Traditional identity management systems, often centralized, face challenges around privacy, data security, and user control, leaving users vulnerable to data breaches and misuse. This paper explores the potential of using the Arweave network to develop an identity management solution. By harnessing Arweave's permanent storage, our solution offers the users a Self-Sovereign Identity (SSI) framework, that uses Decentralized Identifiers (DIDs) and Verifiable Credentials (VCs) to allow individuals and other entities to create, own, and manage their digital identities. Further, the solution integrates privacy-preserving technologies, including zero-knowledge proofs and the BBS(+) signature scheme, enabling selective disclosure. This approach ultimately enhances user privacy and supports compliance with European Union legislation and regulatory standards like the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) by design.
Greg Anderson is an Associate Professor of History at Ohio State University, where he has taught since 2005. His teaching and research cover ancient Greece, critical theory, and historical thought. In his first book, The Athenian Experiment: Building an Imagined Political Community in Ancient Attica, 508â490 b.c. (University of Michigan Press, 2003), and a number of other pieces, he questions the use of modern categories such as âstate,â âtyranny,â and âdemocracyâ to characterize phenomena in ancient Greek experience. He is currently working on two book projects: a monograph, The Realness of Things Past: Ancient Greece and Ontological History, and a volume of essays on states in history titled State Formations: Histories and Cultures of Statehood, which he is co-editing with John Brooke and Julia Strauss. The Decree of Eukrates (337/6 b.c.). This decree authorizes Athenians to assassinate anyone who attempts to establish a tyranny in the polis of Athens and prescribes punishments for any would-be collaborators. The sculpted relief shows Demos (âthe People of the Atheniansâ) being crowned by a personified Demokratia. As the image suggests, the Athenians conceptualized Demos as a unitary corporate person, not as an aggregate of autonomous individual persons. In contemporary thought and practice, this corporate self was a kind of primordial superorganism, one that existed prior to and apart from the particular flesh-and-blood Athenians who happened to embody it at any given time. As âthe rule of Demos,â Athenian demokratia was thus not just institutionally different from modern individualist democracies. It was premised upon entirely different ontological foundations. Athens, Agora Museum I 6524. American School of Classical at Athens: Agora Excavations. Photo: C. Mauzy. Our discipline's grand historicist project, its commitment to producing a kind of cumulative biography of our species, imposes strict limits on the kinds of stories we can tell about the past. Most immediately, our histories must locate all of humanity's diverse lifeworlds within the bounds of a single universal âreal worldâ of time, space, and experience. To do this, they must render experiences in all those past lifeworlds duly commensurable and mutually intelligible. And to do this, our histories must use certain commonly accepted models and categories, techniques and methods. The fundamental problem here is that all of these tools of our practice presuppose a knowledge of experience that is far from universal, as postcolonial theorists and historians such as Dipesh Chakrabarty have so well observed. In effect, these devices require us to âtranslateâ the experiences of all past lifeworlds into the experiences of just one lifeworld, namely a post-Enlightenment âEurope,â the world of our own secular, capitalist modernity. In so doing, they actively limit our ability to represent the past's many non-secular, non-capitalist, non-modern âways of being human.â1 To be sure, the discipline's cultural turn of the last thirty has us to the of non-modern our of past and the have us to the of our with the of and cultural history has us to that our non-modern in its it a knowledge of one that for a primordial and a and the one to represent that it is a historicist that us to the experiences of To the a by the a of and and in they by own on the of the as as one attempts to this to tell a in the by our discipline's and one the ability to the here by The one can do within the limits of our is to to the and of cultural to it as the of his who can be the the to a history of the one that to a the of the as it was by the the of to an of to a of it past. It that past into the past of namely our that the of past all those of the lifeworlds that by the the postcolonial of has for our as of historians have to as the of historical knowledge us to non-modern experiences by all into modern the of in is the To have on and a has to Our be to ontological which to be we can our of and non-modern we to the of To us all those that we have in we a that can of non-modern on its own ontological as a world in its own and to ontological experience. past of its own particular its own of the of its own particular of and and and and and so our historicist categories, and do not us to past experiences all the to the ontological they require us to non-modern lifeworlds as all within one and the within a single universal by of and a where and individualist The is a practice that the of non-modern past the to the of own experience. the of and that the of this historicist practice far they a these have and by of thought in a of from and critical to and on the of these we can in turn to an one that in an entirely not as an as a as an by the of thought and this of require us to an ontological turn in our It us to of past in its own our non-modern was in be an of was at the And we to this we duly histories that at and As a lifeworld, Athens can as a for the us to in an ontological turn in historical of at and a of ontological In to in and upon the world as a the of any given historical must that world as a must a knowledge of is of the and of which that world must a of the phenomena that the and of phenomena those we and and and and and the and of And they