COVID-19 conspiracy rhetoric and other primal fantasies

Planet Lockdown, a documentary film, claims that the COVID-19 pandemic was manufactured by finance capitalists, Silicon Valley, and the pharmaceutical industry to microchip the population, consolidate global wealth, and enslave the population. Viral videos from the film have received tens of millions of engagements throughout social networks and media, constituting a major source of COVID-19 disinformation. This article argues that COVID-19 enslavement fantasies consummate white conservative fears of racial displacement, brought on by an impending demographic shift and greater visibility of antiracist activism throughout the early stages of the pandemic. I argue that Planet Lockdown's preoccupation with so-called "modern slavery" restages a national primal scene to resecure white power as perceptions of its dominance wanes: a fantasy of the origins of the liberal subject that omits that subject's relationship to slavery and anti-Blackness. By imagining slavery as a future threat to white selfhood rather than the structural organization of a society underwritten by anti-Blackness, COVID-19 conspiracy rhetoric facilitates a disavowal of the structural legacy of white supremacy. [ FROM AUTHOR] Copyright of Quarterly Journal of Speech is the property of Taylor & Francis Ltd and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full . (Copyright applies to all s.)

Phantom Sounds, Haunting Images

Powerful, imaginative, and long-lasting, the half-year mobilisation and its iconography are hard to forget, and the ongoing political crackdown keeps our memory alive with constant republications of photographs and video clips of the events. Since the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic and the proclamation of the National Security Law (NSL) on 30 June 2020, protests have, however, almost disappeared from Hong Kong's public spaces. [...]many films, books, and artworks have vanished from screening venues, shops, and libraries. Soon after the end of the movement, two anonymous books documented these ephemeral displays challenging authorities and urban order (Abaddon 2020;Guardian of Hong Kong 2020). [...]in October 2021, the Film Censorship Ordinance was amended to align with the NSL (Ho 2021b).

Spotlight: Scandinavian Scholarly Interest Group

[...]the S-SIG has helped nurture long-term collaborations and supportive academic friendships. Nordic film and media scholarship ventures far beyond the traditional concerns of regionally focused cinema studies. [...]SSIG members have pioneered areas of intense scholarly interest, including Mette Hjort's groundbreaking research on the cinemas of small nations;Eva Novrup Redvall's influential contributions to multiplatform television industry studies;Pietari Kääpä's innovative global green production initiative;and Scott MacKenzie and Anna Westerståhl Stenport's research on Arctic Indigenous cinemas, [t] r#Nii S-SIG members have additionally revitalized timeworn research areas. While the S-SIG seeks to undermine assumptions about Nordic media studies and support its members' versatility, SCMS conference programming continues to privilege submissions on amply researched male directors (e.g., Tars von Trier and Ingmar Bergman) and the same few noir texts (such as Forbrydelsen and Broen). [...]we have adopted multiple strategies to support work beyond such well-covered topics, such as by contributing Bihttoš (Rebel 2015)-Elle-Máijá Tailfeathers's experimental documentary exploring her Blackfoot and Sámi heritage-to an SCMS Indigenous cinema event our SIG co-hosted in Toronto in 2018.

Introduction

Reflecting on the future of documentary pedagogy in a profoundly polarized media landscape and chaotic world, how should we introduce undergraduate students to documentary history and practices, and what pedagogical strategies should we privilege to supervise graduate students working within the field of documentary studies or those making documentaries within MFA and practice-based PhD programs? Documentary Pedagogy: A Burgeoning Field From the first courses in documentary appreciation and production-at the New School for Social Research (1938) and the City College of New York's "Institute of Film Techniques" (1942)-to the plethora of undergraduate, graduate, and continuing education curricula focusing in whole or in part on non-fiction media today, documentary pedagogy has had a remarkable impact on the training of practitioners and the shaping of public tastes. If instead of using the blu-ray (or stream) of a historical film as a substitute teacher, we involved students in the production of non-fiction content, leveraging their skills as digital-native "bricoleurs, sophisticated multimedia rag-pickers,"[#N2] we would be deploying documentary as an active learning tool, one that obviates the hard separation between theory and praxis. In her doctoral dissertation on documentary filmmaking and critical pedagogy, Taiwanese curator and scholar Yng-ruey Jiing articulates the value of research beyond the "ivory tower" as a way to "expand the knowledge of independent filmmaking, popular education, media literacy and social transformation."

