Media, Communication and Performing Arts
Permanent URI for this collectionhttps://eresearch.qmu.ac.uk/handle/20.500.12289/7185
Browse
17 results
Search Results
Item THE INSTITUTIONALISATION OF WHISTLEBLOWING IN THE SCOTTISH HEALTH SERVICE: AN INTERPLAY BETWEEN ORGANISATIONS, MEDIA AND POLITICAL INFLUENCE(2025) Burnett, AlexisThe act of whistleblowing has become a common, global phenomenon in recent decades, and the necessity to find satisfactory solutions has become a major focus for organisations world-wide. This is particularly important in the field of health, where the National Health Service has witnessed serious whistleblowing events to the detriment of healthcare staff and, perhaps more importantly, to patients. NHS Scotland is selected as a case study to explore the reconceptualization of whistleblowing as a normative organisational process. This research study contrasts with existing literature on whistleblowing, which has focused primarily on the treatment of healthcare whistleblowers at the hands of their managers and organisations, where the primary victim is the whistleblower, subjected to organisation reprisal. A qualitative research study has been undertaken, which includes interviews with NHS leaders, media coverage of high-profile whistleblowing cases and official whistleblowing-related documents. The primary theme of this thesis concentrates on whistleblowing institutionalisation as an emerging political process initiated by the Scottish Government. This thesis makes two main contributions to the issue of whistleblowing specifically in the Scottish health service. First, it provides evidence of the introduction of whistleblowing institutionalism through related policies and processes for the whole of NHS Scotland and associated organisations, including contractors. Second, it identifies media impact on public policy decision making in relation to whistleblowing with the discovery of a ‘whistleblowing’ specific frame. This frame provides empirical evidence of an influential media on the political landscape.Item DISORIENTATED AFFECTS: ENCOUNTERING QUEER TRAUMA THROUGH EXPERIMENTAL DOCUMENTARY FILM(2025) Mosch, ReginaThis arts-based PhD investigates microaggressions against queer bodies through an experimental documentary film art process. While the idea of a spectacular, very violent, and rupturing trauma experience begins to take on more nuanced perspectives through inquiries of feminist, post/de/anticolonial and queer scholarship, the particular fragmented, embodied and subjective affects of an exposure to microaggressions have as of yet not been fully understood within trauma studies. What do microaggressions do with queer bodies? How do they change their shape and distort their appearance, thus enacting oppression on and beneath the surface of queer bodies? Thisstudy uses experimental film aesthetics and a queer film-phenomenological lens informed by Sara Ahmed (2006) and Katharina Lindner (2018) to question dominant understandings of trauma as rupture and demands a sensibility to forms of violence that are invisible, intangible, fragmented or purely embodied. Introducing a queer politics of encountering and sharing trauma on a sensory level, this study particularly explores what the cumulative, piercing nature of microaggressions takes out of queer people’s grasp, yet also the potentials of aesthetic and practical disorientation for building new lines of thought and action. The co-creative exhibition over/exposed acts as the main vehicle to (de)construct spaces of queerness, co-creation and trauma in experimental documentary film. over/exposed negotiates trauma through various filmic, bodily and spatial surfaces; its encounters disorientate, twist and trouble co-creators, viewers and researcher as a queer politics of encountering and sharing trauma on a sensory level is assembled. Through an affective analysis of the 10 artworks as well as the co-creative process, this study reveals a new understanding of trauma as overexposure that brings attention to abrasions, frictions and subtle intrusions to queer bodies, the (power) relations within and beyond an artistic process and the significance of an instable and disorientated body for producing new knowledge.Item A PAPER OF RECORD: CONVERGENCE AND COMMUNITY AT THE GLASGOW HERALD(2025) Silver, ChrsitopherFounded in Glasgow in 1783, the Herald is among the oldest continuously published newspapers in the English-speaking world. In the late 20th century, the paper sought to cast off its reputation as an organ of once powerful local elites; with the goal of becoming the preeminent national paper of record for Scotland. This transformation necessitated an expansion in the range and extent of the Herald’s journalistic output: with a particular emphasis on culture, high literary standards, and the role of specialist correspondents with the requisite expertise to scrutinise state and civil society institutions. These developments form part of a cultural turn in Scottish journalism, facilitated by structural modernisation and energised by prefigurative impulses that emerged in the context of growing demands for enhanced political autonomy, alongside a broader revival of national identity and culture in Scotland. However, a seemingly resilient and expanding national media system, consolidated in the post-war era, was unprepared for the advent of global media convergence. Thus in 2003 Newsquest – a wholly owned subsidiary of US conglomerate Gannett – purchased the Herald and went on to substantially retrench the title’s editorial operations, resulting in a significant reduction in the range and extent of