Using Our Influence to Seek Safety and Connection Through Despair and Grief: A Conversation About the Impacts of Disease and Violence, and the Pathways of Hope and Healing

This article is an exploration of Critical Appreciative Inquiry and the practice of appreciative resiliency in the face of violence, tragedy and Covid-19. We investigate, through video documentary, how sharing stories and sharing pain can create opportunities for hope, trust and resilience. We explore spaces of safety and connection where experiences of violence against women and girls can be prevented, heard or healed. Together we move from despair and hopelessness to healing, forgiveness and constructive action.

the Unknown Person: Post-Colonial Fictioning, Personal Stories and Surveillance

the Unknown Person connects the artist's family history to Britain's postcolonial “fictioning.” The project interrogates the gaze of surveillance and social control systems to explore the fiction of the self, data and liminal spaces of the City of London. The final output of this research is a video documentary that employs machine learning processes and facial recognition techniques to generate visuals to reveal the aesthetic value of a neural network. The project culminated as an installation of multiple screens mounted on a scaffolding structure.

Almolonga 1999

Evangelicals from abroad, even as they pushed for rationalized development, urged American evangelicals to recover supernatural aspects of the Christian faith. During the 1980s and 1990s, Almolonga, Guatemala, was transformed into a predominantly Pentecostal—and a very prosperous—mountain town. Town boosters and missionaries declared that spiritual renewal was key to the social transformation. In 1999, the video documentary Transformations described the “Almolonga miracle” as the result of prayer, miracles, and spiritual warfare. Supernatural stories from Latin America, Africa, and Asia led not only to the rise of a substantial neo-Pentecostal movement in the United States, but also to a broader sensitivity among evangelicals to the miraculous in a reenchanted West.

Developing audio-visual learning media based on video documentary on tissue culture explant of Dendrobium bigibbum

The development of science and technology challenge teachers to pay a great effort in creating an effective media. The aim of this study was to produce audio-visual learning media based on video documentary explanation of orchid plants (Dendrobium bigibbum) on tissue culture material. This research was conducted on July 2019. This R&D used the ADDIE model without implementation phase. The data collection instruments used were validation sheets and student questionnaire responses. The data obtained were analyzed using percentage. The evaluation results of the audiovisual learning media based on video documentary tissue culture showed that it was considered as very feasible to be used with an average percentage score of 87.50% by tissue culture expert, 91,87% by learning media expert, 91.66% by the teachers, and 94.37% by the students. The effectiveness of the learning media developed need to be ensured by conducting the implementation phase.

Singing beyond the TV Screen: Documentary, News and Interviews as Operatic Material

John Adam’s opera Nixon in China (1987) opened the era of what some critics called ‘CNN operas’ — an operatic mixture of political issues and televisual representation. Since Nixon, various attempts to interrogate issues of world politics, power and realism on the (post)operatic stage took place: video documentary opera Three Tales (1998–2002) by Steve Reich and Beryl Korot, “The News” (2011) by Jacob ter Veldhuis (Jacob TV), five one-minute operas by Michel van der Aa (produced from 2010 to 2014, commissioned for the Dutch TV program Der Wereld Drait Door), Aliados (2013) by Sebastian Rivas, to mention only the few. This article attempts to give a partial overview of different operatic approaches to televisual expression and to illuminate ways of depicting documentary and news in recent opera focusing on the political figures.

Changes in stigma and help-seeking in relation to postpartum depression: non-clinical parenting intervention sample

Postpartum depression (PPD) is a prevalent mental illness affecting women, and less commonly, men in the weeks and months after giving birth. Despite the high incidence of PPD in Australia, rates for help-seeking remain low, with stigma and discrimination frequently cited as the most common deterrents to seeking help from a professional source. The present study sought to investigate PPD stigma in a sample of parents and to examine the effects of an intervention on stigma and help-seeking behaviour. A total of 212 parents aged 18–71 years (M = 36.88, 194 females) completed measures of personal and perceived PPD stigma and attitudes towards seeking mental health services and were randomly assigned to one of four groups: an intervention group (video documentary or factsheet related to PPD) or a control group (video documentary or factsheet not related to PPD). Results showed that there were no effects for type of intervention on either personal or perceived PPD stigma scores. No effect was found for help-seeking propensity. Males had higher personal PPD stigma than females and older age was associated with lower personal PPD stigma. Familiarity with PPD was associated with perceived PPD stigma in others but not personal PPD stigma. More work needs to be conducted to develop interventions to reduce PPD stigma in the community.