Developing Transnational Literacies

Social movements operate in 'an environment for politics that is increasingly information-rich and communication-intensive' (Bimber 2001, p. 53). There is an established literature on new ICTs and social movements, but little of it considers mobilization in the global South. This paper presents a case study on the use of ICTs by the Treatment Action Campaign (TAC), a South African social movement campaigning for the rights of people living with HIV/AIDS. McAdam et al.'s comparative framework of three theoretical perspectives on mobilization (McAdam et al. 1996) - mobilising structures, opportunity structures and framing processes - is used to link the analysis into the social movement literature. The findings show extensive use of email, mailing lists and the Internet in TAC activities despite low levels of access among the movement's largely poor activist base. ICTs are used to help the movement engage with elites, professional groups and media, as well as in the development of local and international movement networks. There is also widespread informal use of mobile phones, which a local NGO is working with the TAC to extend. Mobiles are seen as a way to reach the previously disconnected majority, strengthening their involvement in existing processes as well as extending the movement's reach beyond its current branch-based structure.

In Brazil - and more largely in Latin America - the fight of the indigenous movements for the demarcation of their territory and the installation of an intercultural school education contributed to the constitutional changes of the years 1980-1990 which led these States to regard themselves from then on as pluricultural and multiethnic nations and to recognize collective rights specific to native people and tribes living on their territory. The author analyzes the advent and the development of this intercultural bilingual education in two border regions of the State of Amazonas (Alto Solimes and Alto Rio Negro) near the populations Ticuna, Baniwa and Tukano during the years 1990 and 2000. He shows in particular how the indigenous school, an assimilationist instrument for the Occidental and Christian culture until the 1980s, has been transformed by supporting the reappropriation of the traditional knowledge; meanwhile this school has opened itself to 'Western' knowledge in order to make it possible for the younger generation to acquire the ability to go towards evolution.

This paper will focus on an applied research initiative1 we are currently engaged in, which brings together academics (both from conventional institutions - the university, the research centers and undergraduate colleges - and from 'new and innovative institutional structures') with policy-makers and grant-making organizations. The initiative has to do with the entire field of higher education (India having one of the biggest higher education systems in the world), but interestingly it was incubated by the Center for the Study of Culture and Society (CSCS). The painstaking process of the gestation of collaborative interdisciplinary themes/fields of research/teaching and the labor of negotiation with policy-makers and grantees in the field of higher education by a Cultural Studies centre is thus the focus of this paper. Called the Higher Education Cell, an important aspect of the initiative's genealogy is that it is based on (a) a critique of the existing disciplines and an attention to the birthing of 'new thematic/field specifics' as also (b) a critique of the research undertaken in mainstream institutions and an attention to new research methodologies. The Higher Education Cell is at present focusing on four major functions through which it plans to engage with the higher education sector. These functions are (i) Incubation of Research Initiatives, (ii) Institutional Collaborations, (iii) Documentation and Archiving, and (iv) Grant Development.

This essay focuses on television censorship during the last military regime in Brazil (1964-1985) by examining the performance of television censors employed by the Public Entertainment Censor Department (Diviso de Censura e Diverses Pblicas, DCDP). It challenges common perceptions about small-screen censorship during this period, pointing to the need to analyse the boundaries and the spaces of autonomy in each television genre. It focuses on the multiple tensions and struggles between the written procedures and codes, the censors' subjective interpretation of television texts and the negotiation process of the broadcast contents between censors and television producers. The recent opening of the Censor Division Archives (DCDP) and the deluge of biographies, autobiographies and testimonials of key television figures during the authoritarian regime, have opened up new perspectives to examine Brazilian TV history and the place television censors had within it. Annotated and censored scripts of telenovelas and comedy series, correspondence exchanged between the executives of Globo Television Network, the hegemonic TV station in Brazil at the time, and the regime's authorities, printed press reports, as well as audiovisual content that is now available to researchers, constitute some of the sources analysed in this article.

This paper examines the contribution of human rights education (HRE) to conflict prevention and to the promotion of security. It outlines the difficulties in evaluating the long-term impact of HRE, but then proposes five benefits of a rights-based approach to education - rights as secular, man-made, requiring transparency, enabling freedom from degrading treatment and implying reciprocity. The paper goes on to describe the work of UNICEF UK's Rights Respecting Schools before acknowledging the political and contested nature of HRE, in terms of competing rights. Future work should include research on the impact of and countering myths about rights.

Educational diversity does not only imply that education needs to take account of the diversity present in educational settings but that diversity should develop from the educational processes themselves. In this focus issue of Intercultural Education, diversity is perceived as something that education should not only take into consideration - as a given - but also something much more active: to implement and reconstruct diversity as such."

