Engaged Disengagement: Reframing as Feminist Critique in Vanessa Place’s Tragodía

This essay positions Vanessa Place’s Tragodía (2011) as an instance of reframing as contemporary feminist cultural critique. An enquiry into allegory, hermeneutics, and the performative use of indifference in Place’s conceptual writing generates insights into new narrative conditions produced by Place’s work. Tragodía does not represent trauma but rather generates trauma through a poetic practice that has a bipartite structure: conceptual writing (allegory) and Place’s performances of the narratives. Place’s performance is read in this analysis as an ancillary act of reframing that raises the question of what might be at stake in the performative use of indifference. Understood as a strategy of failure, Place’s performance parallels the lack of mediation in the conceptual act of reframing. Positioned counter to the linguistic deformation of the subjects' speech acts and the erasure of affect that occurs in the legal narratives through the act of interpretation, the refusal to interpret implicit in the act of reframing in Tragodía is an ethical gesture, a paratextual pathway to metamorphosis. In its refusal to interpret, Tragodía creates a site of contextual resistance to the oppression of the subjects’ organic narratives by the institutional language of the law, and offers a new textual field of meaning-making.

Reframing reporting of childhood sexual exploitation: three journalists reflect

This article explores three national and local journalists’ experiences of reporting on child sexual exploitation by so-called “Asian street grooming gangs” in UK towns and cities, with a particular emphasis on journalists framing journalists. In response to coverage of a series of cases, journalists have been accused by academics, policymakers and rival media organizations of fixating on perpetrators’ ethnicity and creating distorted, racist media frames. Few, if any, studies have garnered practitioners’ perspectives on how framing occurs, so we interview three prominent journalists who have covered such cases in order to deepen our understanding of the processes and causative factors behind particular editorial angles. While offering only a snapshot view, our findings reveal these individual journalists to be caught at the nexus of a range of factors that impact upon their work, both internally and externally driven.

Temporary Intervention and Long Term Legacy: Lessons from London Case Studies

The paper explores the issue of temporary projects on vacant land focusing on London in the 2007-2012 downturn. Using a case study approach, a link has been identified between the success of temporary projects and a longer-term vision, as well as a move toward better integration between temporary occupants and developer/land-owner. Within this paradox the whole idea of temporariness is put under question, as is the traditional mainstream depiction of bottom-up in opposition to top-down action. These trends are contextualised within the dynamics of recession that has triggered new types of creative conversations between parties traditionally considered in opposition and may contribute to reframing urban development as an incremental, organic and collaborative process.