Blockchain Papers

Hannah N. Krasikov

Since the popularization of digital music downloading and streaming services beginning in 1999 with Napster, artists have struggled to recover financially from the decline of physical album sales. Streaming services like Spotify have been scrutinized for low royalty payments to artists—an issue that was exacerbated over the course of the coronavirus pandemic. Following the successful debut of non-fungible token (NFT) collections by musicians including Grimes, Kings of Leon, and deadmau5 early in 2021, some of the biggest mainstream reporters in music began calling NFTs the future of the music industry. The decentralized funding structure NFTs offered appeared to provide a solution for compensating artists fairly; however, in practice, NFTs have primarily only benefitted musicians of celebrity status. This article provides a brief introduction to non-fungible tokens and examines why they have appealed to musicians. Additionally, it establishes the difference between visual art NFTs and music NFTs by situating the latter within both historical and neoliberal capitalist understandings of musical value. Drawing from evidence demonstrating how NFTs have been used in practice, this essay suggests that by assetizing music, NFTs re-legitimize the undervaluing of musicians by establishing them as productive laborers in technoscientific capitalist societies.

C. Fernandes, Ricardo Morais

Crypto, non-fungible tokens (NFTs), and the metaverse have taken a massive place in our daily conversations and are highly valued. Moreover, NFTs range from luxury fashion to art, and sound is no exception, although it still needs to be explored. Could this be a unique opportunity to go digital from creation to distribution? This study looks at sound NFTs and new avenues for digital audio communication. During the pandemic, podcasts have been exhausted, leaving space for new digital media business opportunities. We look at how sound has grown, assuming a prominent role in the new media ecosystem due to podcasts consumption. We explore NFTs and their evolution in different markets over the years, highlighting the space that sound content has gained on these platforms as new possibilities for dissemination, promotion, and sale. We use content analysis on marketplaces that provide sound NFTs to understand what audio content consumers can find and future opportunities.

Merve Kadriye Yurdabak

NFT piyasası son yıllarda hızla gelişmektedir. NFT kavramı, aslen bir blokzincir altyapısına ait olan Ethereum standardından gelmektedir. Oluşturulan benzersiz kimlikler, dijital varlıklarla ilgilidir. NFT, özelleştirilmiş değerlerle şeffaf bir ticaret sağlamaktadır. Dijital sanat kavramı benimsenirken, yeni bir pazar da oluşmaktadır. Günümüzde, NFT satışları milyonlarca USD'ye ulaşmıştır. Gelişen NFT pazarı dikkat çekmektedir. NFT'nin arkasındaki teknolojiler olgunlaşmadığından, NFT keşfedilmeyi ve anlaşılmayı bekleyen bir ekosistem haline gelmektedir. Bu çalışmada, dijital sanat ve NFT'nin avantajları ve fırsatları tartışılırken, NFT ekosistemi önemli örneklerle gözden geçirilmektedir.

Mona Schubert

How do feminist activists take over our feeds? And can we really escape the shadows of networked visibility? In a series of five case studies, this text and video-based _Perspective applies the method of visual research to analyze and cross-pollinate visual formulas and platform strategies of Pussy Riot’s and LASTESIS’ networked performances. What started as a social media revolution in 2012 has now spread into the realm of cryptocurrencies and Web3 advances. Formerly situated feminist protests become more and more decentralized and ubiquitory—and so do their audiences. Nonetheless, catering to the demands of networked imagery also entails perpetuating its hegemonic, exploitative, and violent nature, which is ultimately at the hands of the viewer’s and researcher’s interaction.

İbrahim YILMAZ

Metaverse is an indicator of interactions in the virtual world with the support of the internet, software, and hardware to create an immersive user experience. In simple terms, the metaverse is the virtual universe that brings the virtual and physical worlds together in a three-dimensional space and allows users to discover a different internet experience. With the innovation it brought to the internet world, it is often referred to as web 3.0. NFT stands for immutable token. It is usually created using the same type of program as cryptocurrencies, such as Bitcoin or Ethereum. The term metaverse is now used everywhere and it takes an important place in our lives by developing in different areas. Visual design plays an important role in many areas such as the creation of NFT artwork, games, film, and television. At the same time, it creates a three-dimensional world where avatars representing real people live and digital versions can interact in a digital environment. This article researched problems between what is the metaverse and NFT? What are the main features of Metaverse? What does crypto art involve? seeks answers to questions such as Its general purpose is to make a descriptive literature content analysis of the concepts of the metaverse and NFT in the internet database in a general framework, and finally, to examine how crypto art plays a role in today's world together with technology with examples.

