Blockchain Papers

David Bååth, Felix Zellhorn

Money laundering is a growing issue which has in later years emigrated more and more to the digital sphere of Bitcoin. Its pseudonymous nature and unrigorous legal definition has made regulation a difficult challenge. This thesis provides a unique take on the Bitcoin money laundering problematique by using incentive structures in place of forced restrictions. The goal is to create, validate and analyze a game theoretic incentive model which aims to combat money laundering by increasing the transaction costs for money laundering Bitcoin users without affecting the transaction costs for the honest users. The results prove the model to be feasible, leading to the conclusion that its real-world application has the potential to combat money laundering in Bitcoin to a significant degree.

Kaido Künnapas

No abstract is available for this record.

Saifedean Ammous

No abstract is available for this record.

Gina Pieters, Sofia Vivanco

No abstract is available for this record.

Christian Brenig, Rafael Accorsi, Günter Müller

This paper reports on our research towards an economic analysis of money laundering schemes utilizing cryptocurrencies, which are convertible decentralized virtual currencies based on cryptographic operations. They gain ground as means to offer enterprises and its customers new payment methods, investing opportunities and some are even intended as substitutes for centrally controlled government-issued fiat currencies. Our starting point is the observation that their increasing popularity attracts the attention of practitioners and scholars, particularly because of raising anti-money laundering concerns. Consequently, work has already been conducted in this area, mainly focusing on implications on anti-money laundering efforts. However, we argue that the potential benefits for criminal individuals are an important, yet neglected factor in the dissemination of cryptocurrencies as money laundering instrument. Addressing this issue, the paper firstly presents the structure of the money laundering process and introduces prevailing anti money-laundering controls. This forms the basis for the subsequent analysis of contextual and transactional factors with respect to their influence on the incentives of criminals to utilize cryptocurrencies for money laundering. This aims at providing an answer to the open question, whether cryptocurrencies constitute a driver for money laundering.

Andrés Guadamuz

In a sandpile world, decentralization is in the air. For many companies it is rapidly becoming a choice between merely hanging on and survival or thriving in the new world of global connectivity and proliferating complexity. In considering Decentralization 2.0, realization of the enablingand-autonomy paradigm presents three major challenges: designing an enabling organization, creating autonomous groups, and establishing a deep structure or genetic code to integrate these into a meaningful whole. Let’s remind ourselves that Decentralization 2.0 is conceived of in the context of a social-systemic perspective of organizing. In this way of looking at organizations, it is recognized that not only does the system have a purpose, but also the parts of the system and the larger whole containing the system, which both have purposes of their own. In other words, when the organization is that of a firm, both its individual members and the society in which it functions are recognized as having purposes of their own. Although they sometimes forget what they are for, companies, whether banks or health care organizations, do have the function to serve the purposes of the society they are a part of. If they fail to do so, in the long run, their survival is jeopardized. Even more so, sometimes companies find it difficult to recognize that their members are purposeful human beings, meaning that they display will, and even have ideals of their own.

J. Emmanuel Raymundo

On February 25, 2011, the fashion luxury company Christian Dior suspended John Galliano, who had been its creative director since 1996, after his arrest over making anti-Semitic remarks at a Paris bar. Quickly following his suspension, a video from December 2010 was distributed showing Galliano hurling anti-Semitic invectives at several bar patrons. On March 1, 2011, Dior fired Galliano. At stake in the considerable interest and speculations regarding who takes over at Dior is control of a €24.6B business empire and access to a historic couturier’s archive. In this sense, its designer will influence the label’s "books" both financial and what will be stored in its physical repository as part of the brand’s creative and artistic repertoire. Despite fashion’s apparent ubiquity, the anticipation surrounding who takes over at Dior is proof that despite fashion’s professed democratization, there still exists a fashion hierarchy with Dior occupying its upper echelon. Since Galliano’s dismissal, fashion insiders have moved from breathlessly feverish in their speculations to desperately calling out for relief in the face of an unexpectedly drawn-out waiting game that is now over a year old and otherwise an eternity in fashion’s hyper accelerated production cycle. To purposely counter fashion’s accelerated internal clock, the purpose of this commentary is to keep fashion in a reflective state rather than a reflexive stance and uses fashion on film, and specifically Robert Altman’s Prêt-à-Porter (1994), to give cultural and historical context to all the online speculation and chatter. Altman’s film is the fractal, or the repeating pattern, in a dramatized form, as well as the cultural archive against which to examine the entangled relations of the designer Marc J

