Exchanges: The Interdisciplinary Research Journal

Five Minutes to Midnight

Gareth J Johnson — Fri, 26 Apr 2024 00:00:00 +0100

This is the editorial for the 27th issue of Exchanges. The editorial offers an update to journal activities, along with an introduction to the issue’s content, alongside highlighting ways in which people can interact and contribute to future issues. The major focus of the editorial is an overview of the various special issue projects currently underway for future publication consideration. The article also includes information on the Editorial Board and ways to contact the Editor-in-Chief.

Voices and/of Places

Cristina Peligra — Fri, 26 Apr 2024 00:00:00 +0100

After Indonesia’s independence was officially recognised by the Netherlands in 1949, several former members of the colonial élite repatriated. Many among the Indies-born repatriatees’ generation used writing to come to terms with their own controversial, multifaceted identity. While they belonged to the colonial élite, they can be studied as writers geographically and temporally displaced as their colonial land of birth no longer exists. Their desire for belonging is arguably exemplified in the way their novels’ protagonists’ linguistic identity is depicted. While these authors write in Dutch, their characters are embedded in local cultures, languages, traditions, questioning fixed labels and dichotomies. Taking as example Helga Ruebsamen’s 1997 novel Het lied en de waarheid [The song and the truth], this article explores how linguistic identity is represented in Dutch literature of repatriation and how this is tackled in translation into English. This novel is chosen not only because it allows to explore plurality in literature and translation in the selected context, but also because it takes the issues of linguistic plurality in literature and translation a step further: the five-year-old Dutch protagonist leaves the tropical (colonial) environment with its enchanting nature behind and arrives with her family in the Netherlands in 1939 as the daughter of a Jewish doctor, unveiling a third identity layer beyond the Dutch-East Indian dichotomy. After positioning this novel within Dutch literature of repatriation by means of a close reading analysis, this article discusses why and how it can be studied as a heterolingual, diasporic (in this specific case, neither colonial, nor postcolonial) text. The translation strategies used to tackle representations of cultural and linguistic hybridity into English are then analysed by means of a comparative textual analysis. Looking for recurring trends, the results are finally briefly related to the findings of a doctoral project about the English and Italian translations of Dutch-East Indian novels by Hella S. Haasse, which suggest that shared tendencies to generalisation may risk distorting images of linguistic hybridity.

Plurilingual Perspectives, Pluricultural Contexts

Natalia Rodriguez Blanco — Fri, 26 Apr 2024 00:00:00 +0100

The present article is concerned with the multilingual news coverage from Agence-France Presse (AFP) about the South American country of Bolivia. Firstly, the theoretical and methodological approaches are outlined in order to characterise the plurality of contexts giving rise to AFP’s coverage of the Bolivian 2020 general elections. Secondly, an analysis is proposed that contrasts these multilingual versions in terms of framing devices and translation shifts, aiming at exploring the ways in which media stakeholders represent the Bolivian reality. Thirdly, the findings of this analysis are contextualised with reference to a cross-linguistic comparison of newspaper corpora. When comparing the Spanish, French, and English versions, the first two are found to be more aligned at the level of discourse patterns. The ultimate purpose of this case-study is to observe the presence of translation in plurilingual news settings, where the role of translators often goes unacknowledged within

Translating Ramayana

Alka Vishwakarma — Fri, 26 Apr 2024 00:00:00 +0100

Embedded contexts and improvisations in bhasha Ramayanas with its nuances of plurality attribute to its influences of respective linguistic and culture of multinational and multicultural countries: Ram-story of Ramayana, considered primarily a work of smriti , has travelled a long journey in the land of multilingual and heterogeneous cultural spheres. Indian bhashas – Assamese, Thamizh, Malayalam, Oriya, Bengali, and so on – have rendered Rama-katha within the very Indian society under different paradigms which have overshadowed the original, i.e. Valmiki’s Ramayana in Sanskrit. In lieu of assimilation of original text in another language that relevant translation promotes, bhasha Ramayanas presents different renderings or retellings , instead of variants or versions of Valmiki, colored with heterogeneous cultural ethos. Discussing three bhasha Ramayana(s) – 12th century Kampar’s Ramavataram in Thamizh , 15th century Krttivasi Ramayana or Sriram Pacali in Bengali, and 16th century Tulsidas’s Ramcharitmanas in Awadhi – this essay explores social and literary function of translation strategies in its poly-lingual and multinational world. Questioning the idea of original and relevant Ramayana, it also reflects on how bhasha Ramayanas co-exist in multilingual and multicultural society with its distinguished autonomy and differences. The tripartite comparative project of this article critically investigates their structures, sequential arrangements, bhasha cultural color, and story overlaps. It also calls attention to coalescence of Rama-story through plurilingual renderings with respect to its pluricultural valences in South Asia. Focusing on the polyvalences, it also argues that such retellings problematize the relevance of a genuine translation by questioning translational canonical principles for bhasha texts.

Subtitling Hong Kong Code-Mixing and Code-Switching

Luis Damián Moreno García — Fri, 26 Apr 2024 00:00:00 +0100

Translation has largely been considered a process involving only two languages, source and target. However, plurilingual audiovisual content has proliferated over the last few decades, reflecting, as a result, the world’s linguistic intermingling. Such a plurality complicates both theoretical categorizations and translation practices. Even though multilingualism in the media has received scholarly attention, more explorations are needed to ascertain the translation processes and methods adopted to handle linguistically diverse source texts in the streaming era.