Soo-Young Nam

Theorizing the Invisible for the Media Industry:Cryptology and the Unknown Inequality Soo-Young Nam (bio) Digital Media Networks and the Invisible System Our hope that the development of digital technology will enrich our media experience is predicated on the belief that digital records are infallible. This concept of infallibility now seems to be going to extremes. The NFT (non-fungible token) has become one piece of evidence. A digital device is a system that can process large amounts of data without errors, and the capacity of this system is growing so large that it is difficult for us to measure it. Now, in this vast network, the pieces that are difficult to specify individually are asserting themselves as absolute proof of infallibility by forming an irreplaceable combination. An NFT proves its value in such a blockchain-like way, with a one-and-only-one combination. Another characteristic of an NFT is that it is based on the communication between machines (computers), rather than an ordinary token that is perceptible to humans. Apart from the fact that recent media arts (e.g., new media arts) are traded through NFT certification, the emergence of NFTs interestingly discloses the aspect of the media environment of modern society of late capitalism in terms of the question of how to deal with the invisible. I will focus on the point that this new industry of NFTs makes profits from "the invisible" to argue that "the invisible" becomes a new field for the capitalist apparatus and raises critical questions beyond the human-centered culture. Therefore, it will be necessary to pay attention to cryptology as a way to theorize how to deal with "the invisible" in our digital culture. NFTs may provide benefits through economic expansion in the short term, but in the long run they will deepen knowledge inequality and reinforce distrust in the public sphere. In the long run, our belief in media democratization (roughly meaning the growth of people's participation in media) through media eruption can be distorted and led to the dysfunction of mass communication in high-tech media environments such as South Korea. South Korea's internet environment is better than any other country's. It is also difficult to deny its advanced digital media technology. [End Page 123] South Korea can be considered a prime example of a media eruption. Here I use the term "media eruption" in two senses: the overflow of new media of different types, and the overflow of information through these media at the same time. In this era, our daily lives are connected with media whether voluntarily or unconsciously, in analog or digital ways. In most cases, we are also involved in the production of information disseminated by such media. The purposes of this article are twofold: first, to point out an aspect of South Korean society from a critical point of view on the media overflow in contemporary South Korea; and second, to examine whether such a change in the media environment can ultimately provide an opportunity to critically analyze the operating techniques of the invisible as new driving forces of capitalism via the idea of cryptology. In other words, I will point out the negative aspects from the sociological perspective of media overflow, as well as the positive turning points in terms of machine and media discourse. Of course, each pole is already two-sided in its own right. For example, media criticism does not ignore the historical elements of media democratization, aspects that address the long history of inequality in information production, of balancing information distribution by recognition of popular consensus. On the other hand, overcoming the human-centered discourse was not achieved without considering the problem of the loss of subjectivity caused by the domination of technological media. The Politics of Invisibility Nick Couldry explains that people use media almost as rituals, ways of strengthening our sense of belonging to society. His insight points to society at the peak of live broadcasting at the end of the twentieth century, when twenty-four-hour broadcasts and live programs made people feel as if their lives were linked to the center of society. However, since 9/11, when the world witnessed...

Rosemary Lee

Cryptographics is an artwork that reflects on the recent phenomenon of cryp- to art, which involves associating digital artifacts with blockchain, tokenizing artworks with non-fungible tokens (NFTs). This practice has recently been the subject of heated debate within art and the humanities, as well as setting off a feeding frenzy by artists, digital content creators, and speculative investors. In Cryptographics, I take an artistic interpretation of this topic, highlighting the way that while tokenization is intended to make unique digital assets more eas- ily traceable, it treats content as inconsequential, raising a number of questions regarding the value of digital artworks. Working with found text fragments from discussions centered on NFTs and crypto art and existing images, the work seeks to negate the representational role of images, reducing them to mere fields of pixels. By obscuring the visual content of the images and text, this work ques- tions what impacts it may have if we are to treat all digital content as commod- ifiable, yet interchangeable.

Elizabeth Kovacs

This paper examines the concept that legitimate autographic identity may be granted to digital images created as a non-fungible token (NFT). The blockchain technology coded permanently into minted NFT’s keep track of the legitimacy of authorship and ownership, keeping them from being duplicated and removing them from the realm of allographic art. Questions arise of what ‘legitimacy’ and ‘ownership’ for a digital image—which are so easily reproduced and circulated—even look like. The main question that must be answered is whether the backend coding of a digital file is sufficient to alter its ontology into a token of one-of-a-kind autographic work, or if it only what is visible to the viewer of the image matters for its replicability and allographic ontological nature.

Alfonso Amendola Amendola, Michelle Grillo

La pandemia ha definito diverse declinazioni della liveness nella dimensione digitale. Tra i settori più colpiti e che hanno dovuto reinventare linguaggi e forme comunicative, accanto al teatro quello della musica live (il tema disciplinare sul quale vogliamo riflettere). L’industria musicale, da sempre fortemente legata alla prossimità fisica, al necessario rapporto con la strada, inteso come luogo d’ispirazione e nutrimento (immaginiamo le subculture giovanili: dai teddy boys, ai mods, dal movimento hippie, al punk, dall’hip hop alla trap) si è tenacemente reinventata negli ultimi anni negli innovativi spazi digitali: dai social network ai concerti sui videogames (sperimentando un nuovo modo di comunicare e dando vita ad un rinnovato immaginario). Attraverso questo saggio si intende procedere verso una ricognizione e analisi delle pratiche della liveness multimediali, transmediali, intermediali nell’ambito musicale esaminando, in particolare, come gli NFT musicali (Non Fungible Tokens) si siano rivelati come una delle strade più promettenti per continuare a mantenere il legame emotivo, culturale ed identitario tra i performer e i fans. E gettando le basi per un’economia alternativa futura.

Paul J. Ennis

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.

