This chapter critically investigates the concept of data-opolies âa term coined by Maurice Stucke to describe the monopolistic control over data by dominant tech corporations such as Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, and Microsoft (GAFAM). It explores how this concentration of data power threatens democratic resilience, distorts competition, and exacerbates socio-political inequalities. Drawing from EcheverrĂaâs Telepolis , Cancelaâs UtopĂas Digitales , and Lehdonvirtaâs Cloud Empires , the chapter unpacks the network effects that entrench data-opolies and their capacity to manipulate user behavior, public opinion, and market dynamics. The chapter contends that these monopolistic structures erode democratic accountability and civic trust by fostering opaque algorithmic governance and undermining citizen agency. In response, it proposes emancipatory datafication strategies , including data cooperatives, algorithmic transparency, and participatory infrastructures, aimed at reclaiming democratic control over digital systems. Special attention is given to the sociopolitical implications of digital nomadism and e-diasporas as new global patterns of democratic interaction. Finally, the chapter offers a visionary assessment of Web3 technologiesâblockchain, DAOs, and data cooperativesâas a potential counterweight to data-opolies. By advancing transparency and user agency, Web3 is presented as a foundation for inclusive, decentralized, and empowered digital democracies fit for the algorithmic age.
This article examines the broader societal implications of blockchain technology and crypto-assets, emphasizing their role in the evolution of humanity as a "superorganism" with decentralized, self-regulating systems. Drawing on a process philosophy approach grounded in Stiegler's "general organology" and further informed by related concepts such as Nate Hagens' "superorganism" idea and Francis Heylighen's "global brain" theory, the paper contextualizes blockchain technology within the ongoing evolution of governance systems and global systems such as the financial system. Blockchain's decentralized nature, in conjunction with advancements like artificial intelligence and decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs), could transform traditional financial, economic, and governance structures by enabling the emergence of collective distributed decision-making and global coordination. In parallel, the article aligns blockchain's impact with developmental theories such as Spiral Dynamics. This framework is used to illustrate heuristically blockchain's potential to foster societal growth beyond hierarchical models, promoting a shift from centralized authority to collaborative and self-governed communities. The analysis, grounded in sense-making through a philosophical and biomimetical approach, and aims at providing a holistic narrative and view of blockchain as more than an economic tool, positioning it as a transductive technological seed for the evolution of society into a mature, interconnected global planetary organism.
Frances Liddell, Ella Tallyn, Evan Morgan, Kar Balan · 10 authors
In this work-in-progress, we present ORAgen, as âunfinished softwareâ, materialised through a demonstrative web application that enables participants to engage with a novel approach to media tokenisation â the ORA framework. By presenting ORAgen in âthink-aloudâ interviews with 17 professionals working in the creative and cultural industries, we explore potential values of media tokenisation in relation to existing challenges they face related to ownership, rights, and attribution. From our initial findings, we reflect specifically on the challenges of attribution and ongoing control of creative media, and examine how media tokenisation, and underpinning distributed ledger technologies can enable new approaches to designing attribution.
Chris Elsden, Evan Morgan, Ella Tallyn, Suzanne Black · 8 authors
This paper presents the design, deployment and qualitative study of a large-scale, public, generative art exhibition, through which passers-by could create artworks, and mint a non-fungible-token (NFT). Following the month-long exhibition, during which 229 anonymous participants produced artworks, 69 non-transferable NFTs were minted, we surveyed (33) and interviewed (14) expert and novice participants about their experiences. We explored contemporary challenges of owning digital things, and the extent to which NFTs, and 'Web3' technologies offer meaningful forms of ownership. Our findings describe how the inability to trade this NFT, and its unique circumstances of acquisition, made it meaningful in ways that extended beyond its immediate (limited) utility and offered participants something through which to construct identity. Reflecting on the aspirations, contradictions, and misconceptions of forms of ownership enabled by NFTs, we conclude with proposals for renewed attention in HCI to the nature of digital possessions, and the potential for 'ownership design'.
