Blockchain Papers

Dr. G. Shekhar, L. Ravindar

Mathematics has been an important part of human civilization since ancient times and has developed continuously with human progress. Early mathematical ideas emerged from practical needs such as counting, trade, land measurement, construction, and astronomy. Over time, these simple methods evolved into organized mathematical systems. Ancient civilizations such as Egypt, Mesopotamia, India, Greece, and China made significant contributions to mathematics. Egyptians used geometry in architecture and land surveying, while Mesopotamians developed numerical systems and astronomical calculations. Indian mathematicians introduced the decimal system and zero, which greatly advanced mathematical studies. Greek scholars transformed mathematics into a logical and theoretical subject through proofs and geometrical reasoning. During the medieval period, Arab and Islamic scholars preserved and expanded mathematical knowledge. They translated earlier works, developed algebraic methods, and promoted the exchange of scientific ideas across cultures. Their contributions strongly influenced European mathematics. The Renaissance period brought major developments such as analytical geometry and calculus, leading to rapid scientific and technological progress. In the modern era, mathematics has become essential in engineering, medicine, economics, computer science, artificial intelligence, and space research. It supports scientific discoveries, technological innovation, and problem-solving in everyday life. The historical development of mathematics shows how civilizations and scholars contributed to its growth over centuries. Understanding this evolution helps us appreciate the importance of mathematics in shaping modern society and future advancements.

Lisa Downing

In Materialism from Hobbes to Locke, Stewart Duncan provides a lucid and judicious investigation of some central episodes in the history of materialism in seventeenth-century Britain. The book begins with an examination of Thomas Hobbes’s defense of materialism. Duncan then considers three significant critics of Hobbes’s materialism: Henry More, Ralph Cudworth, and Margaret Cavendish. Last, he turns to a four-chapter treatment of issues surrounding materialism in John Locke. A brief epilogue considers Locke’s influence on Toland and Collins.In chapters 1 and 2, Duncan displays his expertise concerning Hobbes on language and ontology. Chapter 1 focuses on Hobbes contra Descartes in the Objections and Replies to the Meditations. This is a helpful context for understanding Hobbes’s materialism, as well as providing critical background for any discussion of ontology in the early modern period. In addition to the obvious topic of the nature of finite minds, a critical topic of disagreement is what we can and cannot have ideas of, and why. Here Duncan highlights the perhaps surprising connection drawn between imagism about ideas and materialism (vs. dualism) in the period. Chapter 2 digs into Hobbes’ defenses of materialism in the Elements of Law, De Corpore, and the Leviathan, critically evaluating both Hobbes’s arguments for materialism and his prospects for providing a materialist account of mind.In chapters 3 and 4, Duncan considers several less canonical figures who articulate important positions in the debate over materialism. Cudworth, More, and Cavendish all criticize Hobbes and find his materialist ontology lacking, while, further, agreeing that Descartes’s dualist and mechanist view is inadequate to explain the physical world. Of course, their positive views are quite different: Ralph Cudworth and Henry More endorse a dualism of immaterial spirits and material bodies, and they posit one (More’s spirit of nature) or many (Cudworth’s plastic natures) nonrational spirit(s) to order the physical world—whereas Margaret Cavendish endorses a vitalist or panpsychist materialism, one that posits three degrees of matter (inanimate, sensitive, and rational), with all three degrees intermingled in all actual matter. Duncan does a fine job introducing these figures and zeroing in on their relation to Hobbes’s materialism, though the reader may sometimes wish for more detail. (For example, what is animadversion? How is More’s critique of Hobbes on gravity supposed to work, and how does it relate to standard criticisms of Descartes on gravity?) Nevertheless, what Duncan does intriguingly investigate may prompt readers to pursue these topics further: for example, the different groundings of Cudworth and More’s arguments for the inadequacy of mechanism, the tensions in Cavendish’s views about a place for immaterial substances in her system.All this is a terrific context to bring to bear on Locke, whose Essay is strongly influenced by Hobbes throughout, as well as being even more obviously influenced by the strongest influence on Hobbes, namely, Descartes. And, by the standards of his time, Locke comes perilously close to endorsing the plausibility of Hobbesian materialism, while nevertheless doing his very best to critically distinguish himself from Hobbes.To consider Locke’s views about dualism versus materialism, one needs to consider his understanding of mind, of matter, and of their relation. On all three topics, Locke criticizes and rejects or revises Descartes. Or, as Duncan puts it, the version of dualism that Locke thinks might be true is not Descartes’s dualism. In chapter 5, Duncan provides an insightful tour of Locke’s anti-Cartesian responses to two questions: Is the idea of God innate? Is the soul always thinking? In considering the first question, he illuminates further the rather subtle connections between denying innate ideas and affirming materialism in the period. In considering the second, he clarifies the way in which Locke’s thinking thing is definitely not Descartes’s.In chapter 6, Duncan begins by considering the rather tortured question of Locke’s views about substance qua substratum, and our ideas thereof. Here Duncan argues, surprisingly briefly and quite persuasively, that Locke is addressing a psychological question of how we think about substance, and he gives a “bare substratum” account of that. While there is surely more to say about the extent to which some of Locke’s claims have metaphysical implications, Duncan’s core contentions here seem correct and exceedingly helpful. Duncan proceeds to demonstrate how useful it is to consider Locke’s discussion of substance in 2.23 in the light of Henry More, and, further, Duncan shows that there are strong indications that Locke was influenced by More’s The Immortality of the Soul. One upshot is the observation that both More and Locke are interested in rejecting Hobbes’s view that the notion of spirit as incorporeal substance is incoherent and unusable. More remarkable, though, is the way Duncan uses More to counter prominent interpretive claims1 that Locke is not considering a bare substratum view, and moreover, that such a view was not one that Locke’s relevant near predecessors or contemporaries would have taken seriously. Here Duncan argues that More is relevant context and that More seems to clearly articulate a bare substratum notion of substance. This is a very effective argument, and one that should attract discussion. It is worth emphasizing here, perhaps even more than Duncan does, that Locke is giving us his account of the idea of substance as substratum, which does not commit him to positing any bare particulars, and is also compatible with the (arguably Lockean) thought that this is a problematic idea that we use for want of a better. Last, Duncan sets up the next chapter by examining Locke’s 2.23 account of how we construct an idea of God.In chapter 7, Duncan adroitly defends a consistent and integrated set of positions on highly debated territory via a succinct discussion of 4.10, Locke’s defense of our knowledge of God’s existence. As part of this account, Locke argues that God must be immaterial. Many commentators (myself included) have thought that Locke’s argumentation here is in interesting tension with his position that human minds might, for all we know, be material; for in 4.10, Locke seems to raise deep objections to supposing that mere matter could ever think. Duncan discusses the full proof but attends most closely to the sections that argue, first, that the eternal being and first cause must be a cogitative being and, second, that that cogitative being cannot be material. Duncan warns us that Locke should not, by his own standards, be relying on an assumption that inconceivability implies impossibility, and he suggests that what is doing the real argumentative work is a principle of perfection: the more perfect cannot be caused by the less perfect.2 The principle of perfection, which Duncan shows can be traced to Cudworth, straightforwardly explains 4.10.10: an incogitative being cannot produce a cogitative one. For the principle to justify 4.10.16, Duncan seems to imply, Locke would have to be eliding a possible distinction between efficient causation and a synchronic grounding relation. (It appears that a criticism of Locke is implicit here, which one might wish had been made explicitly.). But if the principle of perfection implies that matter can never produce thought, this seems to require a strong reading of the “superaddition” in Locke’s famous remark that God might “superadd” thought to matter. That is to say, Duncan holds that the tension must be resolved by interpreting Locke as holding that if matter thinks, God must be the cause of that thought, in keeping with the principle of perfection. Here Duncan makes an extremely helpful distinction between “voluntarist” and “naturalist” interpretations of superaddition, based on whether or not thought is supposed to flow from the essence of body. Duncan nicely points out that the naturalist has a problem accommodating the principle of perfection. He argues that this rules out mechanist naturalism and complicates the prospects for a not-merely-mechanist naturalism (such as my own; see Downing 2007).3 The chapter is a genuine tour de force, in that along with defending a particular account of how the arguments of 4.10 are supposed to work, Duncan argues effectively for a particular account of what kind of materialism about human beings Locke thought might (for all we know) be true.Chapter 8 takes up another question about Locke’s relation to materialism: Did he think dualism or materialism more likely, or should we see him as neutral, affirming only that we cannot rule out either position with certainty? Duncan argues cogently for the neutral interpretation, despite the fact that Locke claims at one point that dualism is more probable, and despite the fact that many interpreters from Locke’s time on have seen Locke as unofficially inclined toward materialism.4 Interestingly, Duncan concludes by emphasizing how much Locke does in the Essay by way of defending philosophical views about the mind that are consistent with materialism and indeed make manifest its possibility.From the point of view of Locke scholarship, the book as a whole does a terrific job of succinctly supplying an illuminating context for considering Locke’s connections to materialism and, via judicious distinctions and arguments, motivating a specific and original set of interpretive claims. More broadly, it is a book that carefully investigates some varieties of materialism and responses to it in seventeenth-century Britain, while also indicating the rich tangle of issues connected to materialism (physical, metaphysical, epistemological, and religious issues, among others) that propelled arguments for and against. It’s a book that anyone interested in Locke or early modern materialism will want to read.