Tom W. Rice

From the Inside:The Colonial Film Unit and the Beginning of the End Tom Rice (bio) In January 1948 the British Film Institute organized a conference entitled "The Film in Colonial Development." While speakers at the conference trotted out, as the journal West Africa termed it, "the old rusty arguments about primitive, illiterate peoples … ad nauseam," they also acknowledged a shift in colonial film policy that was clearly closely aligned to broader political developments.1 "Throughout our Colonial Office policy we are working at one main thing," explained K. W. Blackburn, the Director of Information Services at the Colonial Office, "trying to teach the people of the Colonies to run the show themselves and doing precisely that thing in the film world as in every other field."2 Speaking at the conference, John Grierson further outlined the need to create "a genuine African Unit that can work with native units in other colonies," what he described as a "Colonial Film Unit with true regard for decentralization and the part which natives will play in it."3 The conference marks a public shift in colonial film policy, revealing at a moment when the British government was outlining concurrent changes in its political strategies toward Africa. It represents a moment of transition, one marked by uncertainty surrounding decentralization and the alacrity and extent to which power would be transferred. The discussions address the position, function, and structure of the Colonial Film Unit (CFU) and, as throughout the history of the CFU, these film policies were intricately connected to greater political changes. When the CFU began in 1939, under the aegis of the Ministry of Information (MOI), it sought to produce "propaganda" films encouraging African audiences, exemplified by its first production, Mr. English at Home (dir. Gordon Hales, 1940, Great Britain). After the war, the role of the CFU began to change in ways that often mirrored the broader processes of decolonization. At the start of 1946, the CFU sent units to East and West Africa. Now funded by the Colonial Development and Welfare Act and under the direction of the Films Division of the Central Office of Information (COI), the CFU made instructional films for African audiences, as practical [End Page 107] instruction replaced more general imperial propaganda. By 1948, the CFU was increasingly looking to take production (and with it expenditure) away from London and into the colonies. The Home Unit now accounted for no more than twenty percent of the CFU's output and was financed separately as an allied service from the vote of the COI. The increasing marginalization of the Home Unit is indicative then of this shift in film policy, which closely mirrored changes in political policy.4 The Home Unit serves to connect the traditional functions and structure of the CFU with its ultimate ambitions. Its role in filming Africans brought over to London may appear anachronistic within the context of an administrative and film policy that was increasingly looking away from London and towards the colonies. Yet, in filming a series of conferences, tours, and public exhibitions, these Home Unit productions reveal some of the ways in which the Colonial Office visualized Britain's changing relationship with Africa and, more significantly, sought to articulate these impending changes to an African audience. The films depict African sportsmen (Nigerian Footballers in England, 1949), musicians (Colonial Cinemagazine 9, 1947), and leaders (An African Conference in London, 1948). They celebrate British interest in the empire (Colonial Month, 1949) and show social and political events that sought to challenge popular perceptions of African political life. Yet, in their largely traditional formal structure, which defined London through its landmarks, institutions, and repeated references to the royal family, as the ideological center from which the empire could be controlled and contained, the films reveal the still tentative and reactionary nature of the British government's moves toward decolonization. The films of the Home Unit thus provide a starting point when examining these shifts within colonial film and political policy. In showing official events and tours, they reveal some of the ways in which the Colonial Office and the COI sought to promote and represent a reconfigured empire to the British public and...

Matthias Scharnowski, Stefan Scharnowski, Stefan Scharnowski, Lukas Zimmermann

No abstract is available for this record.

Robert J. Shiller

No abstract is available for this record.