In this article, Erik Bordeleau presents, as a form of anarchic resistance to the capitalist logic, The Sphere project in which he is involved. For the author, The Sphere can be understood as a virtual space for exchanges between artistic processes and financing practices, whose root comes from a need to give new understanding to the meaning and use of digital media. He also states that the project is specifically interested in promoting the integration of creators, producers and the public, enabling an ecosystem that facilitates the alignment between interests and purposes through a spirit of speculative generosity. Therefore, the author uses reflections from renowned figures in the intellectual world, such as, for example, Deleuze and Guattari, Hito Steyerl, Jean-Luc Nancy, Jacques RanciĂšre and Yuk Hui fundamentally to propose the defense of the need for a new look at crypto and blockchain technology, considering the decentralization provided by DAOs and Web3. Generating new forms of rhizomatic organization, instead of nostalgic notions of mass organization, ends up producing the possibility of codifying relations of equity through vectors of mutual participation.
Kobe De Keere, Martin Broholt Trans, StefanĂa Milan
In less than two decades, cryptocurrency has transformed from being an object of interest for an obscure online community to becoming a globally desired digital asset. By acknowledging the importance of fictional expectations in the creation of economic value, this study delves into the various imaginative values that are being attributed to cryptocurrency. Through quantitative-qualitative coding of YouTube video transcripts (N: 1929), combined with Exploratory Factor Analysis, this article maps out which imaginaries on crypto are being disseminated by the YouTube algorithm. The latter is conceived not as a passive source of information but as a performative market device, steering consumer behavior. This study identifies four distinct imaginaries to which cryptocurrency consumers are exposed: investment, utility, digital metallism, and infrastructural mutualism imaginary. These shed light on the potential value consumers attribute to cryptocurrencies while opening new research avenues towards a better understanding of the different positions within the market.
The object of study of this work is the impact of the use of non-fungible tokens (NFTs) on the art system. To do so, it establishes theoretical and practical analogies between natively digital (or digitized) images and printmaking techniques, which are grounded in reproducibility. Within the context of the almost unrestricted reproduction of digital works, the research proposes to observe in what ways the art system restructures itself through the connection with blockchain technology. Considering the artistic production associated with NFTs, especially since the first quarter of 2021, the work covers the aesthetic and sociocultural developments of the use of online platforms for the circulation of art. The issues of authenticity and poetic legitimacy that influence aesthetic experience are emphasized. The research employs a participatory and exploratory qualitative methodology, with data collection, bibliographic studies, analysis of works and platforms, and poetic actions. For this, it proposes experimentation with the digital medium through the publication of digital prints.
In this chapter, I use methods drawn from literary analysis to bear on artificial scarcity and explore how literary and legal storytelling engages in scarcity mongering. I find three particular narrative strategies calculated to compel a conclusion in favor of propertization: the spectacle of need, the diversionary tactic, and the rallying cry. First, I unpack the spectacle of need and its diversionary aspects through several literary accounts of scarcity and starvation. I juxtapose Franz Kafka's "A Hunger Artist," a story explicitly centered on a wasting body, with J.M. Coetzee's The Life and Times of Michael K. Second, to explore how scarcity fables offer diversionary tactics that redirect attention away from actual scarcity, I consider NFTs, or non-fungible tokens. NFTs reflect the arbitrary value scarcity can produce, especially when artificially generated. Yet NFTs offer a spectacle of need that distracts from actual scarcity, riding a wave of expansionist property logic that suggests that more ownership is the answer. Third, to consider the scarcity fable's propertarian rallying cry, I offer an extended close reading of a copyright dispute, Leonard v. Stemtech, involving a pair of microscopic stem cell photographs deemed so scarce they were valued at 100 times their past licensing history. Leonard illustrates how a scarcity fable may look in the context of intellectual property ("IP"). The nature of this chapter is necessarily conceptual and speculative, designed to raise questions rather than attempting conclusively to answer them. Through juxtaposition of literary accounts and one legal case study, fables of scarcity emerge as a genre whose very appearance in certain contexts ought to give scholars and policymakers pause. In copyright litigation, in which expansionist property narratives may be especially harmful to the public domain and subsequent creators, scarcity fables may be made to provide apparent support for potentially dangerous changes. Identifying scarcity fables as such when they appear in copyright cases could trigger review of the asserted scarcity and a more searching inquiry into whether the proposed solution could worsen actual scarcity.
