This article is an exploration of cultural codes of humanitarianism and human rights in feature-length films. The aim of the article is to contribute to the study of mediated human rights, which has ...been very little developed in comparison with work on humanitarian media and culture. The article draws on close readings of films and interviews with filmmakers and curators of human rights film festivals. The analysis is organized into themes that are prominent in critiques of humanitarianism and existing work on human rights films: victims, temporality, scale, and bearing witness. While there can be no definitive list of the essential differences between humanitarianism and human rights, there are differences as well as commonalities in the cultural codes of human rights films and humanitarian media. It is important to be aware of how mediated human rights represent alternatives to the humanitarian imaginary dominant in the West.
Film is an increasingly important medium for communicating knowledge about human rights, and human rights film festivals are growing in number and scope. How do feature-length films produce knowledge ...about human rights? The analysis here is based on close readings of the narratives and cinematography of films associated with human rights, supplemented by fieldwork carried out at human rights film festivals, and readings of film reviews and published interviews with directors and curators. The article identifies three key cinematic strategies encoded in human rights films to produce knowledge as justified belief: authenticity, reflexivity and ambivalence.
How does culture make a difference to the realisation of human rights in Western states? It is only through cultural politics that human rights may become more than abstract moral ideals, protecting ...human beings from state violence and advancing protection from starvation and the social destruction of poverty. Using an innovative methodology, this book maps the emergent 'intermestic' human rights field within the US and UK in order to investigate detailed case studies of the cultural politics of human rights. Kate Nash researches how the authority to define human rights is being created within states as a result of international human rights commitments. Through comparative case studies, she explores how cultural politics is affecting state transformation today.
In the 1970s, a wave of young Western hippies descended on the beaches of Goa in India. Forty years later, some of them reconnected on the social network site Facebook and planned a reunion. This ...event, and the Goan hippy community then and now, are the subjects of a documentary called Goa Hippy Tribe, produced by Australian documentary maker Darius Devas. Funded by Screen Australia, SBS and Screen New South Wales, Goa Hippy Tribe is the first Australian documentary to be produced for the social network site Facebook. In this article, I consider how documentary in a social network context might be theorised. While the concept of the database narrative is most often invoked to explain user interactivity in online documentary, social networks such as Facebook invite different forms of interaction, and therefore raise distinct theoretical questions. In particular, Goa Hippy Tribe demonstrates the potential for the audience to engage creatively and communally with documentary.
Is Habermas's concept of the public sphere still relevant in an age of globalization, when the transnational flows of people and information have become increasingly intensive and when the ...nation-state can no longer be taken granted as the natural frame for social and political debate? This is the question posed with characteristic acuity by Nancy Fraser in her influential article 'Transnationalizing the Public Sphere?' Challenging careless uses of the term 'global public sphere', Fraser raises the debate about the nature and role of the public sphere in a global age to a new level. While drawing on the richness of Habermas's conception and remaining faithful to the spirit of critical theory, Fraser thoroughly reconstructs the concepts of inclusion, legitimacy and efficacy for our globalizing times. This book includes Fraser's original article as well as specially commissioned contributions that raise searching questions about the theoretical assumptions and empirical grounds of Fraser's argument. They are concerned with the fundamental premises of Habermas's development of the concept of the public sphere as a normative ideal in complex societies; the significance of the fact that the public sphere emerged in modern states that were also imperial; whether 'scaling up' to a global public sphere means giving up on local and national publics; the role of 'counterpublics' in developing alternative globalization; and what inclusion might possibly mean for a global public. Fraser responds to these questions in detail in an extended reply to her critics.
The notion of immersive witness underpins much of the exploration of virtual reality (VR) by journalists and humanitarian organisations. Immersive witness links the experience of VR with a moral ...attitude of responsibility for distant others. In accounts of media witness, the ability of the media to sustain an experience of presence has played an important, albeit often implicit, role linking the spectator spatially and temporally to distant suffering. However, the concept of media witness has to date assumed that the media represent, that news stories and documentaries present to their audiences images and sounds that communicate something of an event. VR, in contrast, seeks to simulate, providing the audience with something of an experience that is linked in various ways to the experiences of others. It is this simulative function that is seen as fundamental to VR's moral address. This paper explores the moral potential of VR suggesting that while there is much to recommend VR as a platform for humanitarian communication there is an inherent moral risk attached: the risk of improper distance. The United Nation's VR work serves as a case study for exploring VR's moral potential and the risk of improper distance.
This fully revised and updated introduction to political sociology incorporates the burgeoning literature on globalization and shows how contemporary politics is linked to cultural issues, social ...structure and democratizing social action. New material on global governance, human rights, global social movements, global media New discussion of democracy and democratization Clearly lays out what is at stake in deciding between alternatives of cosmopolitanism, imperialism and nationalism Includes additional discussion of the importance of studying culture to political sociology.
Neo-liberalisation of universities is advancing through a bureaucratic revolution. ‘Marketising bureaucracy’ advances neo-liberalisation through audit and rankings in the name of ensuring value for ...money and consumer choice. However, bureaucracy in universities is not total, just as neo-liberalisation is a project which advances on an uneven terrain of values. This article argues that to exercise academic autonomy, to continue to value education, we must learn to distinguish between ‘marketising’ and ‘socialising’ bureaucracy. Socialising bureaucracy encodes the ethos of impartiality in practices that support academic judgement – both against marketisation and against abuses of collegiality.
Fibrocytes are bone-marrow derived cells, expressing both haematopoietic and stromal cell markers, which contribute to tissue repair as well as pathological fibrosis. The differentiation of ...fibrocytes remains poorly characterised and this has limited understanding of their biology and function. In particular two methods are used to generate fibrocytes in vitro that differ fundamentally by the presence or absence of serum.
We show here that fibrocytes grown in the absence of serum (SF) differentiate more efficiently from peripheral blood mononuclear cells than CD14(+) monocytes, and respond to serum by losing their spindle-shaped fibrocyte morphology. Although fibrocytes generated in the presence of serum (SC) express the same range of markers, they differentiate more efficiently from CD14(+) monocytes and do not change their morphology in response to serum. Transcriptional analysis revealed that both types of fibrocyte are distinct from each other, fibroblasts and additional monocyte-derived progeny. The gene pathways that differ significantly between SF and SC fibrocytes include those involved in cell migration, immune responses and response to wounding.
These data show that SF and SC fibrocytes are distinct but related cell types, and suggest that they will play different roles during tissue repair and fibrosis where changes in serum proteins may occur.
This article explores the effects of the legalization of international human rights on citizens and non-citizens within states. Adopting a sociological approach to rights it becomes clear that, even ...in Europe, the cosmopolitanization of law is not necessarily resulting in greater equality and justice. In fact, 'actually existing' cosmopolitan citizenship is characterized by a proliferation of status groups that concretize new forms of inequality, including those of super-citizens, marginal citizens, quasi-citizens, sub-citizens and un-citizens. Far from inaugurating a new era of genuinely universal human rights, in some cases cosmopolitan law may even contribute to the creation of conditions in which fundamental human rights are violated.
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