Steven S. Kapica

Readers—collections comprised mainly of previously published scholarship—are by design a mixed bag. They stake out fields or topics established enough to merit targeted collections of foundational texts and attempt to be representative but not comprehensive. Their appeal is to accessibility—grounding the initiate and appeasing the seasoned scholar. To that end, most of us automatically assume that “readers” are for students. We look to them as a way to anchor an undergraduate survey course. Maybe we suggest one to a graduate student who needs a quick primer or refresher. For scholars, however, readers rarely provide more than casual strolls along well-worn paths. This is not the case, however, with Nick Marx and Matt Sienkiewicz's Comedy Studies Reader, an expertly conceived collection that proves both familiar and new.Comedy studies is a patchwork field, composed of scholars from a range of disciplines, including (but certainly not limited to) literature, cultural studies, psychology, sociology, media studies, communications, rhetoric, and anthropology. It's a field born of nagging questions. Why do we laugh? Why do we laugh at things we probably shouldn't? A “comedy studies reader,” then, might prove more valuable than a generic reader. A comedy studies reader might provide a useful snapshot of a multifarious field. It might serve as a mission statement or a foundational testament. It might even serve ontological necessity. Marx and Sienkiewicz's collection doesn't lay claim to any of these, exactly. Instead, it “serves as a call to expand both the scope of comedic media that scholars and students consider and the tools they use to do so” (13). The collection “offers an opportunity to consider comedy as both a theoretical concept and a commercial product, while illustrating the ways in which these things are inevitably intertwined” (6). These statements of purpose reveal the editors' disciplinary homes (media studies and communication) and evince the book's preoccupation with film and television comedy (each chapter begins with an epigraph formatted as a film or television script). Although the text does, as its editors claim, probe “the history of Western thought about comedy, joking, and humor, in order to encourage its reexamination in the classroom,” the focus on comedy's commercial aspects tips the collection's hat more toward media studies than any of the other disciplines under the comedy studies umbrella (14). That said, it would be a mistake for us to consign the collection to media studies.The Comedy Studies Reader is expertly ordered. It consists of a clearly articulated (and accessibly written) introduction followed by eight chapters centered on key concepts. Each chapter has its own short introduction from the editors, excerpts from seminal authors, and essays that exemplify how “contemporary scholars have applied comedy theory to media texts” (15). Finally, each chapter includes a new essay that builds on the preceding materials. It is in these new essays that The Comedy Studies Reader achieves its most salient purpose. Students can take note of the scaffolding, how arguments are introduced, synthesized, and built; they can use the theoretical excerpts as foundations for further exploration, the representative and new essays serving as models. Scholars familiar with the theoretical frames, however, can find inspiration in the new essays. We can revisit old concepts in search of nuance and discover unexplored angles worth pursuing.Marx and Sienkiewicz begin chapter 1 with an excerpt by Mikhail Bakhtin, “The Carnivalesque,” which seems to suggest that the Russian philosopher and literary critic serves as an appropriate starting point for comedy studies theory. A contestable point, maybe. However, the Bakhtin excerpt is followed by Umberto Eco's “The Frames of Comic ‘Freedom,’” which both complicates (dismantles) and extends Bakhtin's position. “From antiquity to Freud or Bergson,” Eco writes, “every attempt to define comic seems to be jeopardized by the fact that this is an umbrella term … that gathers together a disturbing ensemble of diverse and not completely homogeneous phenomena, such as humor, comedy, grotesque, parody, satire, wit, and so on” (25). Reading this—after Bakhtin—alerts us to the constraints and affordances of comedy studies as a field. It puts us in a position to critically consider and thoughtfully engage all that is gathered under the umbrella of The Comedy Studies Reader. What we are in for, then, is not a chronological walkthrough of the tenets of comedy studies; rather, we are invited to consider how the diverse ensemble of not-so-homogeneous phenomena might usefully connect and overlap. The new essay, by Philp Scepanski, concludes the chapter by invoking Bakhtin. Scepanski's essay takes as its object of study the “notoriously base, self-consciously offensive, and largely critically reviled” animated sitcom Family Guy and mines the controversial text for answers to how irreverent comedy can provide us with “a better sense of how American comedy and culture respond to collective trauma in our time” (34). The essay serves as proof positive of the kind of scholarship Marx and Sienkiewicz invite us to engage with and produce.After Eco's citation of Freud and Bergson, it should come as no surprise that the central figures of the next two chapters are Henri Bergson (chapter 2, “Comedy Mechanics and Absurdity”) and Sigmund Freud (chapter 3, “Psychoanalyzing Comedy”). Chapter 2 pairs Bergson with an excerpt from Jerry Palmer's The Logic of the Absurd (1987) and Donald Crafton's 1995 piece on slapstick, “Pie and Chase: Gag, Spectacle, and Narrative in Slapstick Comedy.” These three foundational pieces lead to a truly fascinating essay by Evan Elkins on the shocking, antitalk show The Eric André Show. Elkins builds on Bergson and Palmer, as well as Bakhtin, exploring how the narrow-casting logic of postnetwork American television is drawing us into “darker, more absurd, aggressive, and avant-garde forms of comedy” (59). Chapter 3 begins with excerpts from Freud before presenting us with Paul Flaig's 2011 essay “Lacan's Harpo,” which proves a thorny though revelatory exploration of how Harpo Marx's absurdist comedy dissolves the arbitrary boundary between the symbolic and the real. Flaig's heady piece is followed by an essay from Andrew J. Owens who considers a much less controversial text than either Scepanski and Elkins do, opting to explore through a psychoanalytic approach CBS's extremely popular, though decidedly middle-brow, Big Bang Theory.For the most part, the remaining chapters cover expected but necessary bases: irony (chapter 4), genre (chapter 5), race and ethnicity (chapter 6), gender and sexuality (chapter 7), and nation and globalization (chapter 8). Like the first three chapters, each of the remaining chapters includes excellent texts that serve as foundations for the essays that follow. This review risks minimizing the value of these later chapters by not fully explicating them—something I am loathe to do, as the works collected here are just as strong as those in earlier chapters. What becomes clear as one navigates through The Comedy Studies Reader is that the dynamics of the field (comedy studies) make for wildly diverse, infinitely generative scholarship that has clear and useful connections across its myriad interests and domains. I'll confess that early on, I expected to skip through the chapters, reading only those essays whose titles piqued my interest. Yet with each chapter I found myself deeply invested in how all the pieces fit together—and before I knew it, I'd read the entire collection cover to cover, marking many of the selections with notes for work I hope to pursue in the near future.The Comedy Studies Reader meets its claim to be a wide-ranging introduction to comedy studies aimed at both scholars and students. While a majority of the primer is housed in media studies, this is not a bad thing. Marx and Sienkiewicz's selections and organization invite cross- disciplinary dialogue across issues that concern scholars of all fields. For instance, in chapter 5, we find ourselves reading about the features of the television sitcom. In the included excerpt from Steve Neale and Frank Krutnik's Popular Film and Television Comedy, amid discussion of shows like M*A*S*H and The Mary Tyler Moore Show, we are met with a reference to Freud. In itself, this is not surprising, as recourse to Freud is part of comedy studies' DNA, but for the reader of the collection it triggers recall of earlier excerpts; it invites backward glances to how the themes and goals of earlier chapters, though occasionally embroiled in generic, disciplinary features, easily build on and influence each other. Owens's essay on The Big Bang Theory, included in the psychoanalysis chapter (3), can be pulled forward and considered in terms of genre (chapter 5). Ji Hoon Park, Nadine G. Gabbadon, and Ariel R. Chernin's essay on Rush Hour 2 (chapter 6, “Race and Ethnicity”) hearkens back to chapter 4 (“Irony”) and the excerpt from Linda Hutcheon. Alfred L. Martin Jr.'s essay (“Generic Closets: Sitcoms, Audiences, and Black Male Gayness”) from chapter 7 (“Gender and Sexuality”) connects to chapters 4 and 6, and the excerpt from Andy Medhurst's A National Joke, included in the book's final chapter, brings us full circle, recalling Bakhtin and Eco. So while there are those of us who might have liked a more wide-ranging selection of comedic texts (Medhurst's piece is the only one to really address stand-up comedy, for instance), The Comedy Studies Reader expertly follows through on its promise for scholars—providing a clear invitation to play, to revisit old streets and explore new territories under the sheltering sky of comedy studies.

Alesha Serada, Tanja Sihvonen, J. Tuomas Harviainen

This article analyzes specific characteristics of value created through digital scarcity and blockchain-proven ownership in cryptogames. Our object of study is CryptoKitties, the first instance of a blockchain-based game that has garnered media recognition and financial interest. The objective of this article is to demonstrate the limits of scarcity in value construction for owners of CryptoKitties tokens, manifested as breedable virtual cats. Our work extends the trends set out by earlier cryptocurrency studies from the perspective of cultural studies. For the purpose of this article, we rely on open blockchain analytics such as DappRadar and Etherscan, as well as player-created analytics, backed by a one-year-long participant observation period in the said game for research material. Combining theoretical cryptocurrency and Bitcoin studies, open data analysis, and virtual ethnography enables a grounded discussion on blockchain-based game design and play.