Mustafa Alperen YĂCEDAÄ, ĂaÄrı Doç. Dr. GĂMĂĆ
Dijital sanat, yeni medya teknolojilerinin geliĆmesiyle birlikte hayatımızın her alanında karĆımıza çıkan bir kavram olmuĆtur. Görsel sanatlar, kavramsal sanatın yeni bakÄ±Ć açılarıyla yeniden Ćekillenmeye baĆlamıĆtır. NFT (Non-Fungible Token) ve Blokzincir teknolojisi gibi sanat hayatına giren kavramlar, kripto grafik tasarım anlayıĆını doÄurmuĆtur. Kripto grafik tasarımlar ve NFT'ler, kriptografik olarak kayıtlı ve sınırlı sayıda olan dijital sanat eserleridir. Bu eserlerin mĂŒlkiyet hakları, blokzincir teknolojisi altyapısıyla gĂŒvence altına alınmÄ±Ć ve alıcılarla satıcılar arasında doÄrudan ticareti mĂŒmkĂŒn kılmıĆtır. NFT'ler, dijital eserlerin orijinalliÄini, ĆeffaflıÄını ve deÄiĆtirilemezliÄini kanıtlayan bir göstergedir. Sanatçılar ve dijital eser ĂŒreticileri, NFT'ler sayesinde eserlerini galeri veya mĂŒzayede gibi aracılara ihtiyaç duymadan sanatseverlere doÄrudan ulaĆtırabilmektedir. Bu çalıĆma, kripto grafik tasarımı, NFT, blokzincir teknolojisini ve metaverse konularını açıklayıcı bir nitel araĆtırma olarak tasarlanmıĆtır. ĂalıĆma, betimsel tarama yöntemi ve anket çalıĆması ile yĂŒrĂŒtĂŒlmĂŒĆtĂŒr. Kripto grafik tasarımı, blokzincir teknolojisi metaverse ve NFT kavramları aralarındaki iliĆki bĂŒtĂŒncĂŒl bir Ćekilde incelenmiĆtir. Bu çalıĆmanın soyut çerçevesi için kapsamlı bir literatĂŒr incelemesi yapılmıĆtır. AraĆtırma, kripto sanatının ortaya çıkmasından gĂŒnĂŒmĂŒze kadar olan geliĆim sĂŒrecini anlatırken bu baÄlamda en popĂŒler NFT çalıĆmalarına yer vermiĆtir. ĂalıĆma sonucunda grafik tasarım ile ilgilenen hedef kitleye, NFT ve kripto grafik tasarım anlayıĆının neler olduÄu, blokzincir, NFT ve jetonlar gibi iktisadi kavramlar hakkında bilgiler sunulmuĆ ve hedef kitlenin konuyla ilgili algı dĂŒzeyleri ölĂ§ĂŒlmĂŒĆtĂŒr. EÄitim kurumlarında özellikle ĂŒniversitelerde konuyla ilgili eÄitim ve seminerlerin verilmesiyle bu yeni sanat anlayıĆının daha da geliĆtirilebileceÄi önerilmiĆtir.
The âmetaverseâ and non-fungible tokens (NFTs), though not necessarily ânewâ terms or technologies, have risen to mainstream prominence post-2020. This paper, based on survey data obtained from Unity Technologies, examines the metaverse, NFTs, and the future of development within the Unity engine from the perspective of current Unity users. Specifically, the paper examines how users define the metaverse, their goals in metaverse and NFT development, and their future questions and concerns concerning these concepts. This data is then used to place the metaverse and NFTs into broader historical, present, and future contexts. The paper ultimately argues: (1) the metaverse and NFTs follow previous historical trends in communication technology development, (2) development within Unity will continue to be split between game development and non-game development, and (3) arguments of the ânewness,â âuniqueness,â or âfuture-facingâ of the metaverse and NFTs help to obfuscate legitimate concerns about these technologies.
