The hybridization of documentary and fictional discourses has recently adopted very specific forms with clear political and cultural implications. Continuously invoking “actual facts” in fictional audiovisual production goes beyond a mere strategy to endow the narrated story with greater authenticity. Systematically resorting to “facts” and “true stories” generates a false sensation of transparency and diminishes fiction’s artistic, political and reflexive potential, by turning it into merely “relating” some de-problematized facts and which are taken as a given (obviously, these supposed “facts” conceal very concrete discourses and which are heavily biased). This dogmatic turn in fiction is related to a progressive restriction and depletion of ways to narrate and telling, in the guise of audiovisual diversity that supposedly characterizes the digital multiplatform environment. These are some of the conclusions from a study by Universidad Carlos III de Madrid (UC3M) professor, Pilar Carrera, who analyzes the proliferation of para-documentary resources in audiovisual fiction.

“Job connectivity” (the possibility of finding a similar job) is a key factor for the recovery of local economies in the face of crises, according to a study published recently in Nature Communications by researchers from the Universidad Carlos III de Madrid (UC3M), the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), the Max Planck Society and the University of Pittsburgh. The researchers in this study reached this conclusion by drawing on network modelling research and mapped the job landscapes in cities across the United States during economic crises.