Darren Hudson Hick

Thierry Lenain’s Art Forgery: The History of a Modern Obsession is, to my knowledge, the first book-length investigation into philosophical issues of art forgery since Denis Dutton’s 1983 edited volume, The Forger’s Art. And Lenain’s text, it must be said, presents in fascinating detail, not only historical accounts of forgery and its cousins—from ancient Rome up to the dubiously celebrated twentieth-century forgers—but also the history of religious relic veneration, which he argues forms the historical basis to today’s obsession over art authenticity. In his text, Lenain argues for three central points: (1) that art forgery, as we know it, did not exist as a practice in the ancient world; (2) that art forgery instead evolves out of medieval relic fetishism; and (3) that the perfect fake decentres the conceptual notion at the heart of contemporary art connoisseurship—the ‘trace paradigm’. Lenain’s first chapter sets up the conceptual groundwork for what follows. Today, when a work is discovered to be a forgery, it is usually hidden away from view, or else destroyed outright. Art forgery is typically seen as a blight on the art historical landscape—a disease, Lenain suggests, that threatens the very notion of art. Art history and connoisseurship, he argues, have for quite some time rested upon what he calls the trace paradigm, the view that any artwork displays traces of its historical origin. In particular, the trace paradigm holds that the style in which a work is created invariably embodies its creator’s personality. Art forgery is something of an artistic changeling, then, devoid of value of its own and meant to usurp the place of real art. Once discovered, the forgery is seen for what it is: a monstrous doppelgänger. A true work of art forgery, Lenain suggests, imitates the appearance of an artwork with a different origin in order to steal its place in the system of art, and is susceptible to harming someone’s interests. Forgery, as such, plays a unique role in the artworld, a role not played by benign copies, harmless pastiches, or mere replicas. Lenain further distinguishes true forgeries from what he calls ‘artistic mystifications’, which, while identical in method with forgeries and intended initially to deceive, are also intended from the start to be ultimately revealed by their makers, and so not harmful. On this understanding, Lenain sets out in his second chapter to dissolve the pervasive notion that the practice of art forgery ‘is as old as mankind itself’—that it stretches back as far as the Roman Empire or earlier—what Lenain calls the ‘always-been’ fallacy. Certainly, the Roman period had no shortage of art copies and replicas, but, contrary to the claims of other scholars, Lenain argues that textual evidence from the period does not support a practice of art forgery as we understand it today. One such text often referred to by scholars comes from Phaedrus’ Aesopic Fables: As certain artists do in our day, who obtain a much greater price for their productions if they inscribe the name of Praxiteles on their scraped marbles, Myron on their polished silver and Zeuxis on their panels … Carping envy more readily favours works of false antiquity than those of the present day. (65) Though many have taken this and similar passages as clear evidence of a practice of Roman art forgery, sculptures bearing the signatures of artists other than their makers, Lenain suggests, were not deceptive copies but rather overt homages, their values enhanced by association with their more prestigious forerunners through a sort of ‘symbolic enhancement’. Perhaps Lenain’s scepticism appears hyperbolic as he knocks down case after case by suggesting entirely unknown cultural practices rather than accepting them as precursors to contemporary art forgery, but this much appears sound: even if there was an occasional artisan or merchant who lied about the origin of a work for the sake of jacking up the price, without a practice of art collection, there would have been little reason for a practice of art forgery, and so any such individual act would not have had the cultural relevance that it has today. Instead, Lenain argues, the historical origins of today’s ‘religion’ of art connoisseurship are to be found in medieval relic fetishism, and its reasonable concerns over authenticity. Relics were, after all, literal pieces of saints, or of objects closely associated with them, and were believed to embody the very powers of those individuals. So whether a claimed relic was authentic was of critical importance, and great lengths were taken not only to authenticate, but also to protect, preserve, and showcase these relics. Lenain’s hypothesis is, admittedly, a fascinating suggestion, and he outlines the complex and intriguing history of religious relics in equally fascinating detail. But when he turns to making the connection with art forgery, the implacable incredulity which he brought to bear on purported forgery in the ancient world seems to have been shelved. Looking to texts by Pietro Summonte, Marcantonio Michiel, and Giorgio Vasari, Lenain argues in his third chapter that there began in the late medieval period a veneration of artists as divine and their works as analogous to religious relics. And, just as relics could be duplicated through a sort of divine osmosis without any dampening of their religious powers, so too, Lenain suggests, were artistic duplicates seen as equivalent to their originals. However, where Lenain was willing to accept nothing short of absolute proof of forgery in the ancient world, here he takes a lack of contradictory evidence as proof of his hypothesis. For example, Lenain recounts Summonte’s anecdotes of the painter Colantonio, who produced amazing copies of existing Flemish paintings. Summonte’s short account contains no discussion of the means by which Colantonio managed to create his indistinguishable duplicates, and no moral condemnation of his acts. As such, Lenain contends: [t]he fact that Summonte’s discourse offers nothing of that sort indicates that nothing was really at stake in the anecdote except the demonstration of Colantonio’s glorious mastery and the artistic nobility of perfect copying. (175) The lack of moral condemnation, Lenain contends, can