The video years: Stuart Cunningham and screen industry research

This essay explores Stuart Cunningham's foundational contributions to screen industry research. Cunningham's work is grounded in the understanding that industrial and expressive processes are co-constitutive. More than a gestural attempt to articulate opposing fields (industry and culture), it is instead a career-long thinking-through of their mutual constitution. This manifests in Cunningham's close attention to the everyday work of screen industries: distribution; exhibition; promotion; professional training and education; institutional representation and lobbying; regulation. The essay explores Cunningham's thirty years of work on these topics, including his recent studies of online video production and distribution. It also reflects on his intellectual trajectories and his legacies for the field.

Outlining Conceptual Practices in Comics

This article examines how the shortcomings of institutional representation in comics, and the shifting role of existing institutions in the industry, can engender a new comics practice. ‘Conceptual Comics’ mobilise the historical legacy of conceptual art in its capacity for institutional critique, self-reflexivity, alternative forms of skilling, and the prioritisation of context over content, to renew comics making and reading. My case study, Noirs [Blacks] (2015), a facsimile détournement of Les Schtroumpfs noirs [The Black Smurfs], closely approximates the original, with the same cover, number of pages, and format, but replaces four different composite colour plates by four uniform plates of cyan, resulting in a monochromatic deviation. Noirs demonstrates how a form, when no longer conventionally operational, can foreground industrial fabrication normally intuited as a transparent and mechanic process.

A Mapping Study of Veterinary Literature on Perceptions and Attitudes of Female Canine Spaying

This is a mapping study conducted to evaluate the characteristics of where content that engages in perspectives or attitudes on female dog spaying is published. Three databases, CAB Direct, PubMed, and Scopus, were systematically searched. There were 84 out of 642 papers identified and screened for relevance on attitudes or perceptions on female canine spaying. These 84 articles were then examined for recurring authors, institutional representation, and publisher information. Additionally, information regarding the population being addressed, veterinarian or client, was noted with most literature addressing the veterinary perspective. Many important articles were published in a wide array of journals from many countries, which suggests the importance of not only browsing journals but also searching for relevant literature in databases like CAB Abstracts and MEDLINE.

Among Forests, Wetlands and Animals: Ecocriticism in the Baltics

Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania often tend to be grouped together under the label of ’the Baltic countries’, yet they constitute a region characterised by a diversity which also manifests itself in the field of academic research. Still, it may be possible to detect some common elements in the ecocriticism-related activities that have been taking place in these states during the past couple of decades. The article maps the salient tendencies in the environmental humanities (including ecocriticism) of the region that recently gained an institutionalised platform in the form of the Baltic Conferences on the Environmental Humanities and Social Sciences (BALTEHUMS) that were started in 2018. A survey is given of the three countries’ most significant events and publications that have boasted an ecocritical component, ecocriticism’s institutional representation and inclusion of ecocritical issues in university syllabuses and theory textbooks, as well as some pertinent topics and sub-fields on which the scholars in these countries are currently working. Among these, various aspects of the connections of literature and the ecosystems of the forest (trees) and the mire can be noticed; while also animal studies, literary urban studies, bio- and ecosemiotics and environmental history appear to have entered a fruitful dialogue with ecocritical scholarship currently conducted in the Baltics.

Scotland at Westminster

Since the Treaty and Acts of Union in 1707, Scotland has returned MPs to Westminster. Whilst dwarfed, at least demographically by its partner in that Union, England, Scotland has, on a number of occasions, punched above its weight at the Centre—most notably at either end of the twentieth century when Liberalism and then Labour dominated Scottish politics. This chapter examines the relationship of Scotland with the UK Parliament. It begins by placing this relationship in its historical context, before then turning to an audit of contemporary Scottish influence and representation at Westminster, post-devolution. This chapter does this by breaking down two of the main and interconnected dimensions of Scottish representation at Westminster: (1) Scottish parliamentarians and the Westminster party system; and (2) institutional representation within Parliament. This latter category includes both Scottish-specific institutional mechanisms, such as the Scottish Affairs Committee and the Scottish Grand Committee, and the broader Westminster apparatus that can be leveraged for influence, such as parliamentary question times.

