scholars, practitioners and artists dealing with culture, literature and literary translation.

Perceiving the Migrant as “Other”: Analysis of Three Main Categories in the European Migration Context

[sic] – a Journal of Literature, Culture and Literary Translation focuses on theoretical, empirical and artistic research in the fields of culture, literature and literary translation. [sic] thus welcomes the submission of works that focus on various theoretical or empirical problems within the fields listed above, as well as original translations. By publishing research papers, video essays, reviews, literary criticism, interviews and literature in translation, [sic] wishes to offer a wide, interdisciplinary approach to dominant, but also marginal and/or currently unrecognized as well as emerging literary and cultural trends and practices and in this way open a dialogue between proponents of different approaches to the said areas. As such, [sic] is seen as an international platform for scholars, practitioners and artists dealing with culture, literature and literary translation.

Motivation: Up and down: Implementation of a motivational model and assessing the results

The opportunity to enroll in a foreign university skyrockets the motivation of many students. However, a huge number of these students eventually find themselves, in the midst of their studies, to unsure that they will even be able to graduate. This article focuses on the causes of demotivation for these students and aims to find a solution to this problem. Our study relies on previous research conducted by H. Douglas Brown, Zoltan Doernyei, Natalie Ness, Penny Ur, Desley I. Watson-Raston, and others. This article contributes to this literature by, first, looking into the causes of motivation loss among foreign students studying the English language in Russia, and second, by proposing certain tactics that could be put into practice in the classroom. By conducting our research over the last year and a half, we have come to several conclusions. According to our observations, authentic materials, along with the freedom for students to choose study topics and the way assignments are presented determinately increases not only student motivation but also improve learning results in speaking and writing. In our research, we tried to use a big variety of research methods. These included focus and control groups, general and individual questionnaires, video essays, and classic tests.

Video Essays: Curating and Transforming Film Education through Artistic Research

This article is dedicated to all my SOAS undergraduate and postgraduate class members of the academic year 2019-2020, Marguerite Culot, Maximilian Frederik, Umloda Emad Ibrahim, Mostafa Khattab, Ewa Kataryna Kiszelka, Alix Lafosse, Peiwen Li, Yuan Liao, Leen M. Fouad, Donovan Mathews, Ying Sang, Clara Katharina Von Harling, Hsueh Liang Wong, Jianbin Zhang, Cameron McGrath, Greta Alexandra Bassett, Harriet Louis Bessant Marsh, Samantha Carrick, Kim Eckersley, Alexander Hall, Christopher Stump, Ha Linh To, Inhe Yang and Jemima Presland. They were part of my first-year experience of implementing video essays as a creative assessment method. I am very grateful for their enthusiastic response to my invitation to create audiovisual criticism, and impressed by the quality of the work they produced. In their uncertainty lies my learning experience, the one that encourages me to keep engaging with this creative assessment method, and to produce them for various purposes. They have been my main partners in this collaborative task of working together towards finding some academic room for audiovisual criticism. They have been active participants in the learning and teaching of the study of film through film. My deepest gratitude also to all those colleagues who have been great sources of inspiration and supportive of my creative initiatives, starting from Prof Lindiwe Dovey. Many thanks to her and the whole Screen Worlds Team. I am so grateful to fellow colleagues at the School of Arts in SOAS, such as Prof Shane McCausland, who enthusiastically embraced and shared my interest in recursion, Dr Caspar Melville, Prof Lucy Duran, and Dr Morgan Davies, who welcomed me to a sonic discussion to share my experience teaching (or rather, being taught) video essays. I further thank the SOAS Decolonising Working Group. I am also grateful to Bartolomeo Meletti, for his eagerness to join me in the challenging endeavour of creating a guide to make video essays. Finally, I would like to thank the anonymous peer reviewer of this article, for their thorough feedback and generous engagement with my work.

El aula como laboratorio de experimentación visual

El presente ensayo visual trata de mostrar algunas soluciones a dos problemáticas relacionadas con la tríada ‘Arte - Educación - Tecnología’. La primera es la desconexión existente entre los contenidos que se imparten en las asignaturas de Educación Artística en relación a las nuevas visualidades o formas de creación artística vinculadas a las nuevas tecnologías. La segunda es la falta de aprovechamiento de los recursos tecnológicos disponibles en las aulas en relación a la enseñanza de las artes visuales.
 El punto de partida para resolver estas carencias se sitúa en los proyectores como recursos tecnológicos eminentemente visuales que se pueden en contrar en la mayoría de los centros educativos y que a su vez son la base de las creaciones contemporáneas que utilizan la Projection-Based Augmented Reality (PBAR) [Realidad Aumentada Basada en la Proyección].
 Tomando como referencia algunas ideas didácticas del cineasta granadino José Val del Omar (1904-1982), se detallan seis ejemplos que proponen la adopción de estrategias educativas basadas en la experimentación con estas tecnologías en la formación inicial del profesorado, transformando el aula en un laboratorio en el que el aprendizaje se acerca a los procesos creativos de las y los artistas profesionales.
 Por último, es importante destacar que las imágenes que poseen un marco con línea discontinua gris contienen un hipervínculo que permiten acceder a once videoensayos que amplían la información visual de cada apartado.