The present piece of research tentatively explores the treatment given to Cantonese and English code-mixing and code-switching present in Hongkonese films and TV shows currently streamed on Netflix, the video-on-demand platform. This article probes a selection of such content and compares the original dialogues with official Chinese, English and Spanish subtitles. Preliminary results point towards a loss of linguistic diversity and nuance caused by subtitling processes. The differentiated roles that both languages originally play in creating comedic, stylistic, or emphatic effects are rarely retained, possibly affecting viewers’ reception and appreciation. This article argues that further attention should be paid to the translation and adaptation of code-mixing and code-switching present in Hongkonese creations, both by the industry and academia, if such a multilingual reality is to be portrayed successfully via subtitles.

Critical Reflections on Universities, Publishing, and the Early Career Experience

Jonathan Vickery — Fri, 26 Apr 2024 00:00:00 +0100

This paper is a critical reflection on the changing relationship between university institutions, academic publishing, and young researchers. It emerges from a current project in assessing the role and development of Warwick University’s research journals (and their editors), but also takes into account two recent Warwick Institute of Advanced Study seminars discussing the practical and strategic challenge of publishing for early career scholars and PhD students. While these seminars concerned publishing in general, and the question of career trajectories, this reflection paper takes into account the current shifts in publishing and our understanding of research as knowledge production more broadly. This reflection maintains that, in part provoked by digital media, the status of research knowledge vis-à-vis its traditional presentation in the discrete products of the ‘article’, and the book, has become unstable, and this instability has opened up a range of economic and systemic conditions of knowledge production that have long since been concealed. Current shifts thus offer younger scholars and early career researchers significant opportunities: this short paper sets out the initial framework for a current research project focussing on university publishing, then it refers to the two above seminars in order to conclude with some critical issues for academic practice, research and for early career scholars.

Postdisciplinary Knowledge, Edited by Tomas Pernecky

Liam Greenacre — Fri, 26 Apr 2024 00:00:00 +0100

Where does postdisciplinarity stand in relation to the other forms of non-disciplinarity? What critiques of academia does it launch? Postdisciplinary Knowledge edited by Tomas Pernecky, aims to theorise postdisciplinarity as a rebellious and subversive movement. This article reviews this work with the aim of finding out what makes postdisciplinarity unique and whether there is a need for it? It also provides an evaluative description of the individual chapters of the book. I conclude that the input of postdisciplinarity is a necessary contribution to discussions surrounding the nature of academia and the university.

Pushing the Boundaries of Reflection

Fri, 26 Apr 2024 00:00:00 +0100

This article presents a correspondence project completed during the 2019-2020 academic year. To encourage reflection and create divergent modes of expression, teaching staff paired undergraduate students across modules and gave them a blank postcard each week. The students’ brief was an open one - to reflect on their educational experience surrounding the modules with textual and visual representations. The emotionality and expressions of identity that flowed through the postcards were striking. This lent itself to a personally impassioned criticality, meaningful dialogue and more holistic observations on how learning took place.

Mental Health Exemptions to Criminal Responsibility

Rita Augestad Knudsen — Fri, 26 Apr 2024 00:00:00 +0100

Ill mental health is a key category for exempting individuals from criminal responsibility. Even in cases where a defendant has been found to have carried out the act, if mentally ‘ill enough’, the person could either be fully exempt from criminal responsibility and found not guilty – or be partially exempt and receive a reduced or special sentence on mental health grounds. Such outcomes might entail diversion into mental health treatment, sectioning – or release. In determining whether a mental health exemption is warranted in individual cases, ordinary practice is that psychologists or psychiatrists forensically assess the severity and nature of the accused’s impairment or disorder. While this might seem like a straightforward medical-juridical procedure of establishing evidence, this article uses a modified ‘genealogy of the present’ to show how mental health exemptions to criminal responsibility involve significantly more complexity. Looking to Norway and the UK, this article highlights differences in frameworks and implementation, including on matters of burden and nature of proof, and on causality. The article uses as an example the particular category of terrorism-related cases to bring out some of the contingencies involved. By doing so, the article shows the tensions inherent to the principle and practice of mental health exemptions, and its location between law, medicine, politics and security.

Funding Acknowledgement
This research was made possible by a STAIRS grant from the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs (NUPI), as well as by funding from C-REX (Centre for Research on Extremism), University of Oslo.

Assembling with VR

Lisa M Thomas, Debbie Watson, Lois Peach, Nina Ross, Naomi Clarke — Fri, 26 Apr 2024 00:00:00 +0100

In this paper, we consider the claims that constellate around the concepts of immersion, presence and empathy that have been made about virtual reality across many disciplines of study, including psychology, criminology, immersive film and media. These claims are applied to an interdisciplinary, collaborative project: VR Dance; which engaged young people (11-16 years) in hip hop and immersive technology workshops over a six-week period. We discuss the ways in which co-created immersive environments which centre the body offer potential to tune into and re-calibrate our sensitivities and modes of engagement with each other and the environments we are in. We argue that this is not simply as a result of technology’s effects on individuals but constituted in wider assemblages of human and nonhuman actors. We make the case for virtual reality, not as a tool for ‘becoming other’, but as part of wider assemblages in ongoing transformations, relocations, and calibrations.

Funding Acknowledgement

VR Dance is an East London Dance programme, funded by the Mayor of London’s Young Londoner’s Fund & the London Borough of Redbridge and delivered in partnership with the University of Bristol, BirdGang Ltd, Maskomi and PlayLa.bZ.