Mircea Constantin Șcheau, Pop Stefan Zaharie

Economy Informatics Vol 18 No. 1/2018 CONTENTS Goalkeeper Analytics Using a Wearable Embedded System Bogdan IANCU 5 The aim of this research is to identify the main metrics linked to soccer goalkeeping that can be computed by using a small embedded device. Based on the identified KPIs, a prototype is created by using an old Android phone in order to compute them based on the values of the three sensors related to positioning: accelerometer, gyroscope and magnetometer. In the final part of this paper, the obtained results are validated in a real case scenario by comparing the values of computed KPIs against some baseline values. The baseline values are extracted from the video recording of the trainings where the goalkeepers used our wearable embedded system. By constructing a cheap and small version of our prototype, we can help small soccer teams to understand and use data to better train their goalkeepers. Keywords: Sport Analytics, Embedded System, IoT, Wearables A scalable architecture for automated monitoring of microservices Radu BONCEA, Alin ZAMFIROIU, Ioan BACIVAROV 13 In this paper we propose an architecture for monitoring microservices by logging key performance metrics at both system and application levels. By using advanced analytics algorithms we can then classify the events in microservice's behaviour and automate the decision processes, thus improving the overall reliability and security. We will be using Prometheus for storing short-live metrics, OpenTSDB for long term retention and RabbitMQ for passing structured messages between various IT components which orchestrate the collection of our microservices. Keywords: Microservice, Distributed Arhitecture, Monitoring, Complexity IT Agile Transformation Cristian Gabriel OLTEANU 23 The paper presents a case study on knowledge management for IT Agile adaptation, based on organizational changes. It includes discussions about future knowledge management challenges and favorable circumstances within Agile transformation process in terms of its pre-requisites. As shown in the research results, the entire organization was impacted by adopting Agile as a project management approach. The conclusions point out some of the most important pre-requisites for Agile transformation, such as: training and workshops, implication of Agile experts, support and effectiveness, establishment of community practice and learning organizational culture. Nevertheless, the endless learning process as a part of the learning organizational culture, was the biggest Agile challenge within companies transformation, which is like a journey without a final destination, always having to adapt to changes. Keywords: Agile implementation, project management, IT organizational change, Agile methods The Way of Cryptocurrency Mircea Constantin ȘCHEAU, Pop Ștefan ZAHARIE 32 Cryptocurrency market is estimated at several hundred billion dollars. The number of digital coins has exceeded the threshold of one thousand, each day appearing or disappearing some of them. Volatility, the difficulty in practical operation, high cost, associated risk and particular complexity make it quite difficult to choose one of the products without adequate counseling. Proponents of new technologies presents relevant arguments, while the appellants their call attention to the potential hazards/dangers to which expose themselves the investors. Reality offers us a spectrum that combines measures to limit the phenomenon development with the recognition and support from national and international organisms from which, however, is expected to adopt a joint position on the approach. Born at the end of the first decade of the second millennium, cryptocurrency has begun and continues to raise the interest of financial markets in general and specialized institutions in particular.

Gianluca Miscione, Donncha Kavanagh

No abstract is available for this record.

Marco Cucco

Abstract Italian cinema has often been a battle-ground between national government and local administrations. Since 1975 many laws have been passed in order to find a compromise between centralized control of filmic activities and a collective management that involving the State and local institutions. Despite the controversy, in the past two decades local administrations have become aware of the economic benefits from supporting film productions. Therefore they have been implementing film-friendly measures (film commissions, film funds, film incentives and tax revenues). At the same time the Ministero per i Beni e le Attività Culturali/Ministry for Cultural Heritage and Activities is reconsidering its mission by moving from financing films to becoming a promoter, financier and regulator of the Italian cinema industry as a whole. This article analyses how in the past 35 years the Italian state and regions have negotiated their powers regarding cinematographic activities. It also examines the development of film commissions and film funds introduced by local administrations for supporting film production. The final part of the article suggests that financing and regulation of film production in Italy is experiencing a decentralization process.