The modern city is torn by conflicts and contradictions, marked by serious environmental problems (pollution, waste, traffic, etc.), and by large areas of human and urban blight, because its profound changes and the inhabitants of cities meet in a very fractured and parcelled out relationship; the contacts may take place face to face, but nevertheless are impersonal, superficial, and transitory. The critical approach to environmental education and sustainability is to target the inequalities, the wasting of resources, and the arrogance of human domination over nature, but its contribution to appropriate urban development is nevertheless still weak. It is therefore necessary to develop the research on the educational approach to the urban environment. Critical thinking, participation, the ability to imagine future scenarios, and a shared and free access to knowledge are essential elements of the necessary social change toward sustainability.

This paper explores some of the unresolved tensions in higher education systems and the contradiction between widening participation and the consolidation of social position. It shows how concepts of capital derived from Bourdieu, Coleman and Putnam provide a powerful basis for critique, but risk a deficit view of students from less privileged backgrounds. These students are more likely to attend lower-status institutions and engage with an externally focused curriculum. The paper argues for greater attention to agency, and community and familial capital, in conceptualising the resilience of those from less privileged backgrounds. While the recognition of 'voice' is important, a curriculum that acknowledges the context independence of knowledge is essential if these students are not to be further disadvantaged.

This paper looks at examples of journalistic institutions that receive prior funding (as opposed to post facto reward) from charitable foundations. It examines ProPublica in the United States (financed by the Sandler Family Supporting Foundation), Transitions Online in Eastern Europe (financed initially by the Open Society Institute) and the Centre for Public Inquiry in Ireland (closed down by its sole funder, Atlantic Philanthropies, after a government and press campaign against its executive director). Drawing on the sociological literature about foundations, it raises questions about the purposes of philanthropy, about the transparency of media that use philanthropically funded material, and about the assumption of a unitary "public interest" common to both philanthropy and to traditional journalism. It concludes that both a critical understanding of foundations themselves and a consideration of the case-studies presented should encourage wariness about philanthropic funding as an unproblematic model for the future of journalism.

News providers such as Bloomberg's multiplatform service and innumerable business-to-business magazines are flourishing despite the hugely challenging economic climate for journalism. They are catering for a new type of global audience that demands a different editorial strategy. Rather than writing news for local markets they produce for a global professional readership. This paper interrogates the nature of this global news style through linguistic analysis, supported by interviews with journalists. The paper raises questions about the continued efficacy of "traditional" models of journalism practice and notions of audience.

This paper explores the structure of the project-based innovation networks promoted by tax incentives to innovation activities in the Brazilian ICT sector ("ICT Law"). It proposes a framework for characterizing the decentralized governance of innovation projects in sectors, identifying (i) the boundaries between firms and technological partners, (ii) the specialization of actors in types of activities and (iii) the speed of change in the collaborations between firms and technological institutes. The empirical analysis is based on the data of more than 10,000 innovation projects conducted between 1997 and 2003. The results show a strong re-organization of the innovation networks in the sector during the period, attributed mainly to a shift from investments in middleware to software-related innovation activities, the re-specialization of the subsidiaries of multinational companies, and the emergence of private research institutes as central nodes inside the sectoral innovation system.

It seems that everywhere one looks these days, the debate over the "crisis in the humanities" is raging unabated. The profession, as all our readers have undoubtedly noticed, is in a full-on identity crisis: Who are we as a discipline? What is our work? Who do we serve? What values undergird our practice? These perennial questions and others are more insistent than ever, especially as they intersect with the economic issues that dominate higher education today.

This article investigates the contemporary phenomenon of "child media advocacy," or the practice of "empowering" child subjects by providing them with media technologies as a means of self-representation. Tracing the genealogy of this practice to an older ethnographic tradition of "handing over the camera" to the native, or autoethnography, this article argues that the liberatory impulse of child media advocacy needs to be interrogated as a part of the legacy of harnessing media for turning deviant or dangerous types into productive social subjects. The centerpiece of the article is a reading of Born into Brothels, an award-winning film documenting the codirector and photojournalist Zana Briski's humanitarian project to emancipate the children of prostitutes in India by training them in photography and creating avenues for them to sell their own photographs of brothel life. A close reading of two autoethnographic photographs follows, which suggests that the visual rhetoric of immediacy that permeates and surrounds the film conceals a more complex set of transactions that draw on the enduring ethnographic mythology of the mimetic child to authenticate the project of the film. The article concludes by arguing that Born into Brothels puts to work the immaterial or affective labor of children in the production of cultural commodities as a humane and "empowering" alternative to coerced sex work. This move to mobilize the child as a new figure of economic promise indicates the vexed bonds that contemporary humanitarian discourses of media advocacy are forging with the affirmative economic imperatives of neoliberalism.

