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Domestic/family violence is a widespread major public health and human rights violation issue that runs across ethno-cultural affiliations and economic status. Relative to the actual incidence of family violence, use of services is low, and delayed for years after onset, within the broader Victorian and Australian community. Utilization is even lower for women from immigrant and refugee communities. It has been noted that family violence service utilization by Indian women immigrants in particular was especially low, relative to the size of the Indian population in Victoria. With the Indian culture understood to be traditionally a strongly male-dominated culture, it was deemed important to explore the nature of family violence experience of Indian women living in Australia, and culturally determined barriers to use of services. A partnership was formed to explore this issue through a participatory community theatre approach. Forum Theatre is a powerful tool that uses theatre for generating community understanding around hard to address issues such as domestic violence. Using such theatre-based ethnography, we aimed to identify the key issues, challenges and needs of Indian immigrant families when accessing and using services that could assist in situations of domestic/family violence.

The wave of mass protests that swept over Brazil’s major cities in June 2013 gave rise to a citizen journalist collective known as Mídia Ninja whose coverage of the protests attracted enormous attention and challenged established hegemonic media practices. Employing a mixed-methods approach, this study compares Midia Ninja‘s production processes to those of the mainstream media, aiming to reflect on contemporary journalistic ethos. In so doing, Midia Ninja’s attempts at deconstructing hegemonic media discourses and practices are explored through an analysis of five categories that emerged from the data - mobilisation, Ninja’s brand identity, deconstruction, mockery and opinion. The investigation of the collective’s discursive production processes suggests that its media activist logic contributes to widening the deontological codes of the journalistic profession while rejecting traditional journalistic news values, such as neutrality and impartiality.A onda massiva de protestos que se alastrou nas maiores cidades brasileiras em junho de 2013 propiciou o surgimento de um coletivo de repórteres-cidadãos conhecidos como Mídia Ninja. A atenção copiosa que o coletivo recebeu terminou por desafiar práticas estabelecidas da mídia hegemônica. Adotando uma abordagem metodológica mista, este estudo investiga o processo de produção dos Ninja à luz da mídia hegemônica com o intuito de refletir sobre o ethos jornalístico na contemporaneidade. Através da análise de cinco categorias provenientes dos dados, mobilização, institucional, escracho, desconstrução e opinião, o esforço dos Ninja em desconstruir os discursos e as práticas da mídia hegemônica é investigado. A investigação dos processos de produção discursiva do coletivo aponta que a perspectiva de produzir narrativas dentro da lógica midiativista contribui, por um lado, para o afrouxamento dos códigos deontológicos do jornalismo e, por outro, para o rechaço de matrizes do campo jornalístico como imparcialidade e neutralidade. La masiva ola de protestas que se expandió hacia las mayores ciudades brasileñas en junio de 2013 produjo la aparición de un grupo de reporteros-ciudadanos conocidos como Medios Ninja. La atención copiosa que el colectivo recibió terminó por desafiar las prácticas establecidas del medio hegemónico. Adoptando una metodología mixta, este estudio investiga el proceso de producción de los Ninjas a la luz del medio tradicional con la intención de reflexionar sobre el ethos periodístico en la contemporaneidad. A través de la evaluación de las cinco categorías de los datos, movilización, institucional, escrache, desconstrucción y opinión, el esfuerzo por deconstruir los discursos y las prácticas de los medios hegemónicos es investigado. La investigación de los procesos de producción discursiva del colectivo apunta que la perspectiva de producir narrativas en la logica medioactivista contribuye, por un lado, para el aflojamiento de los codigos deontologicos del periodismo y, por otro, para el rechazo de matrices del campo periodista como imparcialidad y neutralidad.

Much academic analysis of media representations of drugs-related violence in Brazil has focused on their role in perpetuating violence and societal divisions. There is less research on how the coun...

Virtual exchange refers to education programmes in which constructive communication and interaction takes place between individuals or groups from different cultural backgrounds with the support of educators or facilitators. Evaluating and Upscaling Telecollaborative Teacher Education (EVALUATE, http://www.evaluateproject.eu/) was a European policy experimentation financed by Erasmus+ which studied the impact of a telecollaborative model of virtual exchange on student teachers. Between 2017-2018, the project consortium trained teacher trainers and organised virtual exchanges which involved over 1,000 student teachers at initial teacher education institutions. This entailed students interacting and collaborating with partner classes from other countries as an integral part of one of their courses. The research team then analysed the learning gains from these exchanges using qualitative and quantitative research methodologies. They also worked with representatives from European ministries of education to understand how virtual exchange could be upscaled in teacher education across Europe. This publication presents the findings of the EVALUATE experimentation and its implications for the education of future teachers. The study found that engaging student teachers in structured online intercultural collaboration as part of their formal learning can contribute to the development of their digital-pedagogical, intercultural, and foreign language competences. It can also lead to innovation and international learning in the education of future teachers.