be explained by a belief that the copy was taken as authentically equivalent to the original, just as a religious relic could mystically produce authentic copies of itself. Those painters in the Renaissance and early modern period who were capable of producing amazing duplicates were not condemned, Lenain notes, but venerated. And, Lenain suggests, although Vasari and others did not hold to the trace paradigm, this did not prevent artworks as coming to be seen as authorial ‘relics’. Against this backdrop, Lenain returns in his final chapter to the trace paradigm in contemporary connoisseurship, and works to show how the paradigm is at odds with the ‘perfect fake’ (or, as Lenain prefers, the ‘perfect stylistic duplicate’). The possibility of a perfect fake has long been denounced by art historians and philosophers alike. Historians have suggested that any forgery carries with it traces of its historical origins, and that while these are not always apparent at the time of creation, they begin to stand out as time passes to the point when we wonder how these fakes could ever have passed as originals (the exemplar here being Han van Meegeren’s atrocious and yet largely effective Vermeer forgeries). Nelson Goodman suggests that knowing one of two visually indistinguishable paintings is a fake constitutes an aesthetic difference between the works, a view echoed by Mark Sagoff, Jerrold Levinson, and others. Working against these notions, Eric Hebborn, the twentieth-century forger of works of antiquity, contended that he adopted the very styles of past artists by adopting their idiosyncratic ‘languages’ and worked directly on this basis, rather than attempting to copy any existing work. Another contemporary forger, Tom Keating, professed to having channelled long-dead artists, whose spirits would literally guide his hands. Both Hebborn and Keating in their own ways were claiming to have made originals, not fakes. Forgery, the forgers suggest, comes down to a matter of labelling only. But, of course, this labelling is critical, and by labelling their works as works of others, forgers explode the link between the surface of the work and the work’s origin. Lenain writes: The perfect fake destroys the absolute significance of the trace paradigm both in scientific and experiential terms – not only as far as particular objects are concerned but also with respect to artworks in general, fake or not. Even though that paradigm is still functional in a majority of cases, it will never be possible to consider it as absolutely applicable in any single case: since some artworks have been subjected to perfect stylistic simulation, no artwork can be regarded as the absolute (that is, bi-univocal) manifestation of its origin. (273) Now, it is worth noting that Lenain has not provided us with any criteria for being a ‘perfect fake’, but it is clear that he does not have in mind what, say, Goodman does: something in all ways aesthetically indistinguishable from the original. Rather, it seems, Lenain is thinking of a perfect fake as a perfectly convincing one, or (in the case of a copy of an existing work) one visually indiscernible from the original, and this is, at least in principle, a much less difficult pill to swallow. The artworld has certainly been hoodwinked before, and it would be arrogant to assume there are not at this moment dozens of forgeries hanging in the world’s most respected museums. Now, I am sympathetic to the view that the perfect fake is a real possibility—a possibility, I suspect, largely unaccomplished only because of our current technological limitations—but I question whether the typical connoisseur, historian, or philosopher today buys into the Romantic notion that an artist’s style embodies his personality in the way that the trace paradigm says it does. Rather, I would suggest, the Romantic model at the core of the paradigm has been steadily dwindling since the late nineteenth century, and Lenain admits as much. So it seems that Lenain is suggesting that the existence of the perfect fake (which itself is questionable) destroys the significance of a conceptual framework that few adhere to. In his conclusion, Lenain ultimately suggests that the practice of forgery cannot comfortably be positioned either within or outside of the artworld: a fake—perfect or not—is not a normal artwork, but plays something of a perverse cultural role, and to submit the fake to ordinary aesthetic analysis is to ignore its role as a fake. An interpretation of a forgery, Lenain contends, must not focus centrally on its surface features, but on its cultural role—and this, he notes, is not all that different from how we interpret much contemporary art. While contemporary artists have toyed with our notions of authorship and originality, Lenain notes, this is not the forger’s concern. Unlike contemporary art, the forgery can function as such only as long as the identity of its maker remains hidden—so long as it remains authorless. On this basis, Lenain suggests, ‘[i]f we decide that fakes are artworks, it means that we have to accept the idea of an authorless artwork’ (316). But the cultural nature of such fakes makes it essentially impossible to interpret them as artworks while at the same time recognizing their nature as forgeries. The clash arises from competing conceptions: any interpretation of art requires a concept of authorship, but recognition of forgeries as forgeries requires conceiving of them as authorless. Nevertheless, despite their non-art status, art forgeries are fully relevant to both the history and theory of art. Philosophically speaking, this discussion makes up the most intriguing part of the entire book, and deserves much more discussion than I can devote to it here. For those with a philosophic interest in the nature of forgery and authenticity in art, Lenain’s book would be worth picking up for the final fourteen pages alone. This is not to suggest that the preceding pages are not worth reading, however. Indeed, while Lenain’s underlying philosophical methodology is at times deeply flawed and uneven, his historical accounts are laid out in such rich, engrossing detail that one is willing to look past the framework Lenain has constructed for the sake of some compelling stories, absorbingly told.