Brexit and the limits of Article 50 Treaty of the European Union

This article aims to analyse the limits of Article 50 of the Treaty of the European Union (TEU) which expressly consecrates a Member State’s unilateral right to leave the Union. However, the provision seems to raise more questions than it answers due to the lack of concrete legal guidelines, and Brexit has underlined this reality. For example, the exit procedure contemplates the possibility of signing a withdrawal agreement with the European Union (EU), but it does not discipline its content. In our opinion, any agreement must regulate three questions: fundamental rights, financial settlement, and borders. A second limitation refers to the possibility of a Member State withdrawing its withdrawal notice. This question has recently been decided by the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) in a manner that leaves the EU without any say in the process. Finally, the provision does not deal with the constitutional implications of withdrawal: treaty revision, institutional deadlock, and institutional representation. In sum, these critical omissions are analysed considering the relevant legal doctrine, jurisprudence, as well as the Brexit process. It also proposed that Article 50 of the TEU be amended in the future.

10. The internal (or common, or single) market

This chapter describes what is interchangeably called the ‘common market’, the ‘single market’, or the ‘internal market’. These terms all refer to the same concept: a geographical area made up of the territories of the Member States, wherein there are (in theory) no barriers to trade, and which operate an identical external trade policy. The chapter looks at the completion of the single market, considering the European Economic Community (EEC) Treaty. It also identifies what makes the single market unique, detailing the stages of economic integration and the key components of the EU's internal market. In light of the Withdrawal Agreement, it will be some time before the UK distances itself from the EU's internal market. The transition period created by the Withdrawal Agreement effectively results in a form of ongoing ‘EU membership’ without institutional representation. Both the positive regulations that make up the internal market and the EU's customs union rules will thus continue to apply to the UK until at least the end of 2020.

Hybrid Justice and the Rights of the Defence

This chapter examines generally the issue of the position of the Defence in hybrid tribunals, more particularly at the Extraordinary African Chambers (EAC) before proposing those reflections on the role of the Defence within the international criminal justice project. When it comes to the EAC, it should be noted that the initial agreement and Statute of the Chambers signed in 2012 did not include any specific provision relating to an institutional representation of the Defence within the institution. However, in 2014, an addendum to the initial agreement was signed between Senegal and the African Union (AU) in order to create a Defence office within the EAC. The ambition of this addendum was clearly to promote the respect for the rights of the Defence at the African Chambers, as noted in the Preamble to the addendum, where the right to a fair trial and the presumption of innocence are reaffirmed as fundamental principles. The chapter then looks at the legal challenges faced by the Defence during the Hissène Habré trial and how they were dealt with by the Trial and Appeals Chamber.

Two decades of diplomatic representation of the Slovak Republic in the world – political-geographic perspective

The aim of the paper is political-geographical evaluation of the institutional representation of the Slovak Republic abroad. The geographical (complex) point of view on the foreign policy and localisation of the embassies significantly influence the way of understanding the nature of the network of diplomatic representation of the small state in central Europe. In the first section, we compare and evaluate government documents regarding the establishing, cancellation, or planning of the Slovak embassies in the world in three main periods. Subsequently, we compare official data with the real steps of diplomacy and the government of the Slovak Republic, especially in terms of time and space. In the next section, we point out the other diplomatic representations and their progressive increase. The last section identifies and defines the main factors affecting spatial changes in the localisation of the Slovak embassies abroad by most frequently mentioned reasons in government documents. We pointed out embassies and their effectiveness by economic relations, tourists and other factors. This article is a contribution to the Slovak political geography and the evidence of the undoubtable role of geography in foreign political decisions on the example of the embassy network of the Slovak Republic.