A. N. M. Sajedul Alam, Junaid Bin Kibria, Al Hasib Mahamud, Arnob Kumar Dey · 7 authors
In the realm of digital art and collectibles, NFTs are sweeping the board. Because of the massive sales to a new crypto audience, the livelihoods of digital artists are being transformed. It is no surprise that celebs are jumping on the bandwagon. It is a fact that NFTs can be used in multiple ways, including digital artwork such as animation, character design, digital painting, collection of selfies or vlogs, and many more digital entities. As a result, they may be used to signify the possession of any specific object, whether it be digital or physical. NFTs are digital tokens that may be used to indicate ownership of one of a-kind goods. For example, I can buy a shoe or T shirt from any store, and then if the store provides me the same 3D model of that T-Shirt or shoe of the exact same design and color, it would be more connected with my feelings. They enable us to tokenize items such as artwork, valuables, and even real estate. NFTs can only be owned by one person at a time, and they are protected by the Ethereum blockchain no one can alter the ownership record or create a new NFT. The word non-fungible can be used to describe items like your furniture, a song file, or your computer. It is impossible to substitute these goods with anything else because they each have their own distinct characteristics. The goal was to find all the existing implementations of Non-fungible Tokens in different fields of recent technology, so that an overall overview of future implementations of NFT can be found and how it can be used to enrich user experiences.
In this paper, I discuss an approach to teaching cryptocurrencies as cryptocultures. Cryptocurrencies are traditionally approached as technical or financial phenomena, but I argue that for students outside those specialist areas, a cultural approach will orient them better. I encourage teachers to first focus on situating students in a place, a shared public commons inhabited by the community of a cryptocurrency. I offer a way to model this place using a hash, bash, cash model of decentralised organisation. I build on this sense of place by then revealing to students the cultural context of a cryptocurrency. The context is comprised of the social imaginaries and the overarching goal animating a cryptocurrency culture. I show how this cryptocultural approach can be used to analyse different cryptocultures through an examination of the competing environmental imaginaries of Bitcoin and Ethereum.
In this paper, we consider the activities of hacker's social movement through the history of hacker culture and philosophy in modern times. Some social movements of contemporary hackers are called hactivism, but if hactivism aims for social reform, peopleâs support needs to be acquired it. Therefore, this paper considers the principle of winning the trust of citizens from the viewpoint of âjustness and legitimacyâ according to the theory of Giddens and Max Weber. Futhermore, through consideration of Wikileaks and bitcoin, we point out that there are many problems in hactivism.
Digital technology is changing, and has changed the ways we create and consume narratives, from moving images and immersive storyworlds to digital long-form and multi-branched story experiences. At the same time, blockchain, the technology that underpins cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin, is revolutionizing the way that transactions and exchanges occur. As a globally stored and collaboratively written list of all transactions that have ever taken place within a given system, the blockchain decentralizes money and offers a platform for its creative use. There are already examples of blockchain technologies extending beyond the realm of currency, including the decentralization of domain name servers that are not subject to government takedown and identity management and governance. By framing key blockchain concepts with past and present storytelling practices, this article raises questions as to how the principles and implementation of such distributed ledger technologies might be used within contemporary writing practices â that is, can we imagine stories as a currency or value system? We present three experiments that draw on some of the fundamental principles of blockchain and Bitcoin, as an instantiation of a blockchain implemented application, namely, (1) the ledger, (2) the blocks and (3) the mining process. Each low-fi experiment was intentionally designed to be very accessible to take part in and understand and all were conducted as discrete workshops with different sets of participants. Participants included a cohort of design students, technology industry and design professionals and writing and interaction design academics. Each experiment raised a different set of reflections and subsequent questions on the nature of digital, the linearity (or not) of narratives and collaborative processes.
In the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, Bitcoin emerged as an alternative monetary system that could circumvent political and financial authorities. A practice in libertarian prefigurative politics, Bitcoin demonstrates the capacity for online subgroups to creatively appropriate internet-based technologies to enact alternative futures. Andrew Feenbergâs critical theory of technology clarifies this capacity and outlines the significance of agency in technical action. As technology mediates many social relations, it has a significant role in the reproduction of social power. Technological agency is therefore a crucial site of resistance in which users can form alternative, democratic rationalizations of technology. Yet are such instances of agency intrinsically democratic? In analysing this aspect of Feenbergâs theory, this article argues that Bitcoin represents a âpopular rationalizationâ of technology â a creative appropriation of technology that empowers some groups while lacking the ethical justification necessary to be considered democratic.