Peter Linett

My congratulations to you—or should that be my sympathies?—on being chosen as Curator’s next Books Editor. On the positive side, you’re joining a team of thoughtful, creative editors who manage to generate sparks of camaraderie even though we’re scattered around the country. Your postal carrier and UPS driver will soon begin delivering a steady stream of books from academic and commercial publishers—review copies and sometimes bound proofs, all with chipper press releases slipped inside the covers and publishers’ glossy catalogues spilling out of the envelopes. Your bookshelves will gradually come to resemble mine, and visitors who don’t know about your editorial work will be wowed by the breadth and idiosyncratic coolness of your interests, which will appear to run from Pueblo pottery to Islamic calligraphy by way of the anthropology of world’s fairs and the latest scholarship in cultural property law and “glass studies.” Who else, your friends will wonder admiringly, would own that gorgeous coffee-table book celebrating Traditional Archery from Six Continents? Yes, the environmentally unfriendly truth is that a fair percentage of the books you’ll receive for Curator you’ll have no intention of getting reviewed, for the sensible reason that they’re not really about museums—their work or history or guiding ideas—and have little light to shed on those topics except indirectly and in the aggregate. Instead they’re about the objects that museums exhibit or the technical study and preservation of those objects. So they tend to appeal mostly to people who are already interested in and at least somewhat knowledgeable about those kinds of objects or the periods and places associated with them—which in many cases is a small, specialized audience. (If this sounds familiar, perhaps it’s because museums themselves have been accused of focusing on certain classes of objects largely for the benefit of people who already recognize and care about those classes. Not surprisingly, many of the review copies in this category are exhibition catalogues or scholarly texts published in association with new or upcoming exhibitions.) In other words, rather than books about museum practice, these are books of—that is, exemplifying or representing—museum practice. If museums’ traditional activities of collection, preservation, study, and public exhibition can be thought of as a kind of object-based discourse, then what you’re looking for as Curator’s Books Editor is a meta-discourse: stepping back from those activities in order to consider their origins, meanings, functions, and futures. Of course, a variety of those “about” books will arrive in your mail slot as well—books like Museums after Modernism or Museums and Community, books about trends in exhibition design, zoo history, visitor motivations, green museum construction, museum marketing, informal science education, museum philosophy, and the like. A quick taxonomy of these “about” books might be organized around a distinction—or rather, a continuum—between texts written by academics and those written by museum practitioners. At one end of that continuum are books from scholars in various branches of the humanities or social sciences (or, less frequently, the natural sciences) who happen to be interested in museums or museological issues from one angle or another. (Considered as a whole, the museum field is almost absurdly multidisciplinary, as East [2008] and others have reported.) Sometimes that interest is merely one among many and results in a single book about museums; in other cases the interest becomes primary and is sustained over a career. In the increasingly busy middle of the spectrum are texts by museum studies faculty. Here we may want to distinguish between museum studies programs that are . . . well, academic—theory-oriented, historically minded, linked closely to other university departments via interdisciplinary collaborations—and programs that keep one foot in scholarship but lean toward practice, whose faculty members often work in or consult to museums in addition to teaching. These latter programs may be interdisciplinary, but they’re also extradisciplinary: some of their priorities have less to do with the pursuit and creation of knowledge in some recognized domain than with preparing today’s and tomorrow’s museum professionals for the practical challenges they’ll face. Finally, at the other end of the spectrum, are books by the museum professionals themselves, including staff and consultants. Those professional books are the tip of an iceberg of museum discourse that also includes “gray literature” (conference presentations, blog postings, proprietary research reports commissioned by museums, and so on) as well as peer-reviewed journal articles and national research studies. Of course, many books fall somewhere between these categories. It’s a continuum for good reason. There have been collaborations between academics and museum practitioners; volumes