Embodiment and Social Distancing: Practices

A collection of five video essays on embodiment and social distancing, with a focus on practices. RAFFAELE RUFO, “Dancing Together Alone: What Can Be Learnt About Connection When Touch is Forbidden?” (00:10): This video essay reengages the experience of leading a dance improvisation practice on Zoom during the Coronavirus lockdown. As a tango and contact improvisation dancer confined at home, I felt urged to ask: what can be learnt about embodied connection when we are not allowed to physically touch each other? ANAT BEN-DAVID AND CATHARINE ANNE CARY, “What’s the Matter?” (05:54): Performers, scenographers, musicians and wordsmiths Anat Ben-David and Catharine Cary improvised via ZOOM every Tuesday from March to May 2020. Embracing latency, zoom’s affordances, limitations and distortions, they show here excerpts of a transformed body of work. Separated by 5218 km, given the Covid-19 situation, it could have been 200 meters. DEANNA BORLAND-SENTINELLA, LOUISE GWENNETH PHILLIPS, AND ALICE OWEN, “Virtually Embodied: Remembering the Sensations of Connection” (12:04): This film is an exploration of the body: Being present to place and time; being aware of connection with others, whether that be in reality or through virtual connection and sensorial memory. NATHALIE S. FARI, “Notes from a zoom 5Rhythms® session” (17:10): By using a three-hour 5Rhythms® online workshop as basis, this video sheds light into the ways in which the practitioner interacts and engages with both one’s own bodily awareness and the new technology of zoom. AMBERBECKYCREATIVE, “Sheltering in Spacetimematterings: Audiovisual Considerations of Social Distancing” (22:42): Two socially distant authors glitch audiovisual intra-actions through embodied (dis)orientations of space, time, and matter in past/present/future collapsed to (re)present what it’s like to shelter in place during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Embodiment and Social Distancing: Editorial

We are at a point in history in which bodies are linked in truly unprecedented ways. There are new types of limitations, new opportunities, and also new kinds of violence taking place through these connections. It is a lot to take in and very challenging to grasp as it unfolds. In this editorial video essay, the editors of the Journal of Embodied Research’s special issue on “embodiment and social distancing” introduce the fifteen video essays that follow.

Embodiment and Social Distancing: Projects

A collection of five video essays on embodiment and social distancing, with a focus on projects. ANNIE ABRAHAMS AND DANIEL PINHEIRO, “Why is the use of videoconferencing so exhausting? An analysis on the demands” (00:10): Video footage from Distant Feeling(s) project run by Annie Abrahams & Daniel Pinheiro, a yearly reconnection, eyes closed, no talking. MAURICIO CARRASCO AND DANIEL ZEA, “Vortex Decameron: Building narratologies in pandemic times” (05:22): Emerging from another plague, the fourteenth century Black Death, Boccaccio’s Decameron presents the reader with examples of pre, mid and post-plague societal perceptions and norms. This correspondence inspired Ensemble Vortex to propose a newly commissioned series of contemporary narrative works. TINA LA PORTA, “Internet Art At The Turn Of The Millennium” (11:32): This body of work spans from 1994 to 2005, during this time I made over twenty web-based works that explored the idea of “live-ness” on the internet. ALICIA DE MANUEL, DAVID CASACUBERTA, AND PEP GATELL, “La Maldición de la Corona: Revisiting videoconference as a system to foster group creativity” (16:50): A collective and remote experiment based on William Shakespeare’s classic Macbeth, carried out by Fundación Épica La Fura dels Baus during the lockdown. The experiment has involved around thirty creatives and resulted in a pioneering work that transcends technological barriers and investigates the future of theater. MELISSANDRE VARIN, “Freezing Elements of Research” (21:54): the visual is the abstract of the audio/the audio is the abstract of the visual – altogether – with you – it forms an assemblage into braids.

Video Composition As Multimodal Writing: Rethinking the Essay As Post-Literacy

This essay describes an academic experience that both authors shared during a research visit to Russia in November 2018. The goal of this experience was to introduce participants (students and professors) to the notion of multimodal writing as an alternative to how we create texts in class. The essay first contextualizes the idea of “post-literacy” as part of a worldwide move to rethink literacy, especially in this century. The essay then conceptualizes the notion of multimodality as a feature of these “post-literacies” and contextualizes this concept within the practical experience as both authors undertook in a masterclass at a Russian institution. For the masterclass, the authors asked everybody to make videos using only one smartphone and any other resources they had right beside them. After sharing what the activity was about and what attendants did, the authors provide a final moment of reflexivity for others who may want to consider implementing multimodal texts in their classrooms.
 Keywords: Post-literacy, multimodality, design, video essays, text creation

Tarkovsky's Napes

Tarkovsky’s Napes begins with a study of Tarkovsky’s signature "nape" shot before moving into a more personal examination of crisis. Like many video essays, this film shifts modes of address as it transitions from subject to subject. Several questions came up, personal and general, while making this video. Is it an anti-fan video from a very devoted fan? Is it really a video essay? How far can a video-essay reveal something about the one being analysed but above all about the analyser?

