Clicking on the real: telling stories and engaging audiences through interactive documentaries.

An interesting thing about contemporary media is just how much of it is factual. From journalism to social media, YouTube to reality TV we are surrounded by media that claims to be true. Often this content has a definite agenda; it wants to persuade us, make us click, join in and pass it on. How can we understand our changing relationship to factual media? And why is documentary scholarship well placed to help us do so? Kate Nash explores new interactive dimensions to documentary that may encourage wider engagement

Knowing through human rights films

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

Cosmopolitan political community : why does it feel so right?

Identification with a national community is typically associated with “hot” emotions, and opposed to “cool” cosmopolitanism as an ideal. This paper will consider neo-Kantian understandings of cosmopolitan citizenship to be realised through human rights in which “hot” national feeling and “cool” cosmopolitanism are implicitly opposed in this way. I will argue that the dichotomy makes it difficult to see how “warm” cosmopolitanism is actually developing in political communities organised by Western states, in less rationalist ways than is suggested by neo-Kantians and in association with, rather than in opposition to, national feeling. Human rights are developing in part through humanitarian intervention that is of questionable legitimacy in democratic terms. It is less likely to be judged “right” (or wrong) according to reasoned normative principles with which cosmopolitanism is associated in neo-Kantianism, and more likely to be consented to on the basis of sentimental “popular cosmopolitanism” that feels right

A "Politics of Ideas" and Women's Citizenship

The question this paper will address is that of the role of ideas in the development of the social and political institutions of women's citizenship, historically and in the future. It considers the distinction made by Anne Phillips in The Politics of Presence between a conventional "politics of ideas", in which political representation is taken to involve the representation of party policies and voter preferences and beliefs, and a "politics of presence" in which democratic procedures are held to require the physical presence of members of social groups. For Phillips, the latter is preferable because while political equality entails both the inclusion of voices previously excluded from the political process, it also involves an informed judgement of the probable outcome of that process, and she believes that the presence of women could contribute positively to the development of social rights for women as women. In this paper I will take issue with Phillips' view by way of a discussion of feminist theories of the relation between liberal political ideology and women's citizenship. On the basis of this discussion I will suggest that the theory of hegemony developed by Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe is the best way of understanding this relation and that the rather different politics of ideas it proposes is at least as important to feminist strategies to end the secondary status of women's citizenship as Phillips' "politics of presence".The question this paper will address is that of the role of ideas in the development of the social and political institutions of women's citizenship, historically and in the future. It considers the distinction made by Anne Phillips in The Politics of Presence between a conventional "politics of ideas", in which political representation is taken to involve the representation of party policies and voter preferences and beliefs, and a "politics of presence" in which democratic procedures are held to require the physical presence of members of social groups. For Phillips, the latter is preferable because while political equality entails both the inclusion of voices previously excluded from the political process, it also involves an informed judgement of the probable outcome of that process, and she believes that the presence of women could contribute positively to the development of social rights for women as women. In this paper I will take issue with Phillips' view by way of a discussion of feminist theories of the relation between liberal political ideology and women's citizenship. On the basis of this discussion I will suggest that the theory of hegemony developed by Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe is the best way of understanding this relation and that the rather different politics of ideas it proposes is at least as important to feminist strategies to end the secondary status of women's citizenship as Phillips' "politics of presence"

Beyond Suffering, Towards Justice? Human Rights Films and the Critique of Humanitarian Culture

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

Human rights for women: an argument for 'deconstructive equality'

The status of universalism has been much debated by feminists at the end of the twentieth century. Poststructuralist feminism is readily positioned in these debates as antagonistic to normative universalism. It is criticized as such: how is injustice to be judged and condemned if contestation and the openness of ungrounded universalism are the only ideals? This paper is a "sub-philosophical" enquiry into the normative commitments to equality implicit in poststructuralist feminism and its relationship to "actually existing" human rights for women as they have been re-worked by the international feminist movement. It argues that poststructuralist feminism can be used to provide support for one possible understanding of equality encoded in the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women. It addresses feminist concerns over universal rights as androcentric and ethnocentric, arguing that extending human rights to women is compatible with poststructuralist commitments to anti-essentialism and anti-foundationalism and required by the model of "deconstructive equality" implicitly shared by CEDAW and poststructuralist feminism

The Cultural Politics of Human Rights: Comparing the US and UK

The cultural politics of human rights disrupts taken-for-granted norms of national political life. Human rights activists imagine practical deconstruction of the distinction between citizens and noncitizens through which national states have been constituted. They envisage a world order of cosmopolitan states in which the rights of all would be fully respected. How likely is it that such a form of society might be realised through their activities? Is collective responsibility for human rights currently being shaped in cultural politics? If so, how, and with what consequences? If not, how is it that the vision of human rights activists is failing to take effect given the explosion of discourse on human rights in recent years

Global citizenship as showbusiness : the cultural politics of Make Poverty History

Cultural politics and global citizenship ‘Make Poverty History’ was an extraordinary campaign: historically unprecedented, indeed impossible without the new structures of the emerging ‘cosmopolitanising state’, global in reach and yet national in focus. Studying the aims, means and achievements of Make Poverty History has much to teach us about the practical possibilities for a more cosmopolitan orientation to citizenship within and beyond national borders. As a campaign which took place not just through but in the media, investigating Make Poverty History is also important for media studies, enabling understanding of the importance of national media and popular culture to emergent possibilities of global citizenship. Make Poverty History is the name given to the UK branch of a global alliance of NGOs co-ordinated by the Global Call to Action against Poverty to put pressure on the leaders of the richest countries to achieve the concrete, measurable Millennium Development Goals they’d already signed up to achieving. The Global Call to Action against Poverty had different names in different countries: ONE in US, ‘Plus d’Excuses!’ in France, Maak Het Waar in the Netherlands and so on. Although, as we shall see, Make Poverty History was very carefully managed as a media campaign, it was also genuinely grassroots insofar as it was led by a coalition of over 500 NGOs which receive their funding from donations and membership. They ranged from the large, international NGOs like Oxfam and Save the Children to smaller, often more radical organisations, like World Development Movement and Womankind. (Extract, 1st paragraph

Remembering remotely:would video-mediation impair witnesses' memory reports?

Witnesses often experience lengthy delays prior to being interviewed, during which their memories inevitably decay. Video-communication technology - favored by intergovernmental organizations for playing larger roles in judicial processes - might circumvent some of the resourcing problems that can exacerbate such delays. However, whereas video-mediation might facilitate expeditious interviewing, it might also harm rapport-building, make witnesses uncomfortable, and thereby undermine the quality and detail of their reports. Participants viewed a crime film and were interviewed either one day later via video-link, one day later face-to-face, or 1-2 weeks later face-to-face. Video-mediation neither influenced the detail or the accuracy of participants' reports, nor their ratings of the quality of the interviews. However, participants who underwent video-mediated interviews after a short delay gave more accurate, detailed reports than participants who waited longer to be interviewed face-to-face. This study provides initial empirical evidence that video-mediated communication (VMC) could facilitate the expeditious conduct of high-quality investigative interviews