its journalistic output. This project combines a study of documentary and oral history sources which together constitute a cultural history of the Herald. Based on analysis of these sources, this project shows how Herald journalists sustained an interpretive community which resisted the pressures of media convergence by restating journalistic values and valorising institutional memory, while foregrounding the cultural value of the title. This project also situates the Herald’s cultural history and its transformations within wider theoretical debates about community, the public sphere, and modernity. Drawing on these fruitful connections, this thesis concludes by conceptualising four distinct transformations in journalistic culture and practice. These findings are grounded in the Herald’s particular interpretive community, but they also underline the broader salience of the journalistic record amid the pressures and possibilities of global media convergence.Item PROFESSIONALISED CARE: Relational Management at Alchemy Film & Arts(2025-03-12) Tully, KylaThe application of an ethic of care within arts management is of increasing interest to funders, managers, and policymakers invested in the European arts and culture sector as a facet of the perceived benefits of arts to community-building and regeneration efforts. The focus on the potential role of care as a value and a practice within arts management is most noticeable within the increased investment in socially-engaged art within community-centric projects and organisations due to its explicit focus on relationship-building, placemaking, and ultimately community care. Given the growing investment in arts work toward regeneration and maintenance in rural areas and localised communities, understandings of how care might be formalised within arts management practice in these community-centric contexts is vital for the management of individual creative and cultural projects and organisations, as well as the overall sector. The presented research within this thesis therefore investigates how an ethic of care can be incorporated within rural arts management practice alongside processes and expectations of professionalisation. The presented thesis critically examines the perceived importance of care within rural arts management and offers an illustrative perspective on the benefits, tensions, and complications around the relationship between care, management, and professionalisation within the context of rural arts. Alchemy Film & Arts, a cultural organisation based in the Scottish Borders town of Hawick specialising in experimental film and moving image, acts as a case for this exploration in the midst of a pivotal period of organisational development and navigation of precarious socioeconomic landscapes between 2020 and 2022. Through the application of ethnographic and creative research, the offered observations and findings explore the social and relational aspects of both work and management within the arts. The thesis concludes that practices of care within rural arts management are dependent on relationship-building and the context of place, and therefore cannot be fully standardised within processes of professionalisation and perceptions of professional practice. The theory of professionalised care is therefore introduced as part of the findings and observations as a structured yet adaptable way to facilitate the incorporation of ethics of care within rural arts management.Item I’M ACTUALLY AN ARTIST TOO… Artists who are arts managers(2024-06-26) Murray, SheilaThis research investigates how artists might resolve their dual professional identities and continue to be artists when also working in arts management in order to earn a more secure living than is usually possible from art alone. In doing so, it asks how arts organisations could benefit more greatly from the creative practice of the artists they employ as arts managers. The study questions the assumption that artists who work as arts managers must have ‘failed’ in their artistic ambitions and argues that a more nuanced approach is necessary. Rather than artists abandoning their creative practice, and necessitating their identity as an artist being kept ‘invisible’ in the workplace, this thesis argues for both their art and artistic identity to be a visible part of their practice as managers. If this were to happen, it is argued artists and arts management would both stand to gain. The study adopted a qualitative methodology and involved a multi-method, three-phase approach. The first phase recorded data about the lived experiences of 30 participants working primarily as arts managers across a range of creative sectors. The second phase took the form of an intervention into their professional practice and asked a smaller group to make at least one artwork in the context of their work as arts managers. This included several individuals who work in a single arts organisation. The third phase investigated the data generated from an online group discussion attended by a smaller group of participants. As a former artist, arts manager and maker of contemporary jewellery, I took part in all three phases as a participant-researcher. The thesis concludes by arguing that arts organisations, and the artist-managers who work in them, need to bring about change through incremental steps, and by consensus. This change is not only to enable artist-managers to retain their creative practices and identity, but in order for the arts organisations where they work to benefit from the particular skills and knowledge artist-managers can bring. It is argued that this is best