This book tells inspirational stories of women who have worked with and within communities to bring stories to life through screenwriting. As such the book evidences that women’s work is important; that ‘films can change lives’. The collection divides the chapters according to worlds, in recognition of the fact that though we live on one planet, the conditions of existence are vastly different between first and third worlds; between the wealthiest and the poorest.



Each chapter shows how attitudes have shifted, policies have been rewritten, and life experiences and horizons have been altered for specific communities through these instances of screenwriting. The themes touched upon include gender, race, disability, culture, war, colonization, labour relations, political ideologies, to name a few. The parallels found amongst these themes across national, religious and cultural divides, are also telling. The book is wide in its scope, considering screenwriting a skill which can apply to games, social media, music videos, virtual reality … in fact, any of the burgeoning formats alive on our devices and through constantly evolving platforms. All are considered screenwriting.



The book is a celebration of the female writers who have told screen stories that educate and heal.



The book suits readers across disciplines, including screenwriting, filmmaking, women’s studies, history, sociology, and many other areas.

What political power do videos on social media have? In what ways do they exert influence, shape publics and change political life? And how can committed civil society actors in this field assert themselves against hegemonic discourses, commercial interests, anti-democratic agitation, and authoritarian propaganda? These questions are being debated intensely as social media increasingly dominate global information flows, and videos increasingly dominate social media.



Understanding video activism seems particularly relevant at a time when the internet is undergoing fundamental disruptions. The forms, practices, and opportunities of activism depend on its media environment, which now is changing rapidly and profoundly in terms of its technological basis, ownership, legal regulations, and governmental control.

This article examines the transformative impact of Reliance Jio, an Indian telecommunications company, on the digital media landscape in India. By securing the digital rights for the immensely popular Indian Premier League (IPL), a cricket tournament known for its massive viewership and cultural significance, and streaming it for free on JioCinema, Jio disrupted the over-the-top (OTT) video platform market. This move highlights Jio’s strategy of leveraging vertical integration and regulatory leniency to dominate the market. The research delves into the historical context of India’s digital policies and the government’s role in fostering a liberalized market environment through ‘regulatory silence’. It also explores the implications of media convergence and platformization, where digital giants shape the production and distribution of media content. The article argues that Jio’s control over the internet infrastructure and its extensive content library position it as a formidable player in the Indian media industry, influencing both market dynamics and regulatory frameworks. By analysing Jio’s ascent and the broader media policy environment, this study provides insights into the evolving power structures and economic strategies within India’s digital media sector, offering a critical perspective on the interplay between telecommunications and media in a rapidly digitalizing economy.

While most researchers in the field of China–Africa media studies concentrate on the one-dimensional flow from China to Africa, this research aims to unfold the historical dynamics of how African Indigenous films were promoted in China in the 1950s and 1960s when an eliciting wave of independence movements bound the Third World countries. This research indicates that the first media coverage of African cinema in China appeared in the 1950s in the national newspaper People’s Daily and several movie magazines such as Popular Movies, World Cinema (世界电影; Shijie Dianying), Film Art and World Cinema (电影艺术译丛; Dianying Yishu Yicong). Based on these precious and understudied archives, this research examines the political agenda and ideological motivation of Chinese media’s publicity of African cinema. The media coverage of African movies laid the groundwork for the subsequent Film Weeks and the officials’ visits between China and Africa. The researchers argue that such promotion was a strategy to deconstruct the then-prevailing western cultural hegemony and to clarify the heterogenized development of Chinese cinema compared to the western world. The cultural and media interaction between China and Africa back then was part of the internationalist envision of cultural decolonization of the developing countries. This study’s retrospective review and analyses are expected to cast light on the historical foundation of Sino-Africa relations that underpin the South–South cooperation today.

Though queer critics and queer theory tend to frame queer identities as marginal, this edited volume draws attention to a dynamic field in which a wide variety of queer identities can be put on display and consumed by audiences. Cementing a foundational understanding of queerness that is at odds with current shifts in media production, contributors present a broad variety of queer identities from across a range of televisual shows and genres to reconsider the marginalization of queerness in the twenty-first century. Doing so challenges preexisting notions that such “mainstreamification” necessitates being subsumed by the cisheteropatriarchy. This project argues the opposite, showing that heteronormative assumptions are outdated and that new queer representations lay the groundwork for filling gaps that queer criticism has left open.