Karine Chemla

No abstract is available for this record.

Jean-Luc Marion, Christina M. Gschwandtner

It is often thought that the Sixth Meditation serves to prove the distinction of soul from body and the existence of material things, but the matter is actually more complicated. The “material things” do not necessarily include the human body, but “my body” has a special and ambiguous status. My mind is so closely joined to my body that they form a unity. Kant misunderstands Descartes by accusing him of the scandalous attempt to prove the existence of his body, assuming that this is subsumed under the proof for the existence of material things. Yet such a proof suffers from several weaknesses. Although most of Descartes’ successors assume that this is what is at stake in the Sixth Meditation, Descartes actually separates external sensation from the ego’s experience. The existence of material things need not be demonstrated to refute skepticism, because the existence of body and mind and their union are assured. Descartes’ commentators and critics are asking the wrong question.

Harry G. Frankfurt

The most central and familiar lines of argument of the Meditations, Rene Descartes professes to perceive the following propositions clearly and distinctly. Descartes&s;s very sincerity in promulgating it is under a cloud. Considering just what is at stake in Descartes&s; concern with clear and distinct perception will help to identify more fully the source of fascination his argument evokes. Descartes is sometimes thought to have advocated a kind of lunatic apriorism, according to which a person might spin all of philosophy and all of science out of his own head without ever needing to turn to perceptual data. The precise value and import of consistency proofs, particularly in an unlimited context such as one in which Descartes operates, are difficult to specify exactly. It might perhaps be desirable, instead of construing his argument as attempt to prove the consistency of reason, to understand Descartes as attempting just to establish that there is no reasonable ground for doubting that reason is consistent.

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