Under Construction @ Keele 2019 summer 2019, vol 5 issue 1 | Page 6

Editors’ Note
Welcome to the ninth issue of Under Construction. In this issue we have yet another
fascinating range of articles to share with you, consisting of original work produced by our
postgraduates at Keele University. This issue’s articles range across an eclectic range of topics:
gendered agency within Civil War-era America; EU immigration policy frameworks; the social
semiotics of graduate job-seeking; and the politico-aesthetic ethics of representing migrant
displacement within documentary cinema. Our first article will interrogate received notions
around the role of Southern women in bringing down the Confederacy, assigning to them a
higher degree of agency as well as understanding historical events intersectionally through a
critical lens combining class-and-gender critique. Later we read about the use of projective
techniques, through in-depth interviews and Rich Picture creative qualitative methods, in
capturing individualised and social habitus-related narratives around student employment-
centred self-branding (or ‘Brand Me’) then analysing their socio-semiotic construction.
Following this, we feature a comparative analysis of Rational-Choice Institutionalist (RCI) and
Liberal Intergovernmentalist (LIG) approaches to theories of immigration policy in the context
of the European Union’s (EU) contemporary role as a non-state actor in immigration policy.
Our final article of this issue deconstructs the ostensibly empathetic gaze of Gianfranco Rosi’s
migrant documentary 2016 Fuocoammare (Fire at Sea) in light of the claims made for the
film’s ‘warning against the rising indifference [...]’ towards crisis; the piece locates a re-
enforcement of ‘compassion fatigue’ towards refugees based upon a demonstration of the
film’s inability to transcend a dominant (and reductive) epistemological framing of its migrant
subjects. We think you will agree these constitute an interesting range and reflect some of
the fresh and varied research from Keele’s postgraduate community. Special thanks go to the
Editor-in-Chief Kathy James-Castle; thanks also to Rodrigo Neves and Sophie Powell as Editors
for their continuing contributions. The rest of the editorial team and our peer-review liaison
officer were all new to their roles for this issue and it has been a pleasurable, if steep, learning
curve. Finally, we want to think our contributors for being an essential part of this journal. We
hope that this issue is entertaining, inspiring and thought provoking for readers new and old.
The Editorial Board for Under Construction @ Keele
Rodrigo Neves, Martin Goodhead, Christopher Murphy and Sophie Powell.
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