Cultural & Media Studies
Education
Dafydd Sills-Jones • Elin Haf Gruffydd Jones (eds.)
Rubén Jarazo-Álvarez • José Igor Prieto-Arranz (eds.)
Documentary in Wales
The Humanities Still Matter
Cultures and Practices
Identity, Gender and Space in Twenty-First-Century Europe
Oxford, 2021. XIV, 314 pp., 20 fig. col., 4 fig. b/w, 12 tables.
Oxford, 2020. XIV, 326 pp., 7 b/w ill.
Documentary Film Cultures. Vol. 1
Cultural Identity Studies. Vol. 31
hb. • ISBN 978-1-78874-533-8 CHF 85.– / €D 72.95 / €A 74.70 / € 67.90 / £ 55.– / US-$ 82.95
pb. • ISBN 978-1-78997-279-5 CHF 54.– / €D 45.95 / €A 45.40 / € 43.30 / £ 35.– / US-$ 52.95
eBook (SUL) • ISBN 978-1-78874-534-5 CHF 85.– / €D 71.95 / €A 71.30 / € 67.90 / £ 55.– / US-$ 82.95
eBook (SUL) • ISBN 978-1-78997-280-1 CHF 54.– / €D 45.95 / €A 45.40 / € 43.30 / £ 35.– / US-$ 52.95
Documentary, in a small, bilingual nation such as Wales, experiences many of the same challenges that it faces across the world. As the costs of professional documentary production lessen, and the potentialities of internet distribution loosen the grip of its traditional tele-cinematic gatekeepers, documentary production communities face both the potential of new distribution avenues and severe professional precarity. In Wales, the dynamics of this transformation unfolds according to a specific historical, political and cultural situation. With funding, regulatory frameworks, audience taste, viewing figures, and contractual territories all mostly emanating or controlled from across the border in England, at times it is difficult to identify texts that can and can’t be claimed as «Welsh». But then again, contingency and struggle have always been fundamental aspects of Welsh cultural identity. What emerges is not so much the documentary culture of a small nation, but a documentary culture that is still struggling to come to terms with itself, giving Welsh documentary a character defined by a specific set of features: the political and cultural interplay of two languages, a continuation of older British public service broadcasting traditions, the acceptance of the marginal, the close interconnectedness of key players and the often paralysing effect of underfunding.
Why are the arts and humanities under attack? And how can they fight back? Historically these fields have suffered from a lack of prestige due to the utilitarian perspective of the «developed» world. While such utilitarian views have not been entirely fair on this branch of knowledge, the humanities themselves are partly to blame for this crisis, often not keeping pace with an increasingly changing society. It is therefore imperative that the humanities once and for all prove themselves relevant, leaving behind «departmentalized» approaches to academic knowledge and embracing the social mission that once epitomized humanistic study. Guided by such principles, this book features fourteen interdisciplinary studies that explore exciting intersections between different areas of academic research. These studies centre around three broad topics, which function as this volume’s structural axes: identity, gender, and space and mobility (whether voluntary, as in tourism, or imposed, as in the case of migrations and persecutions). Altogether, the volume demonstrates that the humanities, far from being artificially detached from society, can actually study the enormously complex context that is contemporary Europe and crucially point the way to a better, more equitable world.
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