Professionalising the British film industry: the UK Film Council and public support for film production

This article examines the UK Film Council’s objective to reorganise and reallocate public funding for film from 2000 onwards. I argue that the model adopted by the UKFC was innovative on two levels. First, it separated public funds available for film production into three separate streams and then hired industry professionals to head each individual fund. I also examine how the funds developed over the lifetime of the organisation, with each appointed head shaping the principles of their respective funds in accordance with the wider objectives of the UKFC. Drawing on strategy documents, internal papers and interviews with key personnel, I argue that the UKFC worked to position itself as a ‘vanguard organisation’ seeking to shake up an independent sector seemingly reliant on state handouts and introduce a commercial perspective to the industry. This mission met an abrupt end, however, when the incoming Coalition government closed down the organisation in 2010.     

Pre-deployment ‘gender’ training and the lack thereof for Australian peacekeepers

In the area of peacekeeping training, Australia has a reputation of promoting ‘best practice’ internationally. Training for Australian police peacekeepers has been described by the United Nations as ‘one-of-a-kind’ and ‘a world-class model of best practice’. This article provides a case study of how gender training is conducted, and how ‘gender’ is understood from a critical feminist perspective. This article focuses only on the pre-deployment training stage and is informed by confidential interviews with staff from the Australian Federal Police and the Australian Defence Force, as well as observing training in 2013–14. The findings suggest that the training is inadequate because it is not carried out for all peacekeeping personnel, despite international and national requirements to do so. In addition, the findings suggest that ‘gender’ is understood in a very limited way that does not problematise power relations between the sexes and is only covered as a way of understanding the peacekeeping context, and not in relation to the attitudes and behaviours of peacekeepers themselves. This raises the question of whether and how other troop-contributing countries conduct the training and to what standard, given the documented problems of Australia's supposedly ‘best-practice’ training.     

Children's interdependent mobility: compositions,collaborations and compromises

This paper discusses findings from Australian research that used a qualitative and participatory methods approach to understand how children develop and negotiate their everyday mobility. Children's mobility negotiations are discussed in reference to interactions with parents, peers and places; journeys in relation to their multi-modality, compositionality and temporality; and mobility formations in terms of ‘companionship’ – travel companions, companion devices and ambient companions. Children's mobility is characterised by interdependencies that both enable and configure this mobility. Three themes – compositions, collaborations and compromises – are used to detail and describe some of the ways these interdependencies take shape and unfold.     

Bristol Deaf Memories: archives,nostalgia and the loss of community space in the deaf community in Bristol

The deaf community in the UK has undergone major changes in recent years, which has uprooted it from its traditional foundations, the deaf club and deaf residential school. This article examines the effect of the closure of the deaf club in Bristol, a city in the South West of England, which resulted in the loss of an important community place and spaces for deaf people in the city. We discuss, with a strong focus on methodology, a community event celebrating Bristol’s deaf heritage organised by the research team which utilised archive materials, including archived actuality footage. This article draws on interview data elicited from participants in that event to explore the meanings connected to space and place in both past and present by the deaf community in Bristol. Concepts of the rhizome and the smooth and striated spaces of Deleuze and Guattari were found to be useful models with which to engage with the contemporary struggles of the deaf community for community recognition and organisation. We also suggest an online mapping application which enables the practice of rhizomatic cartography could be a way forward in preserving the deaf heritage and history of the city.     

The Archaeology of Commoner Social Memories and Legitimizing Histories

In recent years, archaeologists have productively exploited historical documents and monuments as evidence for social memory and the selective writing, rewriting, and silencing of history for instrumental purposes. However, for a variety of theoretical and methodological reasons, less consideration has been given to such powerful uses of the past in the past by commoners in domestic contexts. In this article, we present a case study that demonstrates how the household remains of commoners can be used as rich, direct sources of evidence for the conscious manipulation and deployment of social memory. Our case study focuses on multiple lines of evidence from burials interred under a household patio at the pre-Aztec and Aztec site of Xaltocan between C.E. 1290 and 1520. Archaeological burial data, osteological analyses, a fine-grained chronology created with Bayesian statistical modeling of radiocarbon dates, and ancient DNA analyses are combined to reconstruct the household genealogical history inscribed by residents. This history—perhaps motivated by power and claims to land—entailed selective remembering and forgetting and the rewriting of the past of life on this house mound and was enabled by material mnemonics in the form of buried bones. Interestingly, this inscribed, instrumental genealogical history may have been structured by some of the same principles and representational canons that shaped pre-Hispanic pictorial genealogies used as evidence in colonial legal disputes.