"Despite lack of funding and institutional support, not since the mid-twentieth century have comics in the region been so dynamic, so diverse and so engaged with pressing social and cultural issues. Comics are being used as essential tools in debates about, for example, digital cultures, gender iden...tities and political disenfranchisement. Rather than analysing the current boom in comics by focusing just on the printed text, however, this book looks at diverse manifestations of comics ‘beyond the page’. Contributors explore digital comics and social media networks; comics as graffiti and stencil art in public spaces; comics as a tool for teaching architecture or processing social trauma; and the consumption and publishing of comics as forms of shaping national, social and political identities. Bringing together authors from across Latin America and beyond, and covering examples from Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Mexico, Peru and Uruguay, the book sets out a panoramic vision of Latin American comics, whether in terms of scholarly contribution, geographical diversity or interdisciplinary methodologies." (Publisher)
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"This guide is meant to serve as a practical resource for funders who want to understand where to start. Informed by feedback from our network, it represents a synthesis of the past seven years of work we’ve done in the impact space, and includes examples of successful media impact evaluation, too...ls and frameworks for assessment, and the challenges of defining and measuring impact in a rapidly-shifting media landscape. Our years of research have led us to four key insights: 1. There are many different frameworks for measuring media impact for different areas of practice. 2. Funders should be mindful of power dynamics, and thoughtful in determining appropriate impact strategies with their grantees. 3. Digital analytics tools provide a wealth of useful data, but grantees require financial and logistical support in implementing them. 4. There are opportunities for funders to collaborate with each other to share best practices and increase collective impact." (Executive summary)
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"Welcome to the world of melodrama—and to the melodramas of the world. This book introduces nearly one hundred cinematic masterpieces from various periods and different cultural contexts—ranging from early Hollywood to emergent and popular Bollywood, from Latin American and New German Cinema to ...contemporary Nollywood, from classic melodrama and commercial blockbusters to arthouse film and meta-melodrama, while also encompassing a number of other local forms and styles in their hybrid or revisionist varieties. Our collection features discussions of seemingly timeless stories of love and loss, demonstrating the possibility and power of melodramatic plots to portray the overcoming of differences and antagonisms. Yet it also reveals how the melodramatic code is time and again used for asserting political claims and articulating critique—and hence for (re)producing powerful dichotomies of good vs. evil, innocence vs. corruption, virtue vs. vice. Melodrama performs and rehearses moral conflict and emotional crisis management on a broad scale, involving intimate relationships and familial relations, on the one hand, and global constellations of oppression, violence, war, and regime changes, on the other. Thus, like no other genre, melodrama indeed makes the political personal and the personal political." (Introduction, p.13)
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