Thomas Brassington is a researcher whose work explores intersections of queerness and the Gothic in contemporary popular culture. Debra Ferreday is a feminist cultural theorist whose research concerns gender, feminist theory, sexuality, critical race theory, queer theory, and embodiment. Dany Girard is a queer researcher whose work primarily explores representations of gender, asexualities, and queer theory in television and film.

This study analyses the media consumption of the Palestinian diaspora in Sweden and France before and after Hamas’s attack on 7 October. It investigates the types of media used, sharing patterns and comparisons between different media platforms. Although no significant differences were detected between the respondents who lived in France and Sweden, the study argues that there has been a trend towards an increasing use of social media and especially citizen journalism. The negative perceptions of and diminished reliance on the mainstream media can be explained in part by the concept of relative deprivation in the form of feeling deprived of fair media coverage. The perceived bias in mainstream media reporting was believed in part to be a symptom of an increased social polarization. Some respondents preferred to share media reports and their views on them only with like-minded individuals privately, which further contributed to the boundary maintenance between diasporic and host communities. Moreover, the current study uniquely analyses how the media coverage of violent conflicts can contribute to survivor guilt in the diaspora.

This article contributes to the emerging empirical research on the editorial practices of video-on-demand (VoD) publishing in European public service media (PSM). It presents results from a comparative study of the editorial practices visible on the VoDs from ten PSM companies across six countries: United Kingdom, Belgium, Poland, Italy, Canada and Denmark. The aim of the article is to map and compare the editorial practices in the ‘prime space’ of the VoD services and the ‘prime time’ of the companies’ main linear channels. The analysis is based on data from a sample week of 13–19 November 2023. The article contributes to research addressing the key issue of universality in terms of content and discusses the conceptualizations of the audience that seem to be at work in the transition towards an online PSM identity.

This article addresses the link between the rise of global streaming and the significance of media franchises by analysing the implementation of different strategies of control and development of media franchises employed by four of the main video streaming platforms worldwide: Disney+, Max, Prime Video and Netflix. The article identifies and discusses three different strategies regarding the control and development of media franchises in streaming platforms. The expansion strategy seeks to enlarge well-established franchises through streaming releases. While the incorporation strategy involves acquiring entire studios or adaptation rights to integrate already-developed franchises into a streaming service’s catalogue. Finally, the creation strategy aims to develop and consolidate franchises from the outset with the purpose of endowing a streaming platform with its own intellectual property. I conclude that the conjunction between global streaming and media franchises reveals the economic and cultural significance that both elements represent for the media industry. Through various strategies of control and development, such as those identified in this article, streaming platforms are established as an important medium for the exploitation of media franchises.

This article examines the role of public financiers in the context of digital distribution and the increased involvement of global streamers in financing local content. Through a comparative analysis, it explores how screen policy mixes aimed at funding fiction and animation films and series in two small European markets, Denmark and Flanders, adapt to and influence the transnational orientation in response to globalization and the rise of online distribution. Based on interviews in Denmark and Flanders combined with data analysis, the article shows that in the context of rising production budgets, transnational production and intense international competition, screen agencies and other public financiers have also become more transnationally oriented. Both in Flanders and Denmark, screen agencies put increased emphasis on enabling international financing and distribution opportunities for fiction and animation films and series. How to regulate and co-finance with global streamers has become an important question for policy stakeholders. As echoed in the interviews, producers in Flanders and Denmark agree that outward-looking policies for attracting commercial financing are becoming more important for strengthening the financing base of local works. It is significant to outline that policies fostering transnational financing and distribution do not stand in opposition to cultural protectionism. For example, investment obligations for global streamers can have the dual function of safeguarding the production ecology while promoting transnational sale and distribution. In smaller markets, such as Denmark and Flanders, aligning policy tools is essential, given that public funding for fiction and animation is crucial lever for achieving ambitious budgets and attracting private financing.

