Semiosis y cosmopolitismo crítico: Un análisis transmodal de un dilema ético en comunicación transnacional entre jóvenes

The article is motivated by an ethical dilemma encountered in the use of film for transnational communication in a global youth education and research project. We analyse data that enable the reconstruction of the process of production and reception of one particular film produced by teenagers at a project site in Catalonia for peers in Uganda. The data include the video itself and other ethnographic data (observations of the process, and post hoc interview and focus group). The video was deemed by the project coordinators/researchers to be potentially compromising for the Ugandan youth participating in the project as, without access to the ethnographic data that suggests otherwise, the film might be understood to tell a story of homosexuality (which is criminally persecuted in Uganda, unlike in Catalonia). The video was precautionarily removed from circulation. The analysis is framed around the five complexities of transmodalities (Hawkins, 2018) to explore semiosis as carried by audiovisual representations across contexts and cultures. The analysis will also speak to the moral arguments for sharing the Catalan students' creative production with the Ugandan youth, or for removing it from circulation, drawing also on the notion of critical cosmopolitanism for this purpose.