In a global economic landscape of hyper-commodification and financialisation, efforts to assimilate digital art into the high-stakes commercial art market have so far been rather unsuccessful, presumably because digital artworks cannot easily assume the status of precious object worthy of collection. This essay explores the use of blockchain technologies in attempts to create proprietary digital art markets in which uncommodifiable digital artworks are financialised as artificially scarce commodities. Using the decentralisation techniques and distributed database protocols underlying current cryptocurrency technologies, such efforts, exemplified here by the platform Monegraph, tend to be presented as concerns with the interest of digital artists and with shifting ontologies of the contemporary work of art. I challenge this characterisation, and argue, in a discussion that combines aesthetic theory, legal and philosophical theories of intellectual property, rhetorical analysis and research in the political economy of new media, that the formation of proprietary digital art markets by emerging commercial platforms such as Monegraph constitutes a worrisome amplification of long-established, on-going efforts to fence in creative expression as private property. As I argue, the combination of blockchain-based protocols with established ambitions of intellectual property policy yields hybrid conceptual-computational financial technologies (such as self-enforcing smart contracts attached to digital artefacts) that are unlikely to empower artists but which serve to financialise digital creative practices as a whole, curtailing the critical potential of the digital as an inherently dynamic and potentially uncommodifiable mode of production and artistic expression.
B. Balamurugan, T. Poongodi, M. R. Manu, S. Karthikeyan · 5 authors
The moving image archive of the US Agency for International Development (USAID) includes a copy of the film The Double Day (1975), cataloged in the series Moving Images Relating to International Development Programs and Activities, 1979â1991, a collection of more than eight hundred titles âcreated to provide information on assistance programs supported by the Agency for International Development (AID).â1 Yet, The Double Day does not, in fact, directly depict or engage with any specific development or aid initiative. Instead, the filmâdirected by US-based Brazilian filmmaker Helena Solberg as part of the International Womenâs Film Project collective and described as âthe first Latin American feminist documentaryââexamines the gendered dynamics of paid and unpaid labor through the testimonies of women from Argentina, Bolivia, Venezuela, and Mexico.2 Its presence in the USAID archive is likely a consequence of its funding history, having received support from the Inter-American Foundation, a USAID-affiliated entity; the development agencies of Denmark, Norway, and Sweden; the United Nations Development Program; and US philanthropist Calvin Cafritz.3These transnational funding structures not only enabled the filmâs production but also determined its archival destination, which renders legible its place within the history of international development.4 The Double Dayâs institutional trajectory reflects the shifting configurations of aid, gender, and media during a historic moment when women were being repositioned at the center of what Arturo Escobar has described as developmentâs âregimes of visuality.â5 Especially relevant to The Double Dayâs production and exhibition was the international institutional framework of Women in Development (WID). Emerging in the early 1970s and culminating in United Nationsâ proclamation of 1975 as International Womenâs Year, WID emphasized womenâs participation in the global economy as both an index and mechanism of development. Indeed, The Double Day premiered at the World Conference of the International Womenâs Year, held in Mexico City.6 Within this context, the film forms part of a broader trajectory of media use by international organizations that intensified during the 1970sâas best exemplified by Media Habitat, a collection of 236 documentary films commissioned by the United Nations to represent urban and rural development initiatives for the 1976 Habitat Conference on Human Settlements in Vancouver. As a policy-shaping initiative, Media Habitat primarily featured films from the Global South intended not only to illustrate but also to help codify standardized audiovisual markers of âunderdevelopmentâ that determined access to the emerging global economic order and to international aid.7Framed in relation to these international institutions and their operations, The Double Day could similarly be considered âdevelopment mediaââexemplifying the type of nonfiction media produced and distributed outside of the commercial film circuits whose aspects and subcategories have been variously described in scholarship as nontheatrical, useful, sponsored, institutional, industrial, educational, or nonprofessional/amateur.8 Scholars working in this area have emphasized the institutional contexts of such mediaâs production and exhibition infrastructures as shaping its instrumentalized effects. From a feminist perspective, such an approach is crucial to grappling with the broader question of how âgender impacts [these worksâ] shape, content, and trajectories.