Dan C. Shoemaker

In 1957, in his book Mythologies, Roland Barthes recommended mapping the multiple terrains in which various myths and ideologies were spoken (149). This paper follows in those footsteps by examining a pattern of discourse in American films after the events of September 11, 2001. An analysis of three recent films (and a comparison to a film from an earlier era) will reveal that the timbre of our discourse has modulated toward reliance upon (and valorization of) patriarchal authority, and away from reason. The author's fundamental theoretical assumption is that the relationship between American society and its cultural production is interactive, reciprocal, and mutually informing; films not only reflect society, but help to shape it. Since films are the result of conscious acts of representation and not some automatic process of reflection, films should be taken seriously as ideologically driven acts of speech. Million Dollar Baby won the Academy Award for Best Picture of 2004, as well as Oscars for director Clint Eastwood and lead actress Hilary Swank. The religious right criticized the film for its apparent endorsement of euthanasia, but may have missed the point. Million Dollar Baby is actually a film about then-Secretary of State Donald Rumsfeld and the Bush Administration's doctrine of preemptive war. The film stars Hilary Swank as Maggie, a bootstrapping, working poor waitress determined to make it as a professional boxer. Clint Eastwood stars as gym owner and boxing coach Frankie Dunn, who reluctantly takes Maggie under his wing. The narration by Morgan Freeman's character, Scrap, obscures the dynamics of the story. Maggie is the million dollar baby of the title, but whose baby is she? She is Frankie's. Indeed, the relationship between Frankie and Maggie becomes familial. Frankie has a grown daughter who returns his letters to her unopened and unread. The origin of the rift between Frankie and his daughter is unexplained by the film; the audience is not told what happened, and all we see are after-effects. Getting only one side of the story encourages us to sympathize with Frankie (at least he is trying to get it right, we reason). Before long, Maggie slips into the role of surrogate daughter. Maggie calls Frankie “Boss,” but “Daddy” would be more appropriate. Her relations with her own family are frustrating and are an early clue about the film's conservative ideology. When Maggie wins enough money as a boxer, she buys her mother a house. Instead of being grateful, her mother (Margo Martindale) complains that the acquisition of a home is going to upset her welfare scam. Maggie's family also includes her sister Mardell (Riki Lindhome), an unwed mother, and her brother JD (Marcus Chait), soon to be released from jail. Now, whose stereotypes are these? Maggie's mother and siblings are cartoons of welfare-state parasites, the kind of sly poor folk whom conservatives theorize are sapping our nation of its vigor. Maggie's family is portrayed without a shred of sympathy. We do not feel for their poverty, ignorance, or lack of options; instead, the one-dimensional scripting encourages us to see them as selfish, ungrateful, and criminal. Following the debacle with Maggie's mom is a scene which plays a key part in foreshadowing coming events. Maggie tells Frankie about the time her father euthanized her beloved dog as an act of mercy, and then the pair stop at a diner and have some lemon pie. They bond. Subsequently, Maggie demonstrates her loyalty to Frankie by refusing to abandon him in favor of a more successful manager with better connections. Frankie's key piece of advice to Maggie, which he repeats several times throughout the movie, is this: Always protect yourself. That is the same advice Donald Rumsfeld and the rest of the Bush administration invoked to justify going to war in Iraq: we had to protect ourselves from weapons of mass destruction. Despite the constant reiteration of this advice, Maggie fails to keep her guard up and is clocked by a nasty boxer identified as a former East German prostitute (Trifecta: a figure not only representing two major military enemies of the U.S.A. in the 20th century, but also moral turpitude). After getting sucker-punched by her opponent, Maggie falls, sustaining spinal cord injuries that leave her permanently paralyzed and bedridden. She then requests that Frankie treat her as her father had treated her dog. It is at this point that it becomes clear that the film is about Frankie, and not about Maggie. The balance of the movie is about the difficulty of Frankie's choice. As a Catholic, Frankie thinks mercy killing is a sin. As Maggie's surrogate father, he cannot bear to see her suffer. What, then, to do? Well, thank God our patriarchs are old and wise, and are capable of making the tough decisions. The entire narrative logic of the film endorses the assumption that our elders know what they are doing, and the young do not. Frankie's priest is a younger man, whom Frankie treats mostly with disdain. In a sub-plot of the film, Scrap is called upon to defend Danger, a hapless wannabe boxer who is pummeled by a gym bully. The skilled, older boxer (even when reduced to the status of a janitor) is more than a match for the guileless youth of the bully; in fact, Scrap puts him away with one hand. For her part, Maggie demonstrates that she has finally learned Frankie's lesson about defending herself when she refuses to sign her financial assets over to her parasitic family. In every instance throughout the film, the logic of the narrative supports the idea that the combination of age and male gender confers wisdom. Frankie ultimately decides to end Maggie's suffering. In their last conversation, Frankie tells Maggie that the Gaelic nickname he gave her, Mo Cuishle, means “my darling, my blood.” Family feeling triumphs over religion and law; Frankie knows that euthanasia is illegal, but he does it because he feels it is right. Insert your own joke about Bush administration policies and scandals here. Scrap's narration turns out to be a letter to Frankie's estranged daughter, explaining that Frankie never came back to the gym after ending Maggie's misery. “No matter where he is, I thought you should know what kind of man your father really was,” Scrap concludes. The final image of the film is Frankie back at the diner, presumably having some of that lemon pie. The tone is nostalgic and sentimental. It is an odd chord to strike in a film about senseless tragedy and loss, and it only makes sense if we are supposed to identify with Frankie. This is a textbook example of how hegemony is supposed to work under patriarchy; we are presumed to mistake the patriarch's interests and point of view for our own. While democracy and maturity both involve necessary measures of self-determination in order to be free and responsible, patriarchy requires submission to the dictates of the father-figure. In his book Moral Politics, the cognitive linguist George Lakoff delineates paradigmatic differences in the politics of conservatives and progressives. Lakoff asserts that that the two groups both employ the metaphor of the family to conceptualize and articulate their political positions, but differ in the kind of family they theorize. According to Lakoff, conservatives embrace a Strict Parent model of family. In this model, a Strict Parent is deemed necessary because the world is thought to be a dangerous place, and children therefore need to be disciplined in order to survive the Darwinian ordeal of existence. Any leniency toward or indulgence of children is considered a moral lapse, because it fosters weakness that will ultimately endanger the child. In the Strict Parent paradigm, being strong is the same thing as being moral. Since morality and strength are thought to be the same thing, and since success is proof of strength and fitness for survival, success is also considered a sign of morality. Therefore, failure is a sign of weakness and immorality. The people who succeed or fail do so not because of structural inequalities (such as institutional discrimination against race, class, or gender), but because of their personal characters. Strength of character is formed through children learning self-discipline and self-reliance, qualities which are deemed necessary to succeed in life's harsh contest. These qualities are presumably learned through obedience to the authority of the Strict Parent, usually the father. Since the success or failure of children and (by extension) society is dependent on the discipline of the father, the exercise of parental authority is itself considered moral, justified, and paramount; conversely, threats to that authority are seen as immoral, unjustified, and misguided (Lakoff, 67-84). When the Strict Parent is a father, and when the family metaphor is extended to the whole of society and its institutions, Lakoff's Strict Parent model is a good description of the logic of patriarchy. If Lakoff is correct in his assessment of the Strict Parent model, it goes a long way toward explaining the conservative obsession with fathers and fatherhood. It also helps explain the logic behind the 2005 version of War of the Worlds, in which the solution to the problem of invasion is the restoration of patriarchal authority. The narrator of the classic novel The War of the Worlds is an unnamed character much like the author H.G. Wells himself, a writer with some scientific knowledge. Few of the characters in the novel are given names, and most are referred to by their occupation or station, for example, the curate, the artilleryman, etc. A few chapters detail