Massive sports events always attract international attention. However, for attention-seeking countries, this is a double-edged sword because it is difficult to remain in control of the images produced by foreign media outlets. Since Qatar is eager to boost its image internationally, hosting the 2022 FIFA World Cup was supposed to be a major step in the country’s comprehensive strategy to achieve this. However, Qatar faced strong criticism from western countries in the run-up to and during the World Cup, exemplified here by a cursory investigation of German media. Taking a postcolonial lens, we analysed the reactions to this criticism in Qatari media in opinion articles of three different sets of media, one focusing on the national Qatari public (Al-Sharq), one targeting the pan-Arab public (Al-Jazeera) and one targeting the western, English-speaking public worldwide (Al-Jazeera English). Two distinct discursive patterns were identified – one that aims to construct a particular identity mix of an Arab, Global Southern and Islamic ‘us’ against the ‘West’ as a kind of positively turned self-othering and another that actively deconstructs what is perceived as western hypocrisy. While the first pattern is exclusive to the Arab-speaking media, the second pattern was addressed in all three sets of media, albeit with different lines of argumentation depending on the target audience. While, for example, in Qatari national media, reactions to the allegation of Qatar violating or neglecting the rights of LGBTQ people are connected to an emphasis on a different, ‘conservative’ or ‘Islamic’ value system, Al-Jazeera Arabic and English presented their arguments in a more sophisticated manner and highlighted the double standards used by the West by including references to a neo-liberal world order and the remnants of a colonial past that continue to shape the West’s policies.

This study examines the impact of the new digital communication environment on the spiral of silence mechanisms in the context of the current Yemeni crisis. The research focuses on three controversial topics related to the crisis: the role of the Arab coalition in Yemen, the legitimacy of President Abdu Rabu Mansour Hadi and the call to disengage the Yemeni southern governorates from the unified Yemeni state. The sample for this study consisted of 438 respondents, selected using the snowball sampling method. The findings suggest that despite the changes in communication conditions, the mechanisms of the spiral of silence remain effective in the new digital communication environment. The study found that respondents emphasized their awareness of the severity of controversy, disagreement, hostile reactions from the other side and their fears of the threat of social isolation which affected their desire to express their opinions towards the three political issues. The results demonstrated that the respondents with the highest fear of isolation tended to exclude expressing an opinion in the new communication environment or prefer adhering to neutrality. The results confirmed that what impedes the expression of opinion in conflict environments is not the inability of individuals to access media and publishing platforms but rather the same psychological and social mechanisms of the spiral of silence – as identified by Neumann. The study proposes a new model of the spiral of silence theory that incorporates the transformations of the communication field and the inhibitors of opinion expression on social media.

This article is a meditation on the relations between praxis, art and posthumanism. Particularly, it is an attempt at a kind of practice of meaning-making that entangles multiple theoretical fields with my own critical creative practice. The article utilizes the feminist methodology of diffraction to read multiple frameworks through each other without privileging one over the other. It explores a speculative potential in relation to meaning-making and utilizes three specific examples of my artworks that examine what it means to practise concepts that perform change. These artworks – and the theoretical orientations I argue for – take a posthumanist view of media, crude oil, water and sheep. I call this work ‘Heliotechnics/Heliotechniques’: solar practices. These include my recent work Carbon Loops (2022), a dual 16-mm projection installation of crude oil film loops that were soaked in crude oil for one month; and a revisiting of the experimental videos Signal Works (2017) and grass wool signal scan (2016). I build a kind of relation to posthumanist practices through the feminist philosopher River (Karen) Barad. While I emphasize the artworks, it is the kinds of non-representational practices and concepts that I explore in this meditation. My goal is to think through words and doings to enact concepts that perform change.

This article presents a comprehensive analysis of the global discourse on the hijab on Instagram, a key platform for cultural and fashion expressions. Employing a mixed-methods approach, it examines a dataset of 100,000 Instagram posts to explore representations and discussions of the hijab in online communities. The study includes temporal analysis of discourse evolution, text classification of narratives using advanced natural language processing (NLP) techniques like topic modelling and sentiment analysis, and network analysis of community interactions. Key findings reveal the multifaceted nature of the hijab discourse, encompassing themes of fashion, religion and community. The temporal analysis uncovers peaks in hijab-related posts from October 2021 onwards and between May and July 2022, coinciding with Islamic events and the rise of modest fashion. Sentiment analysis indicates a generally positive and neutral perception of the hijab, while emotion analysis highlights joy, anticipation and trust as dominant emotions. Text classification identifies five main topics: hijab styles and fashion, sizing and shipping, colours and product types, religion and spirituality, and product orders. Network analysis visualizes the interconnected nature of these themes and communities. The study makes original contributions by shedding light on the ‘hijabista’ phenomenon, representing Muslim women who blend fashion with modesty on Instagram, and by demonstrating Instagram’s role in shaping contemporary hijab discourse related to identity, empowerment and cultural representation. The findings enhance understanding of social media’s impact on cultural discourses and offer valuable insights into the social and cultural implications of these online narratives for scholars, businesses and policy-makers.

