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Learning from Land Cinema: political pedagogy, plots and plantations
Get PDFThis article explores community filmmaking in Negros, a sugar plantation island in the Philippines, as a material and discursive intervention in pedagogical practices of eco-cinema and environmental media studies. Its focus is the contemporary Filipinx and Taiwanese American artists Enzo Camacho and Ami Lien, whose filmmaking uses phytography, a process that harnesses chemicals within plants as a photographic developer. The article considers the phytogram as an index of contested land, and the coproduction of film as a pedagogy of resistance against the plantation’s political and ecological hold.
Drawing on the radical pedagogy of Paulo Freire, and histories of plantation resistance developed by Sylvia Wynter, the artists practice phytography and gardening as forms of pedagogy and protest. Local grandmothers, expert in botanical medicine, source plants for phytochemical adhesions. Working with them, the artists facilitate teach-ins, workshops, and discursive screenings to resist state and hacienda violence, and techno-scientific practices of monoculture. This approach, I argue, recalls Third Cinema’s anti-colonial politics and extends them in ecological directions emblematic of a genre I am calling ‘land cinema’. Rejecting the tabula rasa blankness of new film stock and associations with terra nullius forms of colonial thinking, phytography resembles composting, the ground of the image reimagined as an earthy site of multispecies connection. Phytography also intervenes in cinema’s imbrication with extractive materials and processes, speaking to a recent environmental turn in film and photography studies. Made collectively on the edges of Negros’ sugar plantations, Camacho and Lien’s phytograms cultivate material pedagogies for climate justice
Conflicts, compromises, and the economy
No full textUnderstanding today’s conflicts and compromises requires addressing the entanglement between material processes and the viewpoints of a variety of collective actors: how they understand themselves and the economy within which they act, what objectives they perceive it affords to them, and what constraints it imposes. The structural approach to economic analysis, which builds on the traditions started by Physiocracy and Classical Political Economy, offers a vantage point to understand material processes. The paper proposes three directions to generalise it, thus making it more suitable to address the entanglement between material processes and the emergence and viewpoints of collective actors
When the patriarchy ‘fights back’! Assessing the role of credit microfinance in the empowerment of women in Malawi
No full textThis paper examines the impact of credit access on women’s empowerment, focusing on microfinance as a tool for gender and economic empowerment in rural development. It draws on the lived experiences of 20 women in rural Malawi, exploring how credit access influences their status and roles in household and community decision-making. In a predominantly patriarchal society, where men are widely regarded as heads of households and primary decision-makers, this qualitative study investigates how women conceptualise their own empowerment and navigate these power dynamics through credit access. Grounded in the capability and intersectionality lenses, it highlights the challenges faced by rural women, marginalised due to their gender, social inequality and rurality, within patriarchal systems. The study examines whether microfinance genuinely leads to women’s empowerment or instead simply facilitates a negotiation of status and power in a context where the patriarchy ‘fights back’ empowerment interventions
Natural Language Processing as Digital Veda (डिजिटल वेद): A Humanistic Framework for Language, Ethics, and AI
No full textThis article conceptualizes Natural Language Processing (NLP) as the Digital Veda (डिजिटल वेद), framing it as a culturally rooted communicative infrastructure inspired by the Vedic tradition of structured knowledge preservation and ethical discourse. Drawing on India’s linguistic and philosophical heritage, it positions NLP not as a neutral tool, but as an evolving ecosystem shaped by human values, language ideologies, and socio-cultural narratives. By mapping the four Vedas to key NLP domains, Rigveda (language modelling), Yajurveda (syntax and pipelines), Samaveda (phonetics and speech), and Atharvaveda (applied AI), the study illustrates how contemporary language technologies mirror ancient systems of meaning-making. It offers a critical, decolonial lens on mainstream NLP, highlighting digital language hierarchies, the marginalization of low-resource Indian languages, and biases embedded in large language model (LLM) training data. The article further proposes a Vedic-inspired ethical AI framework, grounded in the principles of Dharma (righteous design), Ahimsa (non-harm), and Moksha (AI for truth and well-being). This interdisciplinary perspective contributes to a more inclusive, context-aware vision for language technologies, with practical applications in multilingual NLP, bias mitigation, and ethically aligned AI governance. It is particularly relevant for AI ethicists, digital humanists, NLP researchers, and policymakers committed to culturally informed, responsible innovation
Food insecurity: Imagination, utopias and feminist legal methods
Get PDFCan we imagine a world without hunger? This question underpins the work of this article. When the world seems plagued with conflict after conflict, from state and interpersonal violence, to environmental degradation, is there a way to imagine a reality beyond this never-ending list of harms? Food insecurity continues to increase around the world. The lack of access to food is felt by those in and out of conflict. Despite the fact that the complexity of the growth, production, distribution, and cost of food affects everyone, it is not felt the same by everyone. Food is also personal, it relates to cultural, religious, and individual circumstances, and the relationship to food is influenced by our gender, race, socioeconomic status, and dis/ability, amongst others. When problems occur that restrