Edited by Raffaele Chiarulli, Armando Fumagalli, Eva Novrup Redvall

Audiovisual content for children and young people has always been a very important sector within the creative industries from an economic and social perspective...

Edited by Charles M. Ess, aline franzke shakti, Elisabetta Locatelli
Since the late 1990s, Internet Research Ethics (IRE) has emerged as a burgeoning field, fueled by an ever-growing variety of ethical challenges and concerns...

Edited by Rosa Barotsi, Gloria Dagnino and Carla Mereu Keating
In the last twenty years, increasing scholarly attention has been devoted to the screen industries as a workplace and as a site of institutional and individual cultural and creative practice (e.g., Deuze 2007; Mayer, Banks and Caldwell 2009; Hesmondhalgh and Baker 2010). Studies in this field have often centred on film, television and audiovisual media production (e.g., Caldwell 2008; Barra, Bonini and Splendore 2016; Comand and Venturini 2021), although forms of labour in circulation, promotion and reception of media texts have also attracted interest (e.g. Loist 2011; Grainge and Johnson 2015; Fanchi and Garofalo 2018; Treveri Gennari et al. 2020). Within these studies, a number of scholars have interrogated and utilised gender as an analytic category in order to expose and criticise unequal and divisive labour dynamics (e.g., Foster 1997; Gaines, Vatsal and Dall’Asta 2013-; Bell 2021). The gendered division of labour and the systematic exclusion of female-identifying professionals in the screen industries persistently emerge as global, transnational issues (e.g., Gledhill and Knight 2015; Hole, Jelača, Kaplan and Petro 2016; Liddy 2020). In Italy, pioneering studies on women’s labour in the audiovisual sector can be traced back to the 1970s (Bellumori 1972; Carrano 1977), but it is only in recent years that a gender perspective has been taken on more systematically, focusing on directors (e.g., Scarparo and Luciano 2010, 2013, 2020; Cantini 2013) as well as other above- and below-the-line professions (e.g., Dall’Asta 2008; Cardone and Fanchi 2011; Cardone, Jandelli and Tognolotti 2015; Buffoni 2018; Missero 2022).

“Cantautore” is a project that aims to reconsider the role and figure of the singer-songwriter in Italian and international culture.
The singer-songwriter is a mythical figure in popular imagination in different countries, a bridge between a variety and even contradictory forms of experience, both cultural and social. In the Italian context, it has been respectively interpreted in social history as a symptom of collective traumas (Bonanno 2009, Santoro 2010), and in popular music studies as a successful pop icon (Gentile 1979, Borgna 1995-2004), or as a genre (Fabbri, 1982) and – consequently - as an ideological construction (Tomatis, 2019). Only recently, has the transnational dimension of this phenomenon been stressed out and problematized further (Green and Marc 2013, Looseley 2013, Marc 2016).

In the last twenty years, the relationship between media production and places has been a key topic in the field of media studies. Despite that, in the post-lockdown world this relationship still needs to be properly investigated since nowadays it embodies new meanings that invite media scholars to redefine their understanding of how media may serve and/or impact places and vice versa.
It is widely known that film and audiovisual shoots can have a positive impact on the host location economy: more tax revenues, new employment and facilities, etc. Sometimes, film and audiovisual products stimulate tourism too, which implies once again economic benefits. In both cases, they feed local pride and contribute to re-define the image and status of the host places. In the framework of the post-pandemic recovery, these two capabilities are receiving even more attention than in the past: tourism, for instance, was one of the sectors that suffered most due to the health emergency, and its relaunch is at the top of the agenda of many public institutions. Thus, the current scenario moves film and audiovisual production at the center of the action plans for the post-pandemic economy and society. However, all the current recovery policies base themselves on the concept of sustainability, and this raises the question how film and audiovisual production meet the concept of sustainability.

Migration has been a phenomenon throughout human history. However, as a result of economic hardship, conflict and globalization, the number of people now living outside their country of birth is higher than ever. It has also become a key focul point for the media. Even though irregular immigration constitutes only a minor part of the total immigrant population in the EU, it is the one most spectacularized by the media. This over-mediatization of the phenomenon leads to a consistent discrepancy between the perception and the reality of the issue, and this distance has favored the shift of migration issues from ‘low politics’ to ‘high politics’, fueling an emergency management and a securitarian approach.

Il teatro nelle sue plurime modalità realizzative - motivo per cui d’ora in poi utilizzeremo l’accezione plurale di teatri - è da sempre espressione del rapporto che lega la società, i processi performativi di rappresentazione dei soggetti individuali e collettivi e il potere politico. Dunque, fin dall’origine, i teatri si sono configurati come un’arte a disposizione della collettività con la triplice funzione di far accettare lo status quo, di protestare contro il regime esistente, e di divertire un pubblico. In alcuni momenti della storia gli spettacoli teatrali hanno assunto esplicite posizioni politiche di dissenso e di denuncia, di propaganda e di costruzione del consenso arrivando a forme di vera e propria persuasione affiliativa a un partito o a un sistema di governo (Ponte di Pino 1996, Dalla Palma 2001, Kershaw 2002, Ferrarotti 2007, Rancière 2008, Casi and Di Gioia 2012, Mango 2012, Badiou 2015, Bernardi 2015, Eckersall and Grehan 2019, De Marinis 2020, Hamidi-Kim 2014 and 2020). Se poi, come noi proponiamo, si assuma un’accezione ampia e performativa delle pratiche teatrali (Schechner, 2018) che includa giochi, feste, celebrazioni, manifestazioni di piazza, happening, performance negli spazi pubblici ed eventi, allora le connessioni tra le arti e pratiche performative e la politica si moltiplicano. In questa prospettiva, i teatri si configurano come un procedimento intermedio di interazione tra i sistemi di potere rappresentativo e delegato e i soggetti deleganti. Un vero e proprio media che ha aiutato gli uni e gli altri a costruire, non senza complessità, le dinamiche del ben-vivere collettivo.

As Leavy (2015: ix) writes, arts-based research is “a set of methodological tools used by researchers across the disciplines during all phases of social research, including data generation, analysis, interpretation, and representation.” Its emphasis on doing (making) brings in the idea that knowledge is or, expressed more modestly, can be embodied and produced through the creation of the artistic practice itself. To use Cooperman’s (2018: 22) more poetic formulation, “Arts-based research is a research of the flesh where our source material originates from the closeness and collaboration of the bodies and voices of one another.” Slowly but surely, arts-based research is making its entry into Communication and Media Studies, moving away from our rather exclusive focus on the written text. There is, for instance, the work of the multidisciplinary Collective for Advancing Multimodal Research Arts or scholars at the Communication Studies Department of Concordia University (Chapman & Sawchuk, 2015). Communication and Media studies scholars also publish their non-written texts in such specialized journals as the Journal of Video Ethnography; Tecmerin: Journal of Audiovisual Essays; and Audiovisual Thinking, the Journal of Academic Videos. Moreover, both the International Communication Association (ICA) and the International Association for Media and Communication Research (IAMCR) have featured exhibitions at some of their recent conferences, the former with the 2017 Making & Doing exhibition and the latter with 2018 Ecomedia Arts Festival, taking gentle steps toward (the acknowledgment of) non-written academic texts.

The relationship between communication and environmental sustainability has come to the forefront in recent years with renewed impetus. The explosion of Internet-connected devices and the dramatic challenge (and visibility) of climate change have deeply impacted how we communicate environmental risk, stimulate behavioral changes, coordinate individual and collective environmental action and monitor environmental governance. Massive amounts of environmental information of unprecedented quality and resolution are made available by technological, social and legal innovations; at the same time, long-standing issues – such as public trust in environmental communication or the uncertain ability of communication itself to stimulate behavioral change in individual and collective subjects – not only remain on the table but appear heightened and complexified by the new context.

Questo numero intende indagare specificamente le risorse artistiche, sociali e politiche che le arti performative mettono al servizio dell’inclusione socio-culturale, facilitando processi collettivi di fronteggiamento partecipato delle complessità determinate dagli attuali movimenti migratori.