Toward an Eclectic Film History Survey

Drawing attention to film's many uses beyond entertainment challenges students to rethink their object of study and its historical context. [...]the ability to access a wealth of nontheatrical materials online-and for free!-makes them especially valuable in the age of online teaching, austere university budgets, and the precarious financial state of many students and contingent instructors in the time of COVID-19 and its continued fallout. [3] [#N3] Qven pie context of WWII, showing an excerpt from a "process film" about industrial production[4] [#N4] to support the war effort or footage from an army training film is a valuable way to show how film was mobilized to instruct enlisted soldiers through nontheatrical channels. To contextualize the Golden Age of Mexican cinema during the 1930s anddOs, I spoke to the country's strong tradition of nonfiction during the silent period with an excerpt of footage from the Mexican Civil War shown in Memorias de un Mexicano [https: / /youtu.be /gSbZtOObesY] (1950t. a compilation of work by the early Mexican filmmaker Salvador Toscano reassembled by the director's daughter. If I were to teach the course again, I could include Egypt and Bark with Imperial Airways [http: / /www.eafa.org.uk /catalogue /3284] (1932)-an amateur film shot by Ruth Stuart, whom I learned about via the Amateur Film Database [https:// www.amateurcinema.org /index.php/ filmmaker/ ruth- stuart] -or one of many travel films shot by Helen Miller Bailey, available via the University of Southern California's Hugh M. Hefner Moving Image Archive. [http://uschefnerarchive.com /project/baileyfilms/] In a more commercial vein, the films of Aloha Wanderwell [https: //www.alohawanderwell.com/] . many of whose works have been preserved by the Academy Film Archive, could

Henrik Ibsen and Conspiracy Thinking: The Case of Peer Gynt

Generating countless websites, books, films, series, and podcasts, and encompassing nearly every major negative event that has taken place since the end of World War II, conspiracies have become a phenomenon that anyone as a citizen and thinking individual has had to cope with in the last few decades, arguably reaching a peak during the Trump presidency, with the rise of QAnon and various conspiracy theories about the current Covid-19 pandemic (Barkun 2017;Amarasingam and Argentino 2020;Mitchell et al. 2020;Uscinski et al. 2020). Not surprisingly, the rise of conspiracy theories has also coincided with an increasing scholarly interest, especially within psychology and the social sciences, although studies of conspiracies in literature and film have also grown in number during the last two decades. Just to mention two famous examples, the same Brown's Inferno (2013) draws upon the long-standing tradition of conspiracy theories related to Dante's Divine Comedy, and the works of William Shakespeare have been subjected to a long series of conspiratorial readings, arguably reaching a peak-at least in a Norwegian context-with Erlend Loe's and Petter Amundsen's mashup of theories about Shakespeare's persona and the coded messages that the English dramatist allegedly left in his texts (Loe and Amundsen 2006). Drawing upon Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari's rejection of a fixed identity in late modern society and cultural production, she makes a clear argument against two main avenues of scholarly interpretation of the play, a Hegelian and Cartesian one: "I argue that Peer Gynt should be understood as expressing a fundamentally non-transcendent world-view" (Rees 2014, 13, 19). [...]according to Rees, Peer Gynt's status as a "national epos" is highly paradoxical, and the play hardly seems to contain a clear-cut "message" or to allow a straightforward interpretation, be it about cultural identity or otherwise.

Positive Vibes: Love Yourself Today

The performance, from Christmas 2019, and more importantly the audience reaction captured by the filmmakers, are powerful reminders of the value of live music to Irish cultural life, and the loss represented by the shuttering of venues like Vicar Street during the Covid-19 pandemic. Packy's quiet encouragement of a young boxing pupil;Nadia's affection for the women and men in her counselling programme;Jonathan's love of sea-swimming;Damo's embrace of nature on the slopes and forests of Howth Head, the Dublin landmark that looms over the northside suburbs where he was born and raised. Much of Motherland's short-form work is infused with the social realism and sense of place that infuses Love Yourself Today, characteristics that set the film apart from other Irish music documentaries and concert films more generally.