â9 Yet we also argue that, taken in isolation, the institutional and infrastructural contexts are insufficient to account for the complex relationship between media and development, potentially not only limiting our understanding of the reach and impact of development but also distorting our interpretive conclusions. For example, to categorize The Double Day as âdevelopment mediaâ is to overlook the filmâs place within Solbergâs directorial oeuvre, as well as within the histories of both transnational womenâs filmmaking and radical Latin American documentary cinema to which it simultaneously belongs. Such exclusive framing is especially limiting given that women globally were disproportionately engaged in nonfiction production throughout the twentieth centuryâsometimes by political choice but more often due to structural exclusions from fiction filmmaking. Even in nonfiction historiography, however, institutional media has remained particularly marginal, reinforcing hierarchies that separate such works from the aesthetic and authorial frameworks through which film history has been constructed.10 This marginalization not only tends to erase womenâs contributions but also presumes a âweakâ or derivative authorship, rendering these films unworthy of the interpretive attention needed to apprehend their aesthetic and political complexity.11 The same dynamic is likely to structure assumptions about âdevelopment mediaâ as well.Categorizing The Double Day exclusively within this category would further prompt us to assume top-down institutional analyses that have been characteristic of both institutional media methodologies and the scholarship on development at large. This, in turn, would risk obscuring this filmâs radical Marxist approach to womenâs labor as well as its concrete contribution to activism and its attendant grassroot structures. In Mexico City, The Double Day became a catalyst for feminist solidarity in practice when one of the filmâs protagonists, Bolivian activist and trade unionist Domitila Barrios de Chungara, was invited to participate in the Tribune of Non-Governmental Organizations held alongside the official UN conference.12 There, Barrios de Chungara challenged Western feminist priorities by reframing the debate around labor, class, and imperialism, helping to articulate a shared Third World feminist agenda that significantly departed from the developmentalist vision of the United Nations and USAID.13 Seen through the lens of activist media, The Double Day helped forge transnational solidarity networks by enabling information exchange across the diverse voices that shaped its makingâfrom the women featured in the film to the activists who circulated itârevealing a considerably more dynamic interplay between institutional and grassroots or contingent media practices.Moreover, the filmâs Latin American contextâreflected in Solbergâs formation in Brazil as the only woman in Cinema Novo, its focus on women from across the region, and its premiere and key reception in Mexico Cityârequires grappling with the regional specificities of the very notion of development in its multiple iterations.14 Far from being an epistemological and political framework imposed solely by the Global North, both the practices of development and the theoretical foundations of developmentalism (understood as a broad and polysemic set of discourses) were shaped through the active participation of Latin American economists.15 Within this iteration, underdevelopment, as a constitutive notion of developmentalism, became central to a distinctly critical strand, which by the late 1960s became known as the dependency theory.16 This same approach is reflected in some of the best-known Latin American radical film manifestos of the time, arising precisely from the same milieus to which Solberg belonged.17These various considerations of the filmâs history illustrate the methodological challenges confronting feminist scholars seeking to assess the impact of development on media projects, theories, and practices. To disregard the developmentalist context of such works by emphasizing their political aesthetics and affects risks reproducing a romanticized narrative of heroic resistance (albeit from a feminist perspective). Yet to engage exclusively with their institutional and material infrastructures risks naturalizing developmentalismâs political and epistemological foundations at the expense of the goals and beliefs of the many women who participated in these projects. The contradictions and ambivalences that animate such histories call for feminist frameworks capable of holding both institutional complicity and radical possibility in view.This challenge resonates with ongoing debates about the politics of the archive and what Allyson Field has termed âthe practice of informed speculation.â18 As she reminds us, feminist, queer, and decolonial methodologies have long taught us to âpress at the limitsâ of the archive to âinoculate our scholarship against our evidenceâs afflictions.â19 The concern that the evidence we draw on in our analysis reproduces the very structures and blind spots of the dominant ideology and therefore shapes and delimits our interpretation becomes particularly urgent when engaging the developmentalist media corpus. Informed speculation offers an alternative by inviting the experimental, creative, and speculative rewriting of history, mobilizing the archive âin a project that runs counter to the original purpose, or the imperative to preserve, or the conditions that led to erasure.â20 Yet, as Field cautions, such speculative gestures must remain grounded in a deep and âintimate familiarity with the archiveâ that we are working with and against. Building on this imperative, we suggest that the developmentalist archive, in particular, demands expansion and critical reconsideration in ways that unsettle the very disciplinary frameworks through which it has been studied as well as the larger institutional contexts for such knowledge production.Our focus on The Double Day in the opening of this introduction thus foregrounds the entanglements of institutional and grassroots forces, local and international contexts, structural and interpersonal relations, and creative and economic factors that have shaped not only this film but the broader ecosystem of development media projectsâand their preservationâover time. Addressing such a constellation involves transgressing methodologically entrenched divisions between political economy and aesthetics, between material infrastructures and affective regimes; reckoning with divergent periodizations across film history and world economics; and situating these within the local specificities of