of in the all and upon the of such a and In other past and for and to its own particular its own of it to be the is to have in not just To this we have to the world of our own capitalist which on at ontological and is The and other upon which modern being is all presuppose a a world in which is to those phenomena that with our of and As our world has for it as and It is thus a world entirely of all the and and and and the other that have and all other historical for It is a world where is a world of and and all those from to the to and from the It is a world that has all those that and and It is a world this it of that modern is as it the of at it as of the and of as of and not as in own It thus all and the that to a of experience a that is from the of This of a of well to those who have to of as a of the of it have at all in non-modern where was in all of where have the who it of is a that in our modern a world that is secular, a world where have from into that they have the and the to of And this us to the commitment of our modern which is its who of the of within a of a of own have about upon the of his capitalist is upon an of The of experience is thus into two mutually an of knowledge and and to be from a of from a of and And with this of have world from not all non-modern have from of being by the of the and the by the of and from who the that in as from who it for that and in and all the modern ontological that be to non-modern be those we and other persons. we to the and last of the ontological that capitalist namely our our that all This ontological have the of where the the of the was âthe of of the and thus the in his own person, as a of his own such that his all of the It have for that in the world of where and as the and of a single primordial And the of a individual be and the of who all as as of all the and of that have in the modern capitalist it as the primordial of the that all with a to a and upon our to and thus to of of and so as not as of our of who we as And we that being to individual the other we that individual in the first who our us to at any given the of a this of and any be to and the to it is by a since it to rule to other who rule for must be by such as and âthe of on the of to on to a of must be from the of by of and other such And in our modern world it entirely that not the of that we the of our be from any In our world it to the to all of for the tools of historicist practice to the ontological of past experience. they us to modern upon all non-modern To the we can to Athens, a non-modern lifeworld, and the Athenian of that has us of the Athenians to be the of it the Athenians not of to tell was and was was in the stories they about and in all and it was far and our was premised upon just a and the two in the of Attica, not just The Athenians with and other polis was with âthe and not just of and in the world of and space, who all of and the in Athens not for the of the in Athens was the of of and And and to and from and to and the Athenians to in on just so with and a of in Athens was not a of to It was all about those to and the of the polis as a The of Athenian being was the of In the of the was not of It was a a that was at and and To since the Athenians to be an who since the was to be a a of to by they as as a with they an Attica, they given to the first such as and who from As the first on to of and these first to to as and to Athenians in all the to And just as as âthe of so the Athenians as as the of and by and from of all of Attica, of duly the of the they not do so as a aggregate of and they in the world as a corporate person, a they âthe People of the As the of the polis this unitary Demos was a kind of primordial that in since the of those first It thus existed prior to and apart from the particular who happened to and embody it at any given in this Demos was not a of It was about a the of a a polis which an individual have and about the primordial of Greek polis well by The polis is by prior to the and the since the is of prior to the for the is be in the that we of a for the be that The that the polis is a of and prior to the individual is that the is not and he is a in to the he who is to in has he is for must be a a he is of the to modern the of the Athenian not these for the of from the of Attica, which was conceptualized as a for not as the of a Athenian as by a with the that they being within Athenian not one an Athenian and one the to in the one an Athenian was being into the of Demos an Athenian who and of the of the As for the of those to the of the Athenians that the and to and Athenian was in a its as its and in the He duly with his other the for and the of the as a as who one to into not such in the polis was to the of Demos by and within its the polis and in Athens, the Athenians and the it be to of as a Most immediately, one was a a of the and an a of a particular In our modern it is as they all two different at the time, with its own of And of is to Athenians just for as as of a universal the world as of a particular as of the polis and the that and in the first and polis they the that they an Athenian different from all other Greek and In the world of the Athenians was premised upon a just a of and the in this was to the of for and the of was to the of for and The was to and these in such a that the be and that the be and that they a the of the as a And they This of is they It to do with âdemocracyâ as we the It was Demos to do to its own in its particular where upon with in the of from other In demokratia was the of and in and upon the world to the of the This be in it be in the in at on the Athenians to as one in the unitary of the polis so they in as and other as as of the of the As these Athenian and with for a of any it is demokratia in it is not demokratia to to Greek historians of that the Athenians to own all those just we we to use models and categories, tools that actively this non-modern to our own modern ontological tools first of to a modern of ontological us to that the of Athens, the of all to be in a of the the and the they us to that the Athenian and other a of âstate,â an that was from a Athenian that these two