OTT (Netflix) Film Recommender System Using Data Mining

With the current COVID-19 situation on hand, the load of entertainment has completely fallen onto the OTT platforms for over a year now, and as a significant rise in viewership has been seen in the recent years and especially the past year, it is particularly important that these systems are used in best way. Along this increase a big issue becoming among the viewers is the quality and content of the films, documentary films, etc., which depends highly on some factors like choice of actors, genre, availability in different languages and most importantly reviews. So, to solve this issue, a decision was made to try new approach and put some new life into an old and trusted system, incidentally which has been one of the earliest implementations in the field of machine learning and is fondly known or called by the name of the recommender system or the recommendation system. This paper emphasizes on providing with an over-the-top media-service provider (OTT) film recommendation system which aims to deliver a personalized choice of the films as per the new trends among the viewers, the ratings, the reviews and sometimes as per the previous experiences of the user. The so-called recommender systems have been in use for more than a decade now, but the interesting thing with these machine learning-based systems is that there is always scope for some new features or improvements to be added or channelled in and further on when you think that it is perfect and requires no changes or additions to it, but in fact everything in machine learning can be designed and implemented or given a new direction as per your own perspective. The thought to simply redefine this system mainly grew because of a big issue that is the wastage of time in selecting appropriate films as per the choice, non-engaging films and in a bid to make people watch more quality and knowledgeable content. This paper reviews a host of previous work done in this field along with chalking out issues which can be improved along the way. This paper further talks about the methodology for conceiving the system and as well as sheds light on the implementation of the system using Python language and open-source tools. The paper further moves onto dictate about the applications of the system for OTT services and also take a bit of sneak peek into the applications beyond the OTT services. © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd.

Challenging Black Box Technology Power Imbalances by Exposing Them: "Persuasive System" as a Prism for Decomposing Contemporary Surveillance

This article contributes to the discussion around surveillance invisibility by engaging with the existing literature and discussing Salvatore Vitale's "Persuasive System" installation as a case study. Based on the conceptualization of surveillance as a black box, the article frames power imbalances involved in biometrics and video surveillance technologies and shows how Vitale's installation aims at playing with and exposing these dynamics by reconfiguring them. Inserted in the prolific tradition of surveillance art, the installation contributes with a focus on the fluidity of the dynamics behind mechanisms interplaying within controllers and data subjects. Following this line of thinking. "Persuasive System" helps to analyse and explore the dynamics behind systemic monitoring, providing a closer look into the interactions happening between all the actors taking part in a specific surveillance play. The ultimate goal of the installation is to invite a reflection on the process of normalizing surveillance in the wake of recent social and political events that are promoting the construction of a new reality where surveillance becomes central to the functioning of modern societies.

"Because 99 Is Not 100": Teaching Critical Media Ecoliteracy

Bass et al asserts that Lucy Walker's Academy Award-nominated 2010 documentary film Waste Land follows artist Vik Muniz as he visits Jardim Gramacho, the world's largest garbage dump, on the outskirts of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. For three years, Muniz photographed catadores--workers who earn a living picking recyclable materials from the garbage. Walker's film juxtaposes intimate scenes in which viewers learn about individual catadores' life experiences with aerial shots of Gramacho itself. This visual contrast highlights the scale of urbanity's environmental impact. Between these shots, Walker follows Muniz's artistic project, which involves using material waste from the garbage to create largescale collage portraits of catadores. Recent decades have seen an expansion of curriculum topics and texts considered relevant to the ELA classroom, disrupting the canon and making literacy work more vital to students and their communities. Still, one area that has not seen much attention in English education is environmental studies

Remembering the Reedys: Appalachian Music, Migration, & Memory [blog]

Rountree reviews Remembering the Reedys: Appalachian Music, Migration, & Memory, a blog available at https://remembereedy.blogspot.com. Remembering the Reedys: Appalachian Music, Migration, & Memory is a blog site hosted by Timi Reedy and Tammy Clemons that traces their archiving of Frances and John Reedy's musical careers. Reedy and Clemons write that it is "an ongoing and collaborative documentary project about founding Bluegrass musicians Frances and John Reedy originally from Harlan KY and their impact on their family, Appalachian community and culture, and the contemporary Bluegrass/Rock-a-billy music scene in Dayton OH."

Bobi de chang gong = China-Africa factory

Bobby is a Nigerian who has lived in China more than ten years, he and his Chinese wife open a factory making cosmetics for West Africa women. After the outbreak of COVID-19, he tried his best to keep his foreign trade factory open, but the loss of staff and conflict of ideas made the factory fall into a terrible predicament…