womenâs movements and international institutional programs. It also demands attentiveness to the coexistence of multiple, and sometimes competing, understandings of developmentâeach historically, geographically, and ideologically situated.We imagine this special issue as an opening toward a critical dialogue, not only about how such an approach might be enacted in practice but also about the far-reaching ways development paradigms have shaped both our objects of study and the contours of the field itself. The decision to center institutionally sponsored films across all the essays in this issue is deliberate and enables us to highlight institutional critique as a vital methodological imperative within our analytical framework. Created within the frameworks of international organizations, state agencies, or NGOs, these filmsâ histories make legible the institutional logics that underwrite their production. Yet our critique does not stop at these specific entities. Rather, we argue for a broader interrogation of the political conditions and institutional infrastructures that shape media and knowledge production more generally. This includes contemporary corporations embedded in the digital platform economy, from streaming services to the rapid expansion of AI. Equally critical is a reflexive examination of academia itself, where departments of economics, political science, and centers for development have played a formative role in producing and legitimizing developmentalist theories and policy frameworks. While the humanities and arts have at times offered critical alternatives, they have also frequently mirrored and reinforced many of the same developmentalist assumptions. A feminist analysis of the nexus between development and media must therefore unsettle not only dominant archives but also the institutional and disciplinary foundations of our own scholarly practices.As scholars, we share the complex position of navigating the same tensions between institutional complicity and emancipatory aspiration as many of the media-makers whose work we study. Mirroring our subjects is also the transnational, collective mode of this special issueâs own production as it emerges from an ongoing informal working group we have sustained over several years. While relying on institutional and disciplinary affordancesâsuch as university funding for conferences or access to academic publishing platformsâwe have been working toward creating a community that exceeds, and often resists, the prevailing logics of our academic institutions. Our aim has been to create a space for shared inquiry and mutual support that pushes back against disciplinary siloing and technocratic neoliberal assessment modes of both labor and knowledge productionâand this certainly extends to our experience collaborating with the journal editors throughout the publication process. Our goal has been to examine both the persistence and variability of developmentalism, understood as what Gustavo Esteva calls a âpowerful but fragile semantic constellation,â as a conceptual formation that has historically inspired, legitimized, and mobilized media projects across Asia, Africa, and Latin America.21 And gendered biopolitics, from population control to gender mainstreaming, have remained integral to development policies and media practices, recurring across formats from institutional newsreels to film festivals.We share the conviction that, far beyond the history of nonfiction institutional media, development (as both a broad ideological project and a network of material and institutional practices) and developmentalism (as a set of discourses and theoretical models associated with development) have exerted a far-reaching influence on film and media cultures at large. As such, they must be treated as a major force in shaping global film and media systems and also the many ongoing assumptions behind their critical discourses. The discipline of communication studies was founded on modernization theory governed by Cold War goals of dissemination of Western liberal democracy around the world, while âan area studies framework allowed compartmentalizing Western and non-Western outcomes of technologies that were always claimed to be universal.â22 Despite critique from postcolonial and critical race studies, many of these frameworks have remained foundational for media theory.23 In historical scholarship, as we increasingly move beyond âmodernityâ as a dominant conceptual anchor, engaging with practices and discourses of development opens more precise analytical pathways. These film and mediaâs entanglements with the logics of and economic and the associated with as well as their conceptual underdevelopment, and impact in as diverse as and of media aesthetic and paradigms in film and film and funding are developmentalist assumptions to the they to underwrite the narrative and logics of and global media from the structure of the film to the cultures of argue that a examination of the historical entanglements between film and developmentalist aesthetics, modes of as well as infrastructures and critical the and that our contemporary media is a of the historical contours of development as a field of inquiry embedded within a of some of the methodologies by the featured in this special a of this complex history, to the larger at in media, development, and gender all its development a it as an of be with practices as divergent as and in In as we work on this the of the of the USAID the ideological that have the history of international the and of this on the global its a from development as a global practice and as an institutional and which over the has as a with its own media Yet or does not erase the historical impact of these the contradictions they have reflected and over the as the of development several crucial to the economic theories of development initiatives to and through the of the development an international policy framework at from the Global to the of the Global the by the political role of and the of the