Media, Communication and Production

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1001 Nights and anime: The adaptation of transnational folklore in Tezuka Osamu’s Senya ichiya monogatari / A Thousand and One Nights (1969)
(Open Library of Humanities, 2021-06-01) Denison, Rayna; Van de Peer, Stefanie
Anthologising folktales from across the Middle East to North Africa, the inherently transnational 1001 Nights has become one of the most adapted works in the history of folklore (Zipes et al 2015). The tales have been adapted globally into works ranging from literature to theatre, from radio to film and animation. Historically, the 1001 Nights have served as inspiration for some of the very first animated experiments, from Lotte Reiniger’s The Adventures of Prince Achmed (1926) to the Fleischer Studios’ 1936 Popeye the Saylor meets Sinbad the Sailor. One of the influences of the 1001 Nights can be found in Japanese culture (Nishio and Yamanaka, 2006). First translated into Japanese in 1875, the 1001 Nights quickly went on to take a hold of Japanese literature, and more recently it has become the basis for numerous manga and anime adaptations. This article investigates how one Japanese adaptation, Osamu Tezuka’s Senya Ichiya Monogatari (dir. Eiichi Yamamoto, 1969), expands the transnational potential of the original. In exploring how the 1001 Nights have become and remain integral to a transnational repertoire of animated storytelling, we highlight the elasticity and transnationality of 1001 Nights and the impact of its cultural localisation. We argue that the original’s structural and thematic emphasis on journeys, quests and flows provides the Japanese filmmakers with content that allows them to reach out to international distributors, making this early ‘anime’ film transnational in its own right. Through such means, the reciprocal flows of transnationalism within the 1001 Nights and its adaptations offer a mechanism for rethinking the relationship among Middle Eastern, North African and Japanese storytelling as a sometimes shared folklore.
A Can of Worms: Has Visual Communication a Position of Influence on Aesthetics of Interaction?
(2011) Wood, Dave
Interaction Design is a young discipline that grew out of an overlap of other science and design disciplines, its remit was the design of interactive products, services and systems for human behaviour. Visual Communication and its output of graphic design once had an early influence on Interaction Design, but this has since been devalued by the influence from more functionalist disciplines, leading to two myths about Visual Communication: it just does the ‘aesthetic bit’ on the interface, and that aesthetics has no real use or function beyond ‘beauty’. But aesthetics cannot be reduced and measured as a functionalist equation of ‘means-end’. By understanding aesthetics from a Pragmatist philosophical position, the aesthetics of interaction can be explored from a situated and culturally connected embodiment of an interactive experience. From this position aesthetics is viewed as emergent from the interactive experience through three factors: a socio-cultural context, a personal embodiment and finally a means-to-many-ends instrumentality. It is a cultural phenomenon and not an engineering problem that can be explored quantifiably. This makes this a phenomenological study, and closer to Visual Communication. The rhetorical nature of Visual Communication affords a change in human behaviour, evoking a cognitive and emotional response, making its remit about framing decision-making from use of image and text. Experience, emotion, and interpretation can only use qualitative methods to explore an aesthetic experience. This raises a more vexing question: what other design disciplines also share or rather claim a phenomenological position on aesthetics? This paper will set out to explore these amorphous boundaries to decide if Visual Communication still has an actual support position of influence on Interaction Design.
A Collective Timeline of Socially Engaged Public Art Practice 1950-2015
(Routledge, 2015-11-19) Cartiere, Cameron; Hope, Sophie; Schrag, Anthony; Yon, Elisa; Zebracki, Martin; Cartiere, Cameron; Zebracki, Martin
A visual timeline of significant contributions to Socially Engaged Practices. All histories are subjective. We cannot hope to fully capture the timeline of socially engaged artworks over the past half- millennium, but we can present a highly subjective one that acts as a starting point for inquiry. In the spirit of the collaborative underpinnings of 'new genre public art' we present selected, intertwined histories chosen by five individuals. These individuals operate from diverse locations within the eld, and their selections reflect varied interests -- from activist to aesthetic, from historical to happenings. While the legacies of socially engaged art stretch back much further, the boundaries for this timeline are 1950 - 2015 to allow for a relatively focused chronology of an already complex and expansive topography
A journey into Public Dialogue: Sciencewise Research Workshops,- Conference Report for Edinburgh Beltane-Beacon for Public Engagement
(2009) Escobar, Oliver
A research conversation: Stephanie Arsoska and Andrew Morrish
(Intellect, 2025-01-13) Arsoska, Stephanie; Morrish, Andrew
This interview is a research dialogue between Stephanie Arsoska and Andrew Morrish, focusing on their exploration of Stephanie’s solo improvisation practice. Over the course of a year, they conducted ten, ten-minute solo improvisations via Zoom, analysing emerging patterns over time. Stephanie’s practice, which integrates movement and text, is deeply rooted in acting and physical theatre traditions. Rather than engaging in conceptual analysis, they adopted reflective and descriptive methods to gain insights through lived experience. Their goal was to better understand and articulate their creative processes. The conversation highlights the importance of cultivating a pedagogical awareness within artistic practice, fostering openness and mapping these practices to achieve a deeper understanding. Their methodology involved gathering data from multiple perspectives, promoting a reflective engagement with personal experiences and uncovering new insights through the process of improvisation.
A Semiotic Rosetta Stone: Developing a Designer-centric Meta-language of Pragmatic Semiotics
(Taylor & Francis, 2017-09-06) Wood, Dave
In this paper I outline the development of a designer-centric meta-language that interfaces between practitioner and theoretician, without compromising their integrity and rigour. I express this through a Rosetta Stone metaphor and how, as a design researcher, I developed this concept when I had to pierce through Peirce’s pragmatic semiotic theory to enhance aesthetic practice. I initially found it a challenge to understand Peirce’s unfamiliar academic terminology without any prior formal education in Pragmatism or semiotic theory. The problem for designers is that theoretical language can be intimidating, arcane and opaque. In reviewing the Peircean literature I identified an absence of designer-centric literature, which would quickly facilitate designers’ understanding of Semiosis. This paper therefore is a progressive call for more concerted collaboration between theoreticians and practitioners. This would ideally lead to new designer-centric Peircean literature being published, leading to the enhancement of aesthetic creative practice.
A shift towards digital and participatory performance practice post-pandemic
(Open Library of Humanities, 2022-02-14) Mastrominico, Bianca; de Roza, Elizabeth
This perspective analyses and reflects upon the experience of conceiving, curating and participating in Bodies:On:Live Magdalena:On:Live, the first online multi-platform Magdalena Festival, bringing together digitally competent artists with creative roots in the immateriality of the internet, in dialogue about current shifts in performance making with performers, writers, and directors declaring their uneasiness towards online adaptations of live work. As part of the global reaction to the standstill brought about by the Covid pandemic, we argue that shifts in practice for women in contemporary theatre associated with the Magdalena network – whether as an attempt for immediate artistic survival or a conscious experimental choice – were not exclusively determined by the available sharing of technical knowledge, or by the need to increase awareness of the digital medium in order to gain experience of different working modalities, but served a participatory and social purpose. These conditions were surfacing due to the digital space manifesting as a specific format of gathering through the Zoom windows and other platforms, which framed the encounters within a democratic performance arena, making the boundaries between participation and spectatorship porous. Therefore, the shift provoked by the festival not only pertains to the aesthetic sphere, but it is dynamically and organically geared towards the recognition of new working contexts arising from the unsettling experience of ‘disembodiment’ – as an ontological paradox of the original in-person Magdalena festival - and the embedded argument of the creative use of new technologies for a more sustainable and accessible future of performance making, both live and digital.
Accessing PR expertise: methodological considerations
(Queen Margaret University, 2013) L'Etang, Jacquie; Powell, Mandy
The nature of public relations expertise and knowledge has been rather under-researched. In particular, practitioners' perspectives and, more to the point, their voices, have been given little attention. Consequently, we have begun to redress this lack through a twelve month funded project . The study was originally designed from the perspective that academic research could identify conceptual or knowledge gaps in practice that could be filled through the transmission of useful knowledge/cognitive skills, an assumption that has dominated much of the literature. During the progress of this research we came to appreciate that a deeper and more complex challenge existed in understanding how practitioners learn. Consequently, our study evolved from a deficit model of professional development into a series of iterative interventions. These took place during a longer term research relationship aiming to elicit practitioners' ideas about their daily work and the underpinning expertise and knowledges accumulated through learning and over time. We were particularly interested in the work of experienced practitioners who were recognised as such by their professional peer group and identified as 'senior'. In this article we provide a brief synopsis of relevant literature and outline the rationale and approach taken to our empirical work, foregrounding the methodological challenges entailed in accessing the ideas of practitioners about the nature of their expertise, knowledge and learning. We begin with a discussion of insights from the public relations literature and then proceed to draw on sociological, cultural studies and educational theory to indicate useful lines of analysis and future inquiry
Acknowledged Legislators: ‘Lived experience’ in Scottish Poetry Films
(Queen Margaret University, Edinburgh, 2014-06-01) McCaffery, Richie; Van de Peer, Stefanie
In his 2014 book Arts of Independence, co-authored with artist Alexander Moffat, Alan Riach asserts that, while Scotland has had more than its fair share of important and experimental filmmakers, from John Grierson and Bill Douglas to Margaret Tait, the country still lacks a coherent film industry (p. 42). David Archibald’s Forsyth Hardy Lecture at the Edinburgh International Film Festival in 2014 also engaged with the lack of a national film industry in Scotland in the context of the independence referendum, and highlighted the transnational nature of cinema in general and Scottish cinema specifically. He argued for a more concerted effort towards an independent film industry in the country, and we argue here that one of the strategies for starting to foster an independent, national film identity could arguably be through a focus on the lives of poets and writers in film who are themselves devoted to issues of nationhood and national identity. In the case of this article, the poets in question are Hugh MacDiarmid, Norman MacCaig, Sorley MacLean, Liz Lochhead and Robert Alan Jamieson. While these are not the only poets who have been subjects for Scottish films, we wish to focus on these as they are well-known, and have a consistent interest in the medium of film.
Action Research and Public Relations: Dialogue, Peer Learning, and the Issue of Alcohol
(Sage, 2013-05-14) Pieczka, Magda; Wood, Emma
This paper presents an action research project, which transformed dialogic techniques used policy making and community development into an innovative approach to education about alcohol. The project was developed by a group of teenage volunteers, the AlcoLOLs, and two public relations researchers, tested in a local school, presented at the Scottish Parliament to policy stakeholders concerned with alcohol, and subsequently extended to a number of schools across the city of Edinburgh (Scotland). The paper makes a contribution to public relations by offering a detailed analytical account of dialogue as a method of inquiry and a mechanism for change. The paper also introduces the concept of extended epistemology as a fresh perspective on the phenomenon of relationship and on relationship management. Finally, the paper argues that action research has the transformative potential for the development of academic knowledge in the field and as an approach to education and training of practitioners.
Active spectatorship and co-creation in the digital making of Flanker Origami
(The Open Library of Humanities, 2023-02-14) Mastrominico, Bianca
How do spectators engage with, elaborate on and articulate the experience of a digital performance? What are the parameters that regulate the bodily interaction between performers and spectators, when the latter are ‘not seen to be seeing’ through digital screens? When and how does a spectator gain agency in a mediated creative encounter? This paper aims to re-construct the affective nature of the entanglement between the spectator’s body and the non-human, facilitated by the performer whose body is in collision with the technology. In my analysis, I will utilise first-hand responses by diverse spectators experiencing iterations of Flanker Origami - a live online and home-specific performance, originally devised with my company Organic Theatre for the first hybrid edition of the Edinburgh Festival Fringe 2021, and currently developed into an ongoing practice research project. The documentation examined draws upon a mentorship meeting on Zoom with Odin Teatret’s Eugenio Barba and Julia Varley, alongside formal and informal feedback gathered through audience reviews, Q&As, notes, emails, citations and social media interactions, seminars and private conversations in person and online. While the digital performer’s awareness of the encounter is shaped by a praxis made up of their working strategies and creative choices, the reactions and commentary from apparently disembodied spectators shift the focus to a polyphonic reading of the digital work. This, I argue, carries the potential to change meaning, purpose and direction of the performance, which starts reverberating in and growing through the intersection with processes of ‘active spectatorship’, emerging as a tendency for spectators to generate alternative pathways of embodying the remote communication. My conclusion proposes that far from being disorienting or promoting detachment, in this fluid interchange technology itself constitutes the porous membrane through which digital spectators become co-creators of Flanker Origami, influencing the performance and its developments through the immediacy of their response to and levelled participation in the technologically enabled making process.
Adapting Sunset Song: Authorial, Industrial and National Discourses in the 2015 film adaptation of Sunset Song
(Edinburgh University Press, 2024-06-23) Munro, Robert
This article traces the discourses shaping the 2015 film adaptation of Sunset Song, directed by Terence Davies. In doing so it shows how the film, and Gibbon’s original novel, are involved in complex negotiations of ideas about Scottishness. In the case of the film, this can be seen through a sophisticated and poetic visual engagement with some aspects of the novel’s characterisation of Chris Guthrie, its use of language and its representation of landscapes. But it can also be seen in paratextual materials which demonstrate the route taken by the producers and director in negotiating the fraught economic terrain of feature length filmmaking in Scotland, both in terms of its funding applications to national funder creative Scotland, and the way it mobilised particular discourses of art-house and auteur cinema in its marketing and production materials. Finally, through a close look at the emphasis on militarism, femininity and landscape in the film text, the article considers how the film performs a kind of Scotland that is both amenable to the tastes of the filmmaker, desires of the public funder and the art-house, film festival circuit where it will primarily be consumed.