Transcontinental Contacts: The Marainis’ Journey from Italy to Japan

[sic] – a Journal of Literature, Culture and Literary Translation focuses on theoretical, empirical and artistic research in the fields of culture, literature and literary translation. [sic] thus welcomes the submission of works that focus on various theoretical or empirical problems within the fields listed above, as well as original translations. By publishing research papers, video essays, reviews, literary criticism, interviews and literature in translation, [sic] wishes to offer a wide, interdisciplinary approach to dominant, but also marginal and/or currently unrecognized as well as emerging literary and cultural trends and practices and in this way open a dialogue between proponents of different approaches to the said areas. As such, [sic] is seen as an international platform for scholars, practitioners and artists dealing with culture, literature and literary translation.

A City as the Key to Interpreting a Novel by Alessandro Baricco

[sic] – a Journal of Literature, Culture and Literary Translation focuses on theoretical, empirical and artistic research in the fields of culture, literature and literary translation. [sic] thus welcomes the submission of works that focus on various theoretical or empirical problems within the fields listed above, as well as original translations. By publishing research papers, video essays, reviews, literary criticism, interviews and literature in translation, [sic] wishes to offer a wide, interdisciplinary approach to dominant, but also marginal and/or currently unrecognized as well as emerging literary and cultural trends and practices and in this way open a dialogue between proponents of different approaches to the said areas. As such, [sic] is seen as an international platform for scholars, practitioners and artists dealing with culture, literature and literary translation.

“Collateral Damage in the War on Travel Writing”: Recovering Reader Responses to Contemporary Travel Writing

[sic] – a Journal of Literature, Culture and Literary Translation focuses on theoretical, empirical and artistic research in the fields of culture, literature and literary translation. [sic] thus welcomes the submission of works that focus on various theoretical or empirical problems within the fields listed above, as well as original translations. By publishing research papers, video essays, reviews, literary criticism, interviews and literature in translation, [sic] wishes to offer a wide, interdisciplinary approach to dominant, but also marginal and/or currently unrecognized as well as emerging literary and cultural trends and practices and in this way open a dialogue between proponents of different approaches to the said areas. As such, [sic] is seen as an international platform for scholars, practitioners and artists dealing with culture, literature and literary translation.

Tourist Writing: Facing and Embracing the Otherness of Space and Narrative

[sic] – a Journal of Literature, Culture and Literary Translation focuses on theoretical, empirical and artistic research in the fields of culture, literature and literary translation. [sic] thus welcomes the submission of works that focus on various theoretical or empirical problems within the fields listed above, as well as original translations. By publishing research papers, video essays, reviews, literary criticism, interviews and literature in translation, [sic] wishes to offer a wide, interdisciplinary approach to dominant, but also marginal and/or currently unrecognized as well as emerging literary and cultural trends and practices and in this way open a dialogue between proponents of different approaches to the said areas. As such, [sic] is seen as an international platform for scholars, practitioners and artists dealing with culture, literature and literary translation.

Is Apocalyptic Kiev Still Apocalyptic Kiev in English Translations of Mikhail Bulgakov's Novel The White Guard?

[sic] – a Journal of Literature, Culture and Literary Translation focuses on theoretical, empirical and artistic research in the fields of culture, literature and literary translation. [sic] thus welcomes the submission of works that focus on various theoretical or empirical problems within the fields listed above, as well as original translations. By publishing research papers, video essays, reviews, literary criticism, interviews and literature in translation, [sic] wishes to offer a wide, interdisciplinary approach to dominant, but also marginal and/or currently unrecognized as well as emerging literary and cultural trends and practices and in this way open a dialogue between proponents of different approaches to the said areas. As such, [sic] is seen as an international platform for scholars, practitioners and artists dealing with culture, literature and literary translation.

Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities: A Fake Tourist Report and a True Literary Testimony

[sic] – a Journal of Literature, Culture and Literary Translation focuses on theoretical, empirical and artistic research in the fields of culture, literature and literary translation. [sic] thus welcomes the submission of works that focus on various theoretical or empirical problems within the fields listed above, as well as original translations. By publishing research papers, video essays, reviews, literary criticism, interviews and literature in translation, [sic] wishes to offer a wide, interdisciplinary approach to dominant, but also marginal and/or currently unrecognized as well as emerging literary and cultural trends and practices and in this way open a dialogue between proponents of different approaches to the said areas. As such, [sic] is seen as an international platform for scholars, practitioners and artists dealing with culture, literature and literary translation.