the exploits of the narrator's brother, a medical student, after the arrival of the Martians (Mac Adam, xxvi-xxvii). The hero of the 1953 film version is atomic scientist Clayton Forrester (Gene Barry) who wants to get a good look at the Martians as much as he wants to escort his love-object Sylvia to safety. Sylvia (Ann Robinson) is a pretty weak movie heroine, even by 1950s standards: she is weepy and hysterical much of the time, and her skill-set seems mostly comprised of serving coffee, square-dancing, cooking breakfast, and driving a school-bus. Obviously, an update of the story would have to entail some changes; the characters would have to be drawn in such a way that contemporary audiences could recognize them as being realistic. The choices made in changing the story to update it for Steven Spielberg's 2005 version are therefore legitimate topics of criticism. Significantly, instead of replacing Sylvia with a modern woman, the character is simply written out of the 2005 remake. There are no adult women characters for the balance of the movie, or women whose actions matter to the resolution of the problem. Any trace of feminism's impact on our culture is erased. What we are offered instead is the story of a father and his children. In the 2005 version of War of the Worlds, the protagonist is Ray Ferrier (Tom Cruise), not a scientist but an Everyman. At the start of the film, we see Ray finish his shift as a longshoreman and race home in his vintage Mustang. Ray is late to pick up his kids from his pregnant ex-wife, Mary Ann (Miranda Otto), and her new husband, Tim (David Alan They have in a new which Ray to as a As the it becomes apparent that Ray is not the is a and he is an on his has no in his and no when he tells his kids to order out for Ray does not know how to with his and does not know how to his daughter even her is The narrative of the film mostly on as a father as he to escort his children to the Martians our The key in the film is or not Ray is good under When the Martians it It may as well While the of the film is an invasion which the audience knows is the of the film is to with the of This is through the of of and destruction. The of is the that when the from their of the of the film is on we see it in his the of the is in and the are the of When the and turns its on the feeling the scene much the of on of people from the of and by the of the The is the by the that Tim and Mary house. This no narrative and does to the but is of the that in on September The of is the of you seen this that Ray and his children with the to the These of were all over in the as the to who may or may not have in the If we of this recent version of War of the Worlds as a that is about that then are a of about the film that are is the of the in to their to the invasion is a to up with the to the to do so is by his who you leave who will protect a that both lack of in does to and a military that is the What is so is that his need not in of having to do but in of having to see the to it. This is in to the (and of who is from what is going on her on two when she is from at the and when Ray her he their children two about War on all those young who the military after to in and those of us on the home who have from or about what has going on because of the as when the a under the of to of war to The thing is the film's of in whose Ray and The character is an of two characters from the the and the discourse that of the artilleryman, but his is to that of the in the the protagonist the when the is on the of their in a to Martians (Mac Adam, In the 1953 film, the is to the character of of the and the What is so about the character and his in the 2005 version is the in which the and characters are and the logic to justify his What are the qualities that make a to Ray and is a and his him as events This is an but one which Ray never no is made to to stop a of with the of his is At with the but he is when the the in which the characters are After and after the Martians upon the of about in the under the and a This is the from the but to it is the that the a nation never an over not only from our own but also from the Significantly, this is one that to in and What is his own to a Ray not only because he is and but because fails to the of their and because the the of the Martians and a These for are to right of the to the war does not the of the world may in be dangerous to our own and is the of old who are on The of Tim as in of that with this conservative logic on a In a with and its logic of family for killing is to protect and his child. Always protect it for the In the film's only a and Tim is presumably to with a look at the look at the war look at or or The film's narrative has Ray to in Mary Ann him for is having the to the military he into is the film's last of This is in that it is the time Ray as and his patriarchal authority. had referred to his father as him to him from a after him had to do so in the narrative as in the film, Ray had to his him by his but his to be called if you your kids to for your authority, them to war. The film's is taken from the of the and also in the 1953 version is the For those with the the invasion of is when the are by the to which have of the has to the between and for example The and A is the with the novel and film version of War of the H.G. Wells some to God for on to defend our from While to God is religion is also the of in the in the figure of the The 1950s film a but the of the Spielberg's version of the film is of God or religion the when God is mostly as the of triumphs over the Martians because has has that is to upon the but not the from this as is from the discourse of is the of The of and by are the from right and The version of by does not involve the or the of our better obedience to the will of God the father and to the as the of as by on God in a film to this author's by written after The film in at a film in and released in the on only a of with its on in of The film released on in of and has since of a in some and about the film's on The story two from and who get into a with some the in calls and to the of the but the are not the an and that God wants them to all that which is so that which is good may and They out to do with the of their a in the The of that the leave behind them is by at the and the to piece the events which the audience as a When he finally that the are out the he decides to help them than from the of the the of the a out of who is only as We are told is a and but one with he would not women or children. for the The when the in and it is a himself, he is their long the with their by an of the and their father. They in a in which their is by who patriarchal authority. The act as George Bush with that God is on their and with that their is There are no or characters in the The we is the who is for and in a scene about the of her The film with on the about the and of as if of morality. the of Bush administration policies the who process if you are you are the right While this author through written after it is that the film Obviously, the Bush administration not and patriarchal were in American culture the events of September What, then, are the of this If patriarchal have through American culture for what right has the author to the of films to the of the administration in and right politics in that we the back to of the film of that to the of the which a of the same In the like The and The work is not considered to be The film version of to the of the follows the of the a and by is as a but but usually right. of the of the film or not is in his right a in (and surrogate to him of In the the is to be a and is as not only but The of to the of the is the has and A scientist thinks the will itself but that the be from the by a The of the film the to the right at the right time to the the to the world are by the of religious will is written the are you that man even in his to not for us to but we If God that man should without a then does he us the will to to the of the but it a in American thought and cultural production that we could Following War in order to American from right and and American culture the of What this from into or an that it be seen in an and personal had to be to and of and that were to the not only the of but also the of the We see this in a of culture from the the of and on and in and some of the of Ray and the culture and both the and While upon his to have his way for much of to the of the his is on scientific and his to him in the In his own actions not through but by the authority of and have two for to authority. is to and is not. In a or the of God is and is for In the scientific are to and The differences between two have for both and American political asserts a logic to that of the people in know what they are they know what they are because they are the people in knows simply because he is the father. In the Strict Parent model by Lakoff, the in authority is presumed to have that through strength of as the authority is justified, and on or even of are presumed to be such logic is at with which free and September 11, the American people were from an The world to which they and The events of that our that the world us because we are the good In such a strong who a and may and the of is in a of requires us to for and to make our on not authority. The of as by and American who to should be as to that were in culture that The films under are not but As and we should be A culture that obedience to authority is not a culture that endorses free or kind of If we do not this lesson of the century, we may well be to some