achieved through dialogue, rather than by keeping the two different, but interdependent practices separate. In this way, through the recognition and visibility of creative practice in the arts workplace, both would be strengthened.Item RHIZOMATIC TRANSPOSITIONS: INCLUDING CREATIVE PRACTICE WITHIN WATER MANAGEMENT POLICY(2024-06-26) Manley, Nicole Antoinette LucieWestern ontology has traditionally viewed rivers as objects for the intentional purposes of human society. Water policy ensures that rivers are maintained to distribute water and protect against flooding. However, with climate change, the health of many rivers is decreasing, while risk of flooding from rivers is increasing. Water policies appear to be unable to change such negative trends, which are inter-related with poor and exploitative human/river relationships. To form a different relationship between humankind and rivers, this creative practice research develops creative practice based on nomadic ontology and psychosocial perspectives. The research develops a methodology that aims to transform the human/river relationship. Practice-led approaches are employed as an exploration of the artist’s creative practice, including 1) physical immersion in water, 2) underwater film, and 3) aerial photographic collage. Using personal reflective methods that critically analysed the artist’s affective experience, a transformative approach was developed, called the ‘Site of possibility’, which created a site of affective engagement between human and rivers that was different from daily habitual routine. Participatory methods included walking, poetry, mark-making and a creative interpretation of the dialogic method known as the ‘visual matrix’. Emerging differences in perception became Deleuzian ‘deterritorialization’, a shift of mind and heart through creative participatory practice. People’s habitual views of rivers became reterritorialized so that human/river relationships were transformed into a new awareness of human positionality in relation to rivers and, potentially, in relation to policy design directed at water. In three case studies, the Site of possibility creative approach proved successful in transforming people’s perceptions and positions in relationship in relationship to rivers in ways that could potentially inform water policy, creating a more bioegalitarian relationship between rivers and people. These findings show that creative practice approaches have potential to inform water policy and provide direction and guidance for systemic change to problems of governance for rivers.Item The Slum Chronotope and Imaginaries of Spatial Justice in Philippine Urban Cinema(2017) Macapagal, KatrinaThis dissertation proposes that Philippine independent urban cinema reveals imaginaries of spatial justice. The works approached as Philippine urban cinema are independently produced and internationally circulated films that heavily feature or reference Philippine slums as setting, with narratives that centre on the lives of the urban poor. The theory of spatial justice as defined by leading urban theorists argues that social justice has spatio-temporal dimensions. Grounded on this foundational premise, this study approaches Philippine urban cinema in its capacity to foreground and represent the complexities of social justice as contextualised in Philippine urban conditions, with local and global trajectories. Alongside the theory of spatial justice, the dissertation draws from Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory of the “chronotope” (literally meaning time-space) to formulate a theory of the “slum chronotope” as a foundational concept for analysing the ways by which films are able to imagine issues of spatial justice, with emphasis on character configuration and narrative formation. The chapters are structured according to genres and modalities, where other chronotopes that dialogue with the slum chronotope are identified and examined. In the comingof- age chapter, the study locates “chronotopes of passage”; in the melodrama chapter, the study locates “affective chronotopes” configured by the spatial practice of walking; in the Manila noir chapter, the study locates “chronotopes of mobility”; and in the final chapter, the study locates “chronotopes of in/visibility” in the Overseas Filipino Worker genre. This study offers a novel interdisciplinary framework for analysing Philippine urban cinema, and in the process, makes a case for Philippine urban history as crucial grounds for understanding the global urbanisation of poverty.Item SCREENING SCOTLAND’S STORIES: Film Adaptations in Twenty-First-Century Scottish Cinema(2017) Munro, RobertThis thesis surveys book to film adaptations in Scottish cinema in the period 2000-2015. It is the first examination of this practice in a Scottish context which also analyses the operations of Creative Scotland, the public arts body responsible for funding and promoting screen production in Scotland. This thesis asks two central questions: what are the processes by which film adaptations are produced in Scottish cinema? And: do contemporary film adaptations in Scottish cinema engage materially and thematically with ‘the nation’? I do this to test whether or not film adaptation is particularly well suited to speak to a national cultural imaginary. I map out a corpus of film texts produced in the first fifteen years of the twenty-first century, and analyse a selection of those texts in the second half of the thesis. I consider the extent to which industrial and thematic discourses of ‘Scottishness’ are engaged with through and by these films. The understanding of