Diversity and television in Argentina: the case of the Audiovisual Technology Hub Programme

This paper describes and analyses the Audiovisual Technology Hub Programme (Programa Polos Audiovisuales Tecnológicos - PPAT), which has been implemented in Argentina between 2010 and 2015 as part of the public policy of former administration of Cristina Fernández de Kirchner. The main goal was to promote a television industry that reflects the cultural diversity of Argentina by dividing the national territory in nine into nine audiovisual technology hubs, where national public universities acted as centres that gathered a range of regional stakeholders. Considering the 18 TV seasons that were produced for television between 2013 and 2014, the text analyses the diversity of sources and genres / subgenres and its restricted marketing. The article closes with a brief set of conclusions about this initiative.

Measuring the Diversity and the Integration of Film Production in Mercosur: A Social Network Analysis

Based on an original and comprehensive database of all feature fiction films produced in Mercosur between 2004 and 2012, the paper analyses whether the Mercosur film industry has evolved towards an integrated and culturally more diverse market. It provides a summary of policy opportunities in terms of integration and diversity, emphasizing the limiter role played by regional policies. It then shows that although the Mercosur film industry remains rather disintegrated, it tends to become more integrated and culturally more diverse. From a methodological point of view, the combination of Social Network Analysis and the Stirling Model opens up interesting research tracks to analyse creative industries in terms of their market integration and their cultural diversity.

Of Marx and Makers: an Historical Perspective on Generative Justice

In Marxist frameworks “distributive justice” depends on extracting value through a centralized state. Many new social movements—peer to peer economy, maker activism, community agriculture, queer ecology, etc.—take the opposite approach, keeping value in its unalienated form and allowing it to freely circulate from the bottom up. Unlike Marxism, there is no general theory for bottom-up, unalienated value circulation. This paper examines the concept of “generative justice” through an historical contrast between Marx’s writings and the indigenous cultures that he drew upon. Marx erroneously concluded that while indigenous cultures had unalienated forms of production, only centralized value extraction could allow the productivity needed for a high quality of life. To the contrary, indigenous cultures now provide a robust model for the “gift economy” that underpins open source technological production, agroecology, and restorative approaches to civil rights. Expanding Marx’s concept of unalienated labor value to include unalienated ecological (nonhuman) value, as well as the domain of freedom in speech, sexual orientation, spirituality and other forms of “expressive” value, we arrive at an historically informed perspective for generative justice. 

What is social innovation? The paradigm shift and its relationship with Social Work

Innovation is a fundamental part of social work. In recent years there has been a shift in the innovation paradigm, making it easier to accept this relationship. National and supranational policies aimed at promoting innovation appear to be specifically guided by this idea. To be able to affirm this hypothesis, it is necessary to review the perception that social workers have of their duties. It is also useful to examine particular cases that show how such social innovation arises.

Digitizing dissent: cyborg politics and fluid networks in contemporary Cuban activism

Communication technologies shape how political activist networks are produced and maintain themselves. In Cuba, despite ideologically and physically oppressive practices by the state, a severe lack of Internet access, and extensive government surveillance, a small network of bloggers and cyberactivists has achieved international visibility and recognition for its critiques of the Cuban government. This qualitative study examines the blogger collective known as Voces Cubanas in Havana, Cuba in 2012, advancing a new approach to the study of transnational activism and the role of technology in the construction of political narrative. Voces Cubanas is analyzed as a network of connections between human and non-human actors that produces and sustains powerful political alliances. Voces Cubanas and its allies work collectively to co-produce contentious political discourses, confronting the dominant ideologies and knowledges produced by the Cuban state. Transnational alliances, the act of translation, and a host of unexpected and improvised technologies play central roles in the production of these narratives, indicating new breed of cyborg sociopolitical action reliant upon fluid and flexible networks and the act of writing. 

How to map the diversity of the audiovisual industry in the digital era. A Methodological Proposition

This article presents a methodological proposition to map the diversity of the audiovisual industry in the digital scenario by portraying the most important interactions between those who create, produce, distribute and disseminate audiovisual productions on line, paying special attention to powerful intermediaries and to small and medium independent agents. Taking as a point of departure a flexible understanding of social network analysis, the aim is to understand the structure of the audiovisual industry on the internet so that, taking into consideration a given sector, agents, their relations and the networks they give place to – as well as the structural conditions under which they operate – are studied. The aim is to answer questions such as: what is mapping, what is of interesting to map, how can it be done and what advantages and disadvantages the results will present.

Auditoría integrada de Información + Conocimiento: aplicación en un caso de estudio

Se presentan los resultados de la aplicación de una metodología integradora de auditoría de información y conocimiento, llevada a cabo en un Centro de Investigación del Ministerio de Ciencia, Tecnología y Medio Ambiente de la provincia de Holguín, Cuba, conformada por siete etapas con un enfoque híbrido dirigida a revisar la estrategia y la política de gestión de información y conocimiento, identificar e inventariar y mapear los recursos de I+C y sus flujos, y valorar los procesos asociados a su gestión. La alta dirección de este centro, sus especialistas e investigadores manifestaron la efectividad de la metodología aplicada cuyos resultados propiciaron reajustar la proyección estratégica en relación con la gestión de la I+C, rediseñar los flujos informativos de los procesos claves, disponer de un directorio de sus expertos por áreas y planificar el futuro aprendizaje y desarrollo profesional.

Correlation between anxiety and academic self-concept in interpreter trainees

This paper focuses on two basic issues: the anxiety-generating nature of the interpreting task and the relevance of interpreter trainees’ academic self-concept. The first has already been acknowledged, although not extensively researched, in several papers, and the second has only been mentioned briefly in interpreting literature. This study seeks to examine the relationship between the anxiety and academic self-concept constructs among interpreter trainees. An adapted version of the Foreign Language Anxiety Scale (Horwitz et al., 1986), the Academic Autoconcept Scale (Schmidt, Messoulam & Molina, 2008) and a background information questionnaire were used to collect data. Students’ t-Test analysis results indicated that female students reported experiencing significantly higher levels of anxiety than male students. No significant gender difference in self-concept levels was found. Correlation analysis results suggested, on the one hand, that younger would-be interpreters suffered from higher anxiety levels and students with higher marks tended to have lower anxiety levels; and, on the other hand, that younger students had lower self-concept levels and higher-ability students held higher self-concept levels. In addition, the results revealed that students with higher anxiety levels tended to have lower self-concept levels. Based on these findings, recommendations for interpreting pedagogy are discussed.