The Trans/national Cultural Economy of Latin American Film Musicals (1930s-50s)

This essay traces the tensions between national imaginaries and transnational global media flows of tango, samba, and ranchera film musicals, taking into account their cross-media and intercultural configurations as well as interconnections between these three “transgenres.” From a comparative perspective and by means of a “histoire croisée,” or crisscrossing history, it touches upon developments in early Latin American sound film, Hollywood’s Spanishlanguage films and its Pan-Americanism, Spain’s cinematic Hispanoamericanismo, and Pan-Latin American film productions. The essay makes a case for the multifaceted trans/national cultural economy of the tango, samba, and ranchera film musical productions during their main phase, in the 1930s and 40s.

New Patterns of Flow and Rethinking International Mediascapes: The Influence of Stuart Cunningham on Theories of Television's Travels

Stuart Cunningham contributed to important publications that advanced thinking about transnational media flows, much of which remains relevant a quarter of a century later. This essay explores Cunningham's collaborations with Elizabeth Jacka and John Sinclair in ‘Australian Television and International Mediascapes' and ‘New Patterns in Global Television: Peripheral View’ to explore the prescient and productive theoretical innovations these books offered the field.

Stagnation points control chaotic fluctuations in viscoelastic porous media flow

Viscoelastic flows through porous media become unstable and chaotic beyond critical flow conditions, impacting widespread industrial and biological processes such as enhanced oil recovery and drug delivery. Understanding the influence of the pore structure or geometry on the onset of flow instability can lead to fundamental insights into these processes and, potentially, to their optimization. Recently, for viscoelastic flows through porous media modeled by arrays of microscopic posts, Walkama et al. [D. M. Walkama, N. Waisbord, J. S. Guasto, Phys. Rev. Lett. 124, 164501 (2020)] demonstrated that geometric disorder greatly suppressed the strength of the chaotic fluctuations that arose as the flow rate was increased. However, in that work, disorder was only applied to one originally ordered configuration of posts. Here, we demonstrate experimentally that, given a slightly modified ordered array of posts, introducing disorder can also promote chaotic fluctuations. We provide a unifying explanation for these contrasting results by considering the effect of disorder on the occurrence of stagnation points exposed to the flow field, which depends on the nature of the originally ordered post array. This work provides a general understanding of how pore geometry affects the stability of viscoelastic porous media flows.

Review essay: global and comparative perspectives on media and development

This essay reviews the works ‘Television and the Afghan Culture Wars’ (University of Illinois Press) by Wazhmah Osman and ‘Media Imperialism in India and Pakistan’ (Routledge) by Farooq Sulehria as recent contributions to the fields of global and comparative media studies. It considers the overlapping themes in these works through ruberics of media imperialism and development in terms of growth of television industry in India, Pakistan and Afghanistan in the broad context of globalization and transnational media flows.

Mathematical modeling of dispersed media flows in the presence of nucleation, coagulation and phase transitions

A model of motion of a gas-dispersed medium in the presence of processes of nucleation, coagulation and phase transitions has been constructed. A homogeneous nucleation model is used to describe the nucleation process. It is believed that the process of cluster coagulation occurs due to their Brownian motion. The analysis of the solution of the coagulation equation in the particular case of monodisperse clusters in the presence of a source and sink of particles is carried out. To determine the rate of phase transitions the Hertz-KnudsenLangmuir formula is used. The calculations were carried out on the basis of a quasi-one-dimensional model within the equilibrium approximation (when the velocities and temperatures of the phases coincide). As a result of the study the main properties of the flow of a two-phase mixture in a channel in the presence of nucleation, coagulation, and phase transformations have been established. It is shown that the vapor temperature increases along the channel and reaches the saturation temperature at some distance from the channel entrance. Calculations have shown that the coagulation process has a rather strong effect on the distribution of cluster sizes along the channel.

Austerity and the Rise of Radical Comedy

This chapter picks up previous strands from the ‘new satire’ to argue that the global financial crisis and the rise of austerity politics provided fertile ground for the return of ‘radical comedy’. Here the work of Russell Brand and Stewart Lee is discussed in terms of its ability to question and subvert the dominant mode of market agency: the neoliberal subject. For Brand, this is an opportunity to engage in wider themes of radical democracy, whereas Lee provides a more nuanced deconstruction of our place in global capital/ media flows.