these films as ‘Scottish’, and what that means for both their production and reception, nationally and globally, will be discussed. I argue that the importance of national branding in the production of film remains a crucial component of the global film industry, into which Scottish cinema aims for viability. I categorise my four case studies within the categories of arthouse and popular cinema, in order to better understand the ways in which these films are marketed to, and received by, local and global audiences. Furthermore, this thesis uses these film adaptations to consider the discourses prevalent in Scottish culture in the twenty-first century, by examining those pre-existing texts which are selected for cinematic adaptation. How does the success of prior adaptations shape the range of future texts, and therefore what is deemed viable in Scottish cinema? What recurring representative tendencies are to be found in those film adaptations? How do they relate to the socio-political discourses of their era? This thesis attempts to answers those questions, and in doing so examines how particular discourses are mobilised throughout industrial processes of production, distribution and exhibition, and are readable within the film texts themselves.Item An examination of the filmmaking methods of Kenneth Branagh in his directorial film work on Thor, Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit and Cinderella with specific reference to his status as auteur(2017) Hamzah, SaharThis thesis examines the methods that director Sir Kenneth Branagh employs in his approach to directing his films and questions whether the consistency of methods adopted by Branagh across the scope of his films and their recurring themes support the status of Branagh as an auteur. Much scholarly attention has been given to Branagh’s Shakespeare films, yet there is a deficit of such attention to his later work. Using personal and published interviews, empirical evidence of the films, and text-to-text analysis, the thesis focuses upon analysis of his later films Thor, Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit, and Cinderella. The thesis takes an approach based upon the criteria of Sarris (2008) and Leitch (2008) to determine whether Branagh could be classified as auteur based upon his directorial oeuvre. In doing so, the thesis identifies the key components of Branagh’s methods and style and investigates his rehearsal techniques, research into the history and intertextuality of his projects, relationships with actors, and whether he uses elements of mise-en-scène as cues to reveal intertextuality. The thesis discusses Branagh’s role in semiotic coding in his films, informed by the concept of selective perception, wherein viewers tend to recognise elements in media which align with their expectations (Klapper 1960). It argues that memory of the hypotexts plays a key role in film adaptations (Ellis 1982), that their ability to evoke recall is a means of communication (Grant 2002) which can be achieved through the use of elements of mise-en-scène, (Geraghty 2008) and that the viewer and director are collaborators in producing meaning in film (Wollen 1972). This study contributes to the field of adaptation by adding scholarly literature on the films of Branagh in his post-Shakespeare era and to the subjects of auteurship and audience recall achieved through use of camera technique, intertextuality and mise-en-scène.Item The profession of public relations In Saudi Arabia: a socio-cultural perspective(Queen Margaret University, Edinburgh, 2017) Almahraj, YazeedThis thesis examines public relations in Saudi Arabia as an occupational group. The thesis investigates the knowledge public relations practitioners possess, and how Saudi culture and public communication factors affect public relations practitioners. The thesis offers insights into the cultural background of the country, public communication and public relations practice in Saudi Arabia. Moreover, it provides an analysis of theories of the profession and the relationship between the profession and public relations occupation. For the purposes of this research, in-depth unstructured interviews were used to collect data from 27 practitioners. A constructivist paradigm was utilised to examine the Saudi practitioners' perceptions of knowledge, culture, public communication. Moreover, the thesis has followed a socio-cultural approach and theories of the profession to investigate the empirical data. The thesis has several contributions to knowledge. Firstly, it brings an understanding of the role of the state in the process of professionalization. Using Vygotsky's theories the thesis has found that educational institutions influence PR practice and this results in lack of progress and limited opportunities for change, learning and career movement. Secondly, the thesis found that there is disconnection between theories that are taught in universities with PR programmes and PR practices. The thesis found that there is a problematic nature of abstract knowledge, which determines the disconnection between communication theories and PR practice. Moreover, there is a disconnection between the practice immersed in culture and that cultural practices are stronger than professional practice. Finally, the thesis has contributed to the literature by finding out that ethics in Western countries are regarded as something that is developed by a professional body in a way that relates to society, however in Saudi Arabia the Muslim values and ethics are implemented directly in the work context and ethics is not developed by a professional body.