Adapting the Canon: Mediation, Visualization, Interpretation, edited by Ann Lewis and Silke Arnold-de Simine [Book Review]
(Edinburgh University Press, 2022-03) Stewart, Michael
Adapting the X-Men: comic book narratives in film franchises
(Wiley, 2012-01) Zeller-Jacques, Martin; Cartmell, Deborah
Africa in motion: busting the canon since 2006
(MAI: Feminism and Visual Culture, 2018-10-31) Van de Peer, Stefanie; Bisschoff, Lizelle; Atkinson, Justine
Ageing, Masculinity, and the Absurd in Toni Erdmann (2016)
(Routledge, 2022-12-30) Stewart, Michael; Tracy, Tony; Schrage-Früh, Michaela
'Ah! Other Bodies!': Embodied spaces, pleasures and practices at Glasgow Film Festival
(Participations: Journal of Audience and Reception Studies, 2015-05-01) Dickson, Lesley-Ann
Summary Over the past two decades film festivals have become an increasingly important area of scholarly interest, particularly within Film Studies. However, to date, much scholarly attention has focused on the industry, economic and/or political roles of film festivals with surprising little attention given to the significance and meaningfulness of these events to the general public who attend them in droves. Focusing on Glasgow Film Festival (GFF) - an event that defines itself as an 'audience film festival' - this article draws on empirical audience research to examine experiences and pleasures of film festival going, and the extent to which these may, or may not, differ from year-round cinema going. While acknowledging that the raison d'tre for film festivals is to screen films, it argues that festival audiences articulate their experiences primarily in spatial and corporeal terms, as opposed to textual terms (via specific films). Drawing on audience testimonies, I examine the ways in which experiential vocabularies suggest a more embodied cinematic practice and alternative mode of spectatorship within the festival context, which contrast with traditional notions of disembodiment and immersion in the cinema space, as well as the resilience of shared cinematic experiences. Key words: Film festival audiences; cinema audiences; spectatorship; cinema space; festival space; embodiment; community; Glasgow Film Festival
Al Jazeera: Far from perfect, but still a symbol of hope [News Article]
(Middle East Eye, 2017-08-06) Doğan, Taner
AlcoLOLs Project: Final report, March 2016
(Queen Margaret University, Edinburgh, 2016-03-31) Pieczka, Magda; Wood, Emma; Casteltrione, Isidoropaolo
This report evaluates the AlcoLOLs project, funded by the Robertson Trust and conducted in Edinburgh 2013-2015. The project was designed to tackle the issues alcohol presents for young people and worked by combining insights from dialogue, peer education, and a harm reduction approach. The intervention was co-designed by young people and implemented by them in six secondary schools in the North East of Edinburgh, eventually reaching over 3000 young people. The AlcoLOLs, a name they chose for themselves, were volunteers who experienced dialogue at Queen Margaret University where they received training in facilitation and education about alcohol. Subsequently, the AlcoLOLs ran their own dialogue groups in schools, meeting each group of approximately 15 pupils twice and reaching on average 1000 pupils a year. School dialogue groups were designed to problematize alcohol, question participants’ attitudes and behaviours, offer useful knowledge, develop new communication skills to support learning, resilience, and, where appropriate, aspire to change behaviours. Our approach was: to treat alcohol consumption as a social, cultural practice; to acknowledge that persuasion and information-giving were insufficient communication methods to tackle the issue: and to adopt a harm reduction — pragmatic and non-judgmental — way of working. The AlcoLOLs project, consequently, was designed around dialogue and peer-learning and it demonstrably delivered a range of beneficial outcomes for participants: new skills and knowledge, change of attitudes and behaviours (effective self-regulation), and the promise of a potentially larger-scale cultural transformation.
AlcoLOLs, Re-thinking Drinking: Developing a shared leadership approach for alcohol education
(SAGE, 2019-11-13) Casteltrione, Isidoropaolo; Pieczka, Magda
Objective: The aim of this article is to extend and elaborate ways of conceptualising, enabling and practising peer leadership in whole-school alcohol education programmes.