Bhaskar Sarkar

This paper explores the epistemic and ethical questions posed by cinematic representations of blindness. How do experiences of the blind challenge and extend the notion of visuality? At stake is an understanding of blindness not simply as a negation of vision but as a fundamentally different mode of being—an understanding that puts pressure on, and decenters, standard paradigms of perception, cognition and human subjectivity. Drawing on the Australian film Proof (1992), I argue for a politics of representation that acknowledges and accommodates the irreducible difference that constitutes the experience of blindness.

Mark Winokur

History as Ghetto. One crucial question posed by contemporary cultural theoreticians from Louis Althusser to Fredric Jameson has to do with the specific relation of cultural artifact to historical truth. How is one to account for the disparity between history and its representation, or between history and its lack of representation by hegemonic groups that have a stake in maintaining an official story? More pertinent for film scholars, how do the events on the film screen explicate-how are they explicated by-events on the larger, cultural stage, when both arenas are as much defined in the gap as in the praxis? Jameson states the problem and its necessity in its most accessible form: It is in detecting the traces of that uninterrupted narrative, in restoring to the surface of the text the repressed and buried reality of this fundamental history, that the doctrine of a political unconscious finds its function and its necessity.' When speaking about the cultural role of the ethnic, historians derive a number of possible, practical consequences of the problematics of political nonrepresentability. For some, the absence of ethnic or subculture representation in history and criticism is lamentable, but correctable (Lary May's Screening Out the Past). For others, the absence of overt subculture representation is proof of either the sterility of the mainstream culture (Michel Foucault), or the impotence and final incommensurability of ethnic cultures (John Cuddihy's Ordeal of Civility), depending on the critic's allegiance or particular neurosis. When addressing American film, it is possible to make a different kind of assertion: the absence of direct, proportional representation of the immigrant as complex character and lead player, and the substitution instead of ethnic stereotypes, is interesting when one takes into account that the medium is to a great extent dominated by immigrants and children of immigrants. The consensus among most historians of American film, from Louis Jacobs to Lary May, is that the number of immigrants-and their children, America's new ethnics-who worked in Hollywood in creative, technical, and economic capacities has been and continues to be extremely disproportionate.2 Of the thirteen founders of the Big Eight studios, for example, eleven were born outside the United States. The last two, Harry Cohn and Jesse Lasky, were the son and grandson, respectively, of immigrants.3 Add to this the fact that by

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, 1979–1991, a collection of more than eight hundred titles “created to provide information on assistance programs supported by the Agency for International Development (AID).”1 Yet, The Double Day does not, in fact, directly depict or engage with any specific development or aid initiative. Instead, the film—directed by US-based Brazilian filmmaker Helena Solberg as part of the International Women’s Film Project collective and described as “the first Latin American feminist documentary”—examines 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 film’s production but also determined its archival destination, which renders legible its place within the history of international development.4 The Double Day’s 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 development’s “regimes of visuality.”5 Especially relevant to The Double Day’s production and exhibition was the international institutional framework of Women in Development (WID). Emerging in the early 1970s and culminating in United Nations’ proclamation of 1975 as International Women’s Year, WID emphasized women’s 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 Women’s 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 1970s—as 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 “underdevelopment” 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 “development media”—exemplifying 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 media’s 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 “gender impacts [these works’] shape, content, and trajectories.”9 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 “development media” is to overlook the film’s place within Solberg’s directorial oeuvre, as well as within the histories of both transnational women’s 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 century—sometimes 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 women’s contributions but also presumes a “weak” 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 “development media” 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 film’s radical Marxist approach to women’s 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 film’s 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 making—from the women featured in the film to the activists who circulated it—revealing a considerably more dynamic interplay between institutional and grassroots or contingent media practices.Moreover, the film’s Latin American context—reflected in Solberg’s 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 City—requires 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 film’s 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 developmentalism’s 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 “the practice of informed speculation.”18 As she reminds us, feminist, queer, and decolonial methodologies have long taught us to “press at the limits” of the archive to “inoculate our scholarship against our evidence’s afflictions.”19 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 “in a project that runs counter to the original purpose, or the imperative to preserve, or the conditions that led to erasure.”20 Yet, as Field cautions, such speculative gestures must remain grounded in a deep and “intimate familiarity with the archive” 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 projects—and their preservation—over 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 women’s movements and international institutional programs. It also demands attentiveness to the coexistence of multiple, and sometimes competing, understandings of development—each 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 films’ 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 issue’s own production as it emerges from an ongoing informal working group we have sustained over several years. While relying on institutional and disciplinary affordances—such as university funding for conferences or access to academic publishing platforms—we 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 production—and 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 “powerful but fragile semantic constellation,” 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 “an area studies framework allowed compartmentalizing Western and non-Western outcomes of technologies that were always claimed to be universal.”22 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 “modernity” as a dominant conceptual anchor, engaging with practices and discourses of development opens more precise analytical pathways. These film and media’s 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 development’s 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 women’s 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 development’s 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 women’s 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 women’s 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 “gender 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 women’s development programs often by in These were by a of studies, and on and the to of women’s 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