There is now no shortage of media for us to consume, from streaming services and video-on-demand to social media and everything else besides. This has changed the way media scholars think about the production and reception of media. Missing from these conversations, though, is the maker: in particular, the maker who has the power to produce media in their pocket.



How might one craft a personal media-making practice that is thoughtful and considerate of the tools and materials at one's disposal? This is the core question of this original new book. Exploring a number of media-making tools and processes like drones and vlogging, as well as thinking through time, editing, sound and the stream, Binns looks out over the current media landscape in order to understand his own media practice. 

The result is a personal journey through media theory, history and technology, furnished with practical exercises for teachers, students, professionals and enthusiasts: a unique combination of theory and practice written in a highly personal and personable style that is engaging and refreshing.

This book will enable readers to understand how a personal creative practice might unlock deeper thinking about media and its place in the world. 

The primary readership will be among academics, researchers and students in the creative arts, as well as practitioners of creative arts including sound designers, cinematographers and social media content producers. 

Designed for classroom use, this will be of particular importance for undergraduate students of film production, and may also be of interest to students at MA level, particularly on the growing number of courses that specifically offer a blend of theory and practice. The highly accessible writing style may also mean that it can be taken up for high school courses on film and production.

It will also be of interest to academics delivering these courses, and to researchers and scholars of new media and digital cinema.

Information and communication technology is reshaping the world faster than ever. In parallel with the growth of content production and publishing tools, the volume of digital content has increased drastically. Malaysian authorities have established and authorized Content Forum to create a Content Code for imposing self-regulating standards on networked content. The Content Code served as the guiding principle for content creators in managing their content better. Industry players were early adopters of the Content Code. However, there has not been a strong awareness of the Content Code amongst the public. This research aimed to provide insights into the extent concerning how Malaysians are empowered in making an informed selection when consuming content across multiple screens and platforms. Thus, this research conducted focus group discussions and questionnaire distribution to fill this gap. The results showed that most people are aware of the Content Code, but not in detail. Instead, they have been selecting content intuitively based on their common sense and general knowledge. The findings of this study can provide insights to the authorities in increasing the awareness of Malaysians to exercise informed content selection when consuming networked content, therefore increasing the welfare of internet users.

This research aims to provide a critical analysis of the portrayal of migrant workers and the Bedoon in the popular Kuwaiti TV series From Haram Street (Haram Street). The research methodology employs the use of a diasporic critique to explore to what extent have TV and popular culture as technologies of power allowed workers to submit to a certain degree of domination and how television reinforces this script of dominance. Using diasporic critique, the author highlights how labour migrants are displaced in reality but framed differently through popular culture. The key findings indicate that the series provides a highly stereotypical portrayal of the Bedoon and migrant worker communities. The findings also indicate that the diasporic nature of these communities – that of migrant workers and that of the Bedoon – allows for a privileged and hegemonic rhetoric that excludes domestic workers and Bedoon communities. Along with providing an insight into the feminist vernacular discourse in present-day Kuwait, Haram Street series also sets in motion hegemonic rhetorics meant to keep migrant workers and Bedoon communities disciplined and excluded through technologies of domination. Particular attention in this article is paid to how Haram Street shapes our understanding of the migrant workers’ and stateless individuals’ situation in Kuwait.

The aim of this article is to use one central assumption of Wittgenstein’s philosophy – language games – to review some important aspects of communication and language issues that typically have arisen in the aftermath of the wars in Ukraine and Gaza. I draw specifically on a critical inquiry of purposefully selected samples of discursive and linguistic practices accompanying the war in Ukraine and the occupation of its territory by Russia, and the war in Gaza and the occupation of Palestinian territories by Israel. References will also be made to the types of language games used by mainstream western media to categorize other wars and occupations discursively and socially, such as those of Iraq, Yemen and Afghanistan. I argue that the use of language is crucial for the understanding and representation of these wars and occupations, and a cause of failure in intercultural interaction. The central argument is as follows: While language games have different senses and not all people attach the same meaning to them, in case of conflict and controversy, those with power attach additional or different interpretations to them in a way they think is reasonable to change or at least rearrange their meanings. According to Wittgenstein’s deliberations of language games, the meaning of each of the various linguistic utterances, like words, sentences or symbols, is defined in terms of its setting and use. To unravel how and why certain linguistic practices are reinforced, and others are thwarted, the article supplements Wittgenstein’s deliberations of language with Hollihan and Baaskes’ definition of rhetorical source credibility, Thomas Hobbes’ ‘Leviathan discourse’ and Foucault’s notion of discourse and power.