mutually categories do not to phenomena in ancient experience. it is Athenian was entirely by by of Athenian we that the polis of Athens must have kind of of and the that us to these two as mutually in the first the of a from have entirely to the our us to that such as and must have an it to us that the Athenians not have such a was a world where as It that was an where to the of where individual was its own where by for for ancient to the of a modern an not that was not in It that its must have in In we the of Athens, our the of non-modern experience into modern such as and we these to be of the in have to the to not it is the tools of our practice that us to in the first by modern ontological upon the ancient As for the own the non-modern that our historicist tools have us this to a of to a of the world that we have all the and other phenomena that all and at the time, the of this ancient have in history to the of with all the other non-modern of the Athenian by us to Athenian of its in this our historicist tools of require us to As cultural as Athenian can be from the world they It that the Athenians premised upon the that the of not all of to the of the upon which Our that we can of this we it as an as the Athenians just all by It thus us to with from the of which is And it us to all and in a we which it us to as a of an to the of history that was on And the of our us to the of the polis to the Athenians from from they a who actively and and they we to a an of and that existed to be by they a of and we the primordial that our historicist us to a and a we the history of polis as they its and as they the of world its As for the to this by and all the other and in this ancient these must be and the of they to be at us to Athenian of its its and its our have us the of the by that we Demos the of the the individualist of our models and categories the of a they us to a corporate a of to an aggregate of individual it into a of And of these entirely at in the world that our categories have for a world of The of our historicist to render the Athenian of is thus a and individualist a that we the Athenian is to a of âthe with and âthe with this 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in the the by our historicist is and all it on of and This us to the problem with namely its To it is far from where any of our modern ontological it from our own experience of since that is by the modern Our as to the of its own in our a capitalist that is with phenomena such as and a which all presuppose and the of that can this from our modern since that the of our entirely for that and and one that experience into and has its own ontological all for that can from any to since such a has and within a modern one that is with that in the that thought from one the of to the thought of those who do not ontological for the one a number of many who have all the universal of of is in the have that for all the of at the where phenomena such as and do not as for as and as in not a as a they is a effect, an by the an and own of thus of this of we thought and And one that this of has from the to the by of by the of and a of contemporary theorists have the ontological of from to with many of the of the the upon which all our one they have at and in that this particular of is a historical a of knowledge and the of modern capitalist have the of other modern and to be of thought and And postcolonial theorists have to the of categories and from and the to theorists have the of modern knowledge just as theorists of and the have to the of this historians and of have the of the by And have on the of any knowledge It be to of all these as of our as of the our modern experience as from they us with a critical of our world from a kind of they not that is world the they the we about the of us to it as that is and so that one can where a and an as all thus in the primordial and and the and the that of and in the first And they do this by us and the of a world be from the of the of those for that world is those to the that the two can in be In so doing, the of the us to past the ontological of our world and the and of its of they us to this on a kind of us to the in which as with of to 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a of In Athens, it have to from the upon which they all and which they all and the the polis and its to that the of a particular a and was as a to the of the polis as a And of it to it to the Athenians that all in the and be by not by was a in Athens a and the of its it was thus not a in the of experience any of and It was a within the of a and an a that that Athenian to be in different a particular of a particular and a of the Demos we to that Athenian demokratia to do with individualist and and to do with corporate by a of our with other modern categories, and And we such categories and to of the Athenian on its own we can that all those of of our own Athenian not of the polis to of our own individualist of in Demos in Athens have to any As the of Attica, as of in and as and of as and who and the of the Athenians as to the of Demos as that to that be not was the and demokratia as the Athenians the This the in of who the and Demos and of in the to Athenians in the to as and and for the and and to and the of the In other demokratia was entirely those who the to such as the of to the of Demos with Athens and its demokratia by these not by and Athenian demokratia was in a in corporate not an in the of as and to In an where for not for the of the was the of a in have any And as we have Athens have many of the and cultural to The was to the from the of other the of which is the Athenians in the of the the Athenian was the of this to lifeworlds at a certain Most an ontological turn require us to our with its of and all its of a unitary experience in a single It the that has the the and other to this practice of the ontological from which different have the past's many of and of and so And this is the that we have to for histories that at and it to be well this of the for our modern that the ontological of experience to the of lifeworlds that have
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