International the on was challenged by dependency theory and at development as global structural the neoliberal of the the Programs by the and World imposed and as conditions for and forms of assistance became known as the major markers for international development development has moving beyond economic to such as the Human Development and the Development and from international organizations such as the United Nations to a broader network of These frameworks increasingly of and liberal of and with what in many ways to various while the of the to developmentâs epistemological more scholarship has toward a of its and material the field has to a of and critical by and scholars, which development as a dynamic of conceptual and political to these the studies in this special issue call for sustained analysis in place of In we draw from a of and that in of of gender and to this special issue engage that and from Mexico to contemporary specific local historical of global distinctly feminist methodologies as well as attention to studies that this issue a in the global history of development on and documentary work in Mexico how early women infrastructures as of while US films an early of state and transnational on a outside the Global as the of developmentalist both the and markers of development media, its to the and Latin central grounded in archival also womenâs in transnational and the methodological of archives on study of the series to a a digital media not by but by women not as but as subjects and within circuits of neoliberal and the aesthetics and of how developmentâs has models of to contemporary neoliberal paradigms of and analysis how digital and gender and practices, discourses on and their of these essays the of some of the historical of developmentalist as the question of the role of the state within such on a notion of economic as a and the dominant of development that the state as the for and through infrastructural projects. This understanding of development was shared across both of the as well as in the Third The United and the increasingly mobilized international in the of the modes of international at the postcolonial of policy and ideological These programs were at the expansion of their and of while with the and decolonial of The conceptual between modernization and development that the Cold in of and hierarchies of that long and As an of postcolonial their role as of international aid concern about the of Western development projects. In alternative across the Global South that to structural between and through policies of and In many they were further the global structures. In Latin for example, this approach was through organizations such as the United Nations for Latin and the both developmentalist projects and their have taken many forms historically, and they have and they have been to a of projects, and postcolonial and development has been and in ways and with frequently political While many of these alternative frameworks the embedded in dominant Western they often technocratic and assumptions. gender and gender as for the of to be shaped by This becomes particularly in the media that of development where women frequently a crucial associated with and women were as both the subjects and of their participation in the and labor often as the index of In this study of from the 1970s how women were as of this as these about womenâs urban and recurring and of a within the own of and critique that official examination of archives and enables a feminist interrogation of their mobilizing a of the in the of contribution to this issue similarly the of a dynamic within as well as across ideological the of womenâs and the media of the and as active in labor and as integral to the technocratic women became of as their labor remained a of and analysis and archival with attention to the specific of and It also transnational that as a and affective a nexus of and practices through which gender, media, and developmentalism one film not as a but as part of the of alongside and work a broader concern of this special media as a of developmentalist projects. The debates the World and which international such as the United Nations and a critical historical for such primarily by postcolonial and of the for the of media and communication infrastructures in as to counter Western The a between and economic how systems of media and reinforced global hierarchies of and in an agenda that supported and alternative media infrastructures across postcolonial contexts, the framework gender as an analytical This âgender in the 1970s by of the Women in Development in relation to The Double its political critique of with its broader to center women in development policy through and This was also in of media, which was shaped by its international reach and audiovisual production and and and Yet, as WID institutional it also to the and of the womenâs development programs often by in These were by a of studies, and on and the to of womenâs presence and through the of their economic and In this on the filmmaker this history directly by the and of for women by the WID framework during the with and agencies the of and against Women in at the of the neoliberal turn, when institutional media often the only to access and support to projects. The an by this dynamic as of the from the Global South are to engage with the developmentalist assumptions funding models that their similarly the as a in developmentalist media history by the of and centers on the Film a between of and the attention toward the and labor by and work was foundational the of and the of audiovisual aid, as both a of development projects and a critical for their the in this issue argue for a with media, gender, and developmentalism as an field of that is and shaped by feminist and methodologies and that challenge the entanglements between academic knowledge production and and technocratic development And while methodological these dynamics at the structural the of feminist in media and cinema by this the very a