of essays by museum professionals who write from essentially academic perspectives; scholarly musings about the minutiae of museum practice (for purposes other than professional training); and so on. It used to be easier to see the difference between the insider view (museum professionals writing largely for each other) and the outsider view (academics writing about museums, often critically and also for each other). But over the last two decades or so, the academic left’s critique of museums, which began emphatically outside the museum—think of the line that runs from Michel Foucault to Tony Bennett, Carol Duncan, Alan Wallach, and others—has been internalized (some would say co-opted) by museum studies programs and even by some influential museum professionals. What was once a disturbing attack that felt to museum practitioners “like being psychoanalyzed in public,” as one of our book reviewers put it a few years ago (Lindauer 2007, 362), has gradually informed the profession’s own rhetoric about its challenges and ideals. I think of Stephen Weil, Elaine Heumann Gurian, Robert Janes, and Nina Simon, although the influence of the postmodern academics on these commentators’ work seems mostly indirect. Our taxonomy would also have to take into account these books’ subject matter and what type or types of museums they deal with. It could draw distinctions between books by a single author, multi-author collaborative works, and collections of essays by various independent contributors. (The latter category includes the museum studies anthologies that have been published with increasing frequency in recent years.) Or between university presses, independent nonprofit presses, and commercial publishing houses. (You’ll occasionally receive an art-forgery saga or a great-man-of-science biography from the latter.) Or between museum studies programs in North America and those in the U.K. or other English-speaking countries. Constructing such a taxonomy in earnest would be a valuable service to the field, and I hope others take up the thread. My hope here is simply to give us a framework for discussing the challenge you’re undertaking. The good news, and the reason for those congratulations I offered, is that some of these museum books are terrific. The best of them may give you, as they’ve given me, a feeling of prickling excitement—a sense that something is at stake, is being risked. How they do this varies, of course. Whether or not you find a book exciting will have as much to do with you as with the book: we get most charged up about what we agree with and what we’re already invested in. (“A real book is not one that we read,” W.H. Auden observed, “but one that reads us.”) Still, as I pass the torch—or rather, the editor’s red pen—to you I’ll mention some of the characteristics I’ve been grateful to find on the page in the seven years I’ve been Curator’s Books Editor. Good museum books reveal the ways in which the familiar ideas and practices of museology (past or present, depending on the author’s project) are contingent rather than given. They put some critical distance between us and museums, making the ordinary seem unfamiliar, even strange. With the benefit of that distance, the authors are able to interrogate the actions, rhetoric, and structures of museums at a fundamental level. This is not easy for insiders to do; we have trouble seeing the assumptions we operate within every day. Philosopher and sometime-museum-historian Stephen Asma has likened this ability to “tasting your own tongue”—an illustration of how difficult it is (Asma 2001, 154). Good museum books also manage to ground themselves in the relevant literature or practice area while also lighting out for new territory. That balance is important. Without knowledge of what museum people have been arguing about, a new perspective reads as merely naïve. Conversely, without something new to say, the contribution feels like hackwork—an apologia for the status quo (a problem I’ll come back to in a moment). When good museum books do borrow theoretical constructs and examples from other domains, they do so in ways that preserve the complexity of those ideas and respect what’s irreducibly foreign about them—aspects that aren’t neatly assimilable to the museum issue at hand. More broadly, good authors of museum literature know how to sustain an argument or narrative over many paragraphs or chapters, and they understand the difference between a string of assertions and the methodical intertwining of observation, inference, reference, and persuasively articulated belief that constitutes a genuine argument. Good museum books sometimes raise questions they don’t and can’t answer, which can feel like a radical act in a field that is has been trying for decades to establish certainties about itself and its cultural status. By problematizing rather than tidying up, these books have the potential to influence the collective agenda and spur debate. (I say “potential” because