Drawing heavily on the work of the French sociologist Agnes Heller, Latin American anthropologists and educators proposed the notion of saberes docentes, roughly translated as "teacher knowledge", to account for the knowledge acquired through everyday trials and rehearsals of specific problems along with the accompanying reflective processes. In this paper, we argue in favour of incorporating the notion of saberes docentes into our current understanding of educators' work with ethnic minority students in urban and semi-urban educational contexts. To support this argument, we discuss data from two different research settings involving the education of ethnic minority children: (a) the educational programmes organized by a Gitano (gypsy) cultural association that employs several non-Gitano educators in a small city in central Spain; and (b) schools employing bilingual teaching assistants - both immigrant and non-immigrant - working with immigrant students in the northwest region of the United States.

In recent years and with increasing frequency, Japan's mass media has reported on the phenomenon of parents making 'impossible' demands of schools. Researchers have also recognized the importance of understanding parents' expectations toward public school education. It is against this backdrop of heightened awareness that this paper sets out to uncover variations in parental attitudes by categorizing mothers into some groups and assessing how much these groups differ from one another. Of special interest are 'struggling part-timers' who must juggle work and family responsibilities. Our findings point to the need to provide these parents with more child care assistance and other support.

Drawing upon narratives from China's 'E-generation' (the urban only-child generation), this study explores how the Internet as a cultural tool is actually being taken up by young people and made meaningful for themselves within the socio-cultural context of today's China. The narratives revolve around their perceptions and experiences of the net in some major domains of their lives: recreation, the self, learning (study/work) and sociability. It shows that the importance they attached to the Internet for recreation (and the less importance for the other domains) is directly related to their social-biographical situations. Assigning relevance and meaning of the Internet to their lives, the participants drew different aspects of these situations into the foreground, such as, inter alia, only-child status, high parental expectations, the exam-oriented educational system, being young, lack of authority in the family and society, the competitive labour market, and the 'emerging adulthood' in the only-child family.

The Active Objects series is the contribution of Brazilian artist and poet Willys de Castro (1926-1988) to Neoconcretism, which was an avant-garde movement in Rio de Janeiro from 1959 to the mid-1960s that changed the parameters of Brazilian art definitively. A typical Active Object is composed of a wooden structure covered with painted canvas that is hung on the wall like a regular painting - but the evident tri-dimensionality of the object purposefully contrasts with the flatness of its frontal surface. Thus the artist addressed the potential conflict between sculpture and painting to the benefit of a fruitful interdisciplinary practice. The reception of these works, however, is still based on Ferreira Gullar's formalist writings of the late 1950s, and does not consider Castro's poetic production, which informed the series. Based on poststructuralist theory, the article analyses his works in an attempt to understand their complex regimes of signification.

Reflection is generally acknowledged as an important part of teacher education and a central activity in teacher development. The close connection between reflection and identity development has been noted in literature on teacher education. This paper will focus on the interplay among the concepts of reflection, identity and the ideal, and will report the results of a pilot study which attempted to elicit from student teachers their reflections on an ideal identity for their future lives as teachers. The implications of such reflection for teacher education programmes will be indicated.

This sequential QUAL → qual study examines: Phase 1 how reflective practice was implemented in a diversity course in a teacher education program by one teacher educator, and Phase 2 how two of the teacher candidates implemented reflective practice in their diverse student teaching contexts. Data included observations of the course and the student teaching of two teacher candidates (TCs), interviews of the course instructor, three TCs, and two high school students, as well as analyses of key course assignments. This study concludes: (1) cultivation of a reflective practice in TCs is critical to the teacher preparation process; (2) support for TCs in this process is strengthened when led by an instructor who also engages in reflective practice; and (3) teacher reflection on diversity, assumptions and inequity, with opportunities to transfer these course reflections to their teaching practices is central to preparing teachers to teach diverse student populations.

In spite of remarkable advances in science and technology, humankind is beset with a number of serious problems. These are not just problems that 'won't go away'; they are problems that are worsening considerably. These problems include the growing gap between rich and poor, between those who have too much and those who have too little, as well as a broad range of environmental issues that may have major consequences but, at the same time, are little understood. This essay explores the idea of 'civic intelligence'. What projects, perspectives, policy and technology might humankind develop that would help us collectively address these problems? This essay discusses six aspects of 'civic intelligence' (orientation, organization, engagement, intelligence, products and projects, and resources) as well as ways to make cultivating our 'civic intelligence' a practical - non-utopian - enterprise.