This report presents the findings of a survey conducted by the Erasmus+ KA3 project EVOLVE (www.evolve-erasmus.eu) on the awareness and use of Virtual Exchange (VE) in Higher Education across Europe, primarily on the basis of data from universities belonging to the Coimbra Group and SGroup university networks.VE is an educational practice based on sustained, technology-enabled communication and interaction between individuals or groups of learners from geographically separated and/or different cultural backgrounds. This type of online collaborative learning, which can be either in the form of class-to-class exchanges supported by university teachers or in the form of group exchanges facilitated by external exchange providers, is promoted by the EU as a tool for inclusion and to offer more young people an international experience. It also links up with institutional strategies and policies of ‘internationalisation at home’ and internationalising the curriculum. Finally, it is regarded as a tool to enhance students’ employability in terms of transversal skills which employers seek, including foreign language proficiency and intercultural competence, and digital and collaboration skills.Our study found that VE is not yet widely known as educational practice by key stakeholders in implementation, such as educators, educational supporters, internationalisation officers and policy officers and managers. Policy officers and managers show a slightly higher degree of awareness, but this may partly be due to the fact that they associate VE with virtual mobility or online learning more generally.VE is not yet used on a large scale by respondents in our sample. The main disciplines where it is implemented and understood are in Education; Arts and Humanities (especially languages); and Social sciences, journalism and information. Implementation, however, is not restricted to these areas and covers most other disciplines distinguished by our study.Support, when it is provided, is normally in the form of technical and pedagogical assistance; institutional recognition and incentives appear to be generally lacking; and data about inclusion at course or curriculum level by allocation of credits, incorporation in course descriptions and reservation of class time are inconclusive due to the small number of participants reporting on this. Finally, VE is not yet widely referenced in strategies and policies for eLearning, professional development and internationalisation, but a group of 10 to 15 universities appear to be moving towards further integration at strategic and policy levels.Conversely, the potential of VE for educational innovation, skills development and internationalisation are widely acknowledged. More specifically, educators and educational supporters rate VE highly as a tool for teaching and learning innovation, development of intercultural competence, language and digital skills, as well as subscribing to its role in teacher professional development. Overall stakeholders also highly rank its potential for internationalisation, linking it to educational as well as economic benefits.In response to the alleged benefit of VE as a low-cost solution to internationalisation, we point out that VE is not an activity that bears no cost at all. Learning to use it, running and maintaining it requires structural training and support facilities, for which institutional policies and infrastructures are generally not yet in place. In view of the unique characteristics of each exchange, it is not a tool that is easily standardised as a one-stop solution for all.It is promising to see that there is substantial interest from each of the stakeholder groups to learn more about VE by participating in training. Training programmes such as those offered through EVOLVE and Erasmus+ Virtual Exchange respond to this need. Through follow-up studies and interviews in institutions seeking to implement VE, we will try to find out more about factors of success and failure in this promising field of educational innovation and share these with the community at large in future publications.

Photographers from community and mainstream media organisations bring the everyday of favela communities to the attention of Rio de Janeiro's society from different perspectives. While mainstream photojournalists mainly report on favelas from outside to inside, denouncing wrongdoings and human rights abuses, community photographers do it from the opposite direction, from inside to outside, presenting images of the everyday life of favela communities. This paper takes an ethnographic and discursive approach to comparing these two categories of photographers to ask how their different practices can yield benefits for the people living in marginalised communities. Furthermore, by adapting Foucault and Bourdieu's theories, this study examines photographers’ habitus so as to determine how cultural capital and economic capital that they possess shape their subjectivity and, as such, the fields of community and mainstream photojournalism. This study has no intention of creating polarised distinctions between com...

Rio de Janeiro is well-known for its hypnotic beauty and vibrant cultural life, but also for the social, spatial and symbolic boundaries that separate the people living in favelas from the rest of the city. This chapter combines ethnographic fieldwork and text interpretation to explore how mainstream photojournalists and community photographers negotiate courage and fear to obtain a public voice that tells the complexity of life in Rio’s favelas. Echoing Heidegger, I suggest that to claim voice is to claim the realization/manifestation of one’s Being, which is still not fully addressed in Article 19 about the right to communicate. I thus argue that the production of contested visual representations of Rio’s favelas emergent from both mainstream and community sources is a significant contribution to the favela residents’ struggles for human rights.

This proposal combines ethnographic techniques and discourse studies to investigate a collective of people engaged with audiovisual productions who collaborate in Curta Favela’s workshops in Rio de Janeiro’s favelas. ‘Favela’ is often translated simply as ‘slum’ or ‘shantytown’, but these terms connote negative characteristics such as shortage, poverty, and deprivation which end up stigmatizing these low income suburbs. Curta Favela (Favela Shorts) is an independent project in which all participants join to use photography and participatory audiovisual production as tools for social change and to raise consciousness. As cameras are not affordable for favela dwellers, Curta Favela’s volunteers teach favela residents how they can use their mobile phones and compact cameras to take pictures and make movies, and afterwards, how they can edit the data using free editing video software programs and publish it on the Internet. To record audio, they use their mp3 or mobile phones. The main aim of this study is to shed light not only on how this project operates, but also to highlight how collective intelligence can be used as a way of fighting against a lack of basic resources.