even the best books can do little good if nobody reads them. Jay Rounds has raised disturbing questions about how much of the museum literature is actually consumed and by whom [2007].) The best museum books display wit, in the sense of both mental quickness and disarmingly clever humor. These authors are confident enough to expect that they’ll be taken seriously even though they don’t take themselves too seriously, and relaxed enough to let a little of themselves into their texts, acknowledging the subjectivity inherent in any human enterprise and thereby helping us account for their presence in the argument as we grapple with it. This list could go on: I’ve had the pleasure of discovering museum books that were heroically well-researched, that spun nuanced historical narratives, that offered powerfully simple frameworks for thinking about complex things—frameworks I’ve found indispensable and passed on to colleagues. A few have permanently changed the way I experience and think about museums. The best museum books can be very good indeed. The problem—and the reason I offer sympathies mixed with the congratulations—is that such books are distressingly few and far between. Too many museum books that come across my desk display an intellectual thinness and logical slipperiness that limits their value to both scholarship and practice. They read as competent enough, but if you probe a little, you find they don’t support real analysis. Too often I’ve found myself wondering if there isn’t, at the heart of the text I’m reading, a kind of dodge, something avoided or elided because grappling with it would have been too troublesome or destabilizing. The Duke University interdisciplinary scholar Cathy N. Davidson calls this “fudging,” which she defines as intentionally or unconsciously “glossing over the nuances of a complicated, inconvenient, or even controversial topic” in order to fit in, as it were, within the cozy confines of one’s discipline. She notes that the “evasions and coverups” of fudging “arise most often when a scholar is confronted with the most fundamental and potentially contentious concepts of her discipline.” So fudging is “emotionally fraught, making you susceptible to exposure,” and instances of it in a text tend to be heralded by a momentary grandiosity that both marks and masks anxiety (Davidson 2009). Although Davidson has in mind science, literature, and other fields, her analysis captures something all too common in museum books. Too many museum books operate within a narrow and convenient sphere of reference, drawing mostly from sources, ideas, and examples already present within museum discourse. (Such books are about museums in a much narrower sense than, say, history books are about history, because the latter is inherently outward-referring: its subject—the human narrative—lies outside itself. Does an analogous dualism exist in museum studies?) This is especially true of books by and for museum practitioners, which sometimes feel hermetically sealed within the bubble of museums’ most gratifying assumptions about themselves. Even on the academic side of the spectrum, many are rife with what has been called (in another context) “unexamined postulates that answer the question before it is asked” (Ragland-Sullivan 1987, xvii). New or foreign ideas from various disciplines do make their way into these books, of course, but they tend to be ones that confirm rather than unsettle the ways museum people see themselves and their institutions and are often applied in reductive ways that reveal the author’s about the in which the The is a kind of in which the text can museum or practice, even when its seems to want to or Too many museum books make they don’t for argument and an of or for Those in can be of the because out that an has been before by is not the as that to it can the of Too much museum literature on this of which an of the is much I being about these If so, I’m not I a at a museum studies to review a new written by a museum scholar at another whose work she A after the she to she think it was her to review or the museum to were in no with much The book even her wonder about the of the press in which she had already as the of some to the museum they questions have come up in book we on my although they’ve been raised In one a at the University of a museum studies that the to the had the to their own or difficult questions with . . . and and that the had to the articles with each other or the they reviewers have for intellectual and we’re at and than they found in the sometimes texts they It’s that all of these books, including the one as were to an independent review in addition to editorial review before being for So at least two museum studies scholars or museum professionals not with the read each the author’s sometimes with This us that people will on such is to some in the of the But it also questions about the value of the review which may display some of the as the literature whose it is to it’s the of people most of the writing for and the of for and one might expect the and to both at the level. It might be easier for one museum to another to when a than to her own writing to those but it’s that she would have in mind very in the two the that those the profession’s or of can work There are also what we might on the of the review as you’ll see in the of your work with this journal articles also The review is to be but the museum is a sometimes it’s not for reviewers to the of the of the book or they’ve been or for the who those via to their The of people in those two is small, and they each in order to the they and so can work Of course, the of review are of the out the to our taxonomy of museum books and to it the distinctions been making between good museum books and their less but our continuum that runs from academic to or to practice, with museum studies programs in the It will come as no at the academic end and in some books by museum studies the critical which museums are is and the sphere of in which they’re is than at the professional The academics are also at museums among other human and to from other disciplines to understand both of which can be of the most are and while many work in museum natural history museums, few have museum the of their of and are also on the academic side, with What the professional and research reports written by museum practitioners or least in is too many of these books are on and so they fall into the category after be the practitioners who write these books aren’t trying to knowledge for its own they’re trying to support or museums in what they often by and that can be applied So it could be that I’m the of one type of museum literature another and with the But aren’t knowledge and practice of the we to do the in order to the and a little of our and us to do some in my outsider and academic museum books as as a than those by and for practitioners, most museum professionals the academic literature because they think it’s not too theoretical and to them their practical and as and have observed, the of scholarly writing may run than museum staff are of ideas and concepts that appear to But if I’m that books on the academic end of the spectrum are to outside concepts and to on museum then what we have is a between and breadth of in the will This is and are some of the ways new ideas a of practice, and new ideas can that with the it practitioners who academic books about museums are an to their own and I would the even in What museum professionals and museum scholars really to and books that aren’t about museums but which might shed light on the museum enterprise if we can read them with our I’m not to and although these may be relevant in certain this a of I’m that for you work at a science museum or are how science museums their purposes and you for the recent on in or the and you might a of The of a of the and from the and and give some thought to the between an and a (If you’re like me, you’ll at a science exhibit the way Or you could out another this from your into literature, at the of which the of narrative and in the of science concepts than any museum book could read and the for with its of how science from and in human somewhat to of a an on museological truth and by the of of these books raise questions about science museum and and these questions are in kind from those raised by the museum own literature on the they’re and rather than Even by to we something about what’s in the a science or natural history an At the I those coffee-table exhibition catalogues and technical as for a review in Curator on the that they really “about” museums, but were examples or museum here I’m for us to to books that are not “about” museums. The difference is that outsider books like because of their can be read as of museum practice and for new most exhibition catalogues are assertions of the of one over another. It’s not that we should be the outsider books of those that are about museums. should be them museum books, and we should be much to the museological questions they and the they If we can make that in our we may be able to take new in our scholarship and practice. you be able to review many of those outsider books in no matter how their for our be too busy trying to keep up with the stream of books about museums, of which seem to be published each as museum studies programs their to the new their to and museums themselves to in and around the I to seeing which you from this stream to review in Curator and which ones you to your between The of and More I to seeing how the reviewers you to write those to the and the they find in those A literature is as good as its by and can we that our books will be written and are all Your as Curator’s Books Editor will be to museum scholars and practitioners of what’s at each we put to or the of a

Authors unavailable

No abstract is available for this record.

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