In this article, the editors highlight the pressing need for the educational reinforcement of gender equality as a principle in European societies. Media has been central both to the organisation of gender equality initiatives and activities and to the resistance to it. While media is often cited as the cause or agent of anti-gender rhetoric, it is also leveraged for the promotion of gender equality as evidenced in the increasing visibility of and attention to gender issues across various media including TV and film, broadcasting, social media and the press. The editors attend specifically to serial drama as a tool and catalyst for the promotion of gender equality. Focusing on young people as key stakeholders in gender equality and change agents for an equitable world, the introduction and contributions to the issue identify some of the challenges that educators face in teaching gender equality and proposes several valuable tools and techniques for using serial dramas addressed to or watched by young people.

Audiovisual media shape audience perceptions and beliefs, particularly among young adults, influencing societal views on gender equality. This study aims to propose a reproducible teaching methodology for high school classrooms to enhance students’ ability to critically assess gender representation in serial dramas. Using a multimedia annotation software, the methodology involves two hands-on activities: (i) quantifying women’s on-screen presence by tagging their speaking time to compare it with that of men and (ii) documenting observations based on four common stereotypes in the portrayal of women on TV — physical appearance (often sexualized), parenting role (as caregiving mothers), sentimental relationship (as fiancées or wives) and occupational status (as homemakers or in low-status positions). Following the analysis, students share their findings in guided class discussions, which allow them to make meaning of the representations they observe and to challenge preconceived notions. This methodology encourages students to reflect on the media they consume, fostering awareness of how gender stereotypes shape social behavior.

While universities increasingly offer institutional support for academic filmmaking, in the specific case of ethics this support can sometimes become an impediment to creativity. The requirement to follow comprehensive university ethical procedures - which are usually developed with great care and attention to the needs of researchers but with little or no focus on creative practice research - might stymie the artistic practice of filmmakers. My video The Participants: a reflection on the ethics of smartphone filmmaking as research aims to offer a provocation intended to challenge university practitioner-researchers to consider the ethics of their practice, but also, at the same time, a provocation to university ethics protocols and procedures. Specifically, the films seeks to encourage the viewer to reflect on the ways in which filmmaker researchers working in in public places might better consider the ethical issues raised by their practice, especially when subsequently employing (and manipulating) footage of individuals who have not given their consent to be filmed. For The Participants I used an iPhone 11 to capture video images of tourists videoing with their smartphones at Grand Central Station, New York.

Working with the same filmed material from the perspective of anthropology and screen studies, the authors discuss their disciplines’ different approaches to academic filmmaking. This article presents two videos, Filming Out Loud and Whose Stories, made from the same raw footage shot by the two authors together at the garage Cedric Motors, situated close to Manchester University, UK, where they were taking a summer course in ethnographic filmmaking at the Granada Centre for Visual Anthropology in June 2022. After spending seven days at the garage, filming the workdays of the owner Pat Rafter and his main employee (who wishes to remain unnamed), this raw material was then edited separately by each author. Producing points of methodological comparison between videographic criticism working with “an archive of moving images and sounds” (Keathley and Mittell 2019) and the culturally situated “encounters with alterity” enacted through ethnographic filmmaking (Cox et al. 2016), the authors engage with the methodological differences and commonalities between their two disciplines and filmmaking practices. By focusing on how the unpredictability of ethnographic fieldwork generated a rethinking of received conventions, interdisciplinary collaboration in visual research is here framed as an opportunity for a “transmutation of sensibilities” (Csordas 2007) bringing into question both videographic criticism’s imperative of critical thinking articulated audiovisually (generally on archival material) and visual anthropology’s observational legacy. Scraping at the weld between disciplinary received knowledge, the authors reflect on the positionality and ethics of their research and on the task of elaborating a filmic narrative while accounting for different social or cultural worlds

This paper provides a short introduction to fanfiction as an example of Le Guin’s Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction. Through the analysis of the fanfiction drabble, this paper gives an initial outline of a methodology for the carrier bag theory, showing how the process of writing is supported by the community that surrounds fanfiction. As such, the writing and publishing of fanfiction can be seen as exemplary of a democratic, bottom-up method for creating the other stories, or life stories, in Le Guin’s and Haraway’s sense.

In this article, we introduce volume two of our themed issue on co-creation and co-production and discuss various basic assumptions related to collaborative research. In collaborative studies in general, dialogue is often highlighted as an important process element with important implications for empowerment for those involved. However, the underlying understandings and implications of dialogic practice are seldom examined in depth. We raise a critical reflexive discussion on different approaches to dialogic engagement and present four high-level discourses guiding organizational scholarship to discuss crucial differences and similarities. Moreover, we outline seven researcher ideal types that reflect diverse degrees of dialogic engagement. Our aspiration is to provide useful insights, models, and questions that can guide participatory scholars in fostering critical awareness of their own position and the sometimes taken-for-granted assumptions guiding their studies.