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Networked Researcher Open Access Week 2012 Blogging Unconference Proceedings (PDF anthologised by Ernesto Priego; Networked Researcher 2012) [PDF] With many thanks to everyone who contributed, commented and shared online. Please share, cite, link.

Born in 1941 and graduated from the Centro Universitario de Estudios Cinematográfico in 1969, Marcela Fernández Violante has been a formidable pioneering figure in Mexican cinema. She was the director of the CUEC from 1984-8 and one of the first women admitted into the film director’s union. Many of her films have received awards and critical acclaim. Despite her industrial and university prominence, and the repeated recognition of her importance in film histories, especially as a representative of a growing number of women filmmakers, her work is little studied by academics. This is for a variety of reasons: her early work, while independent in aesthetic, thematic and narrative terms, was made within the studio system; unlike many other women filmmakers, her films cannot be easily categorised as feminist; and she often tackles historical figures who are out of political favour. In sum, her output is difficult to place along the lines of previous studies of this period of Mexican film. The history of Mexican cinema has long been told in terms of a progressive development from the decline of the studios from the late 1950s to the birth and growth of the independent sector in the late 1960s and early 1970s (see, for example, Mora (1989), and Hershfield and Maciel, (1996)). This framing privileges a select few male auteurs, colours them as politically radical, and suggests that there was a dramatic break from the previous aesthetic and technical model of the studio filmmakers. The transition was neither as independent nor absolute as has been suggested. Yet, the frameworks applied have encouraged subsequent critics to create a canon made up of independent filmmakers, on the one hand, who are worthy of study, and studio workers who should be ignored, on the other. The filmmakers who fit into this prescribed auteurist model have received critical attention, whilst others, such as Fernández Violante, challenge the neat categorisations and have, therefore, been ignored. There is a need to reconsider this idea of a sudden break with the past and Fernández Violante is an ideal case study. Drawing on multiple interviews with her (for example, Iglesias and Fregoso (1998) and Medrano Platas (1999), archival research, and close readings of a selection of her early films, De todos modos Juan te llamas (1976), Cananea (1978), y Misterio (1980), I shall interrogate how historiography and gender identification have determined how her career has been read and how her work has been overlooked. This chapter aims to examine her output and consider how she blurs accepted critical models forcing us to re-frame their supposed neatness.

This research focuses on Maya Q’eqchi women survivors of wartime sexual violence and their struggle for justice. In particular, I consider their specific experiences and the agency they have been able to realise in the process of bringing to trial two former members of the military. I analyse their participation in this process and their experiences of organising alongside Guatemalan women’s rights organisations and other Mayan women survivors of wartime sexual violence. Furthermore, I consider what justice means for these survivors, focusing, in particular, on the significance of the trial1 and the sentencing both for them and for the women’s rights activists working in the organisations that have supported them. I go on to examine the extent to which the survivors and the activists have achieved their objectives within their particular struggles. Additionally, I consider the extent to which the legal process is able to truly capture the harms that they have experienced and provide redress for those harms. This is a pertinent consideration, given that justice may take on many different meanings; international law and the Guatemalan legal system more closely reflect their European and US counterparts, frameworks far removed from Mayan cosmovisions and customary legal practices. To close, I examine the meaning of the trial for the women’s rights organisations and what they feel has been its real impact, considering, in particular, the silence surrounding wartime sexual violence and widespread impunity for that violence before the trial took place and, in general, the high levels of gender-based violence and attendant impunity in contemporary Guatemala.

Translation is usually perceived as an ‘invisible’ part of journalists’ daily routine at the foreign desks of newspapers. Despite the key socio-political role played by translation in international news production, the contributors behind this complex process have received scant attention from scholars in Translation Studies. The present research explores the role played by institutional and individual agents in positioning Saudi news in the British press through multiple processes of ‘trans-editing’, a term coined in 1989 by Stetting. The study examines three quality British newspapers—The Guardian, The Independent and The Telegraph—to investigate how their social dispositions shaped their trans-editing of Saudi-related news during a period of reform from August 2015 to July 2016. This thesis proposes a combined conceptual framework of Bourdieu’s theory of social practice and analytical tools from an appraisal framework and Pedersen’s ‘Venutian scale’ framework. The thesis investigates contributing agents within each institution (journalists) and outside institutional settings (cited Twitter users), analysing them in terms of their collective and individual forms of habitus, accumulated and exchanged forms of capital and the space to where they function, i.e. field. To support this analysis, the thesis assembled a unique dataset of English-language hard news reports taken from the three broadsheets as well as institutional documents. These were supplemented by original semi-structured interviews with the most prolific journalists. The findings generated by the analysis suggest that the collective forms of newspapers’ habitus dominate the trans-editing process over individual habituses. The authorial power of each individual journalist is associated with their positions within their parent institutions as senior journalists have more space to exhibit distinguishing trans-editing strategies compared to newcomers. The findings also reveal a common tendency towards distancing Saudi Arabia through trans-editing, but the extent to which news is domesticated or foreignised is linked to the accumulated linguistic capital of journalists. Ultimately, this study shows that the invisibility of trans-editing can be observed more in the context of translation from Arabic into English, compared to other language pairs, due to the hegemonic status of English in news reporting, which means that trans-editing from Arabic is not a field on its own, but rather an activity within the British journalistic field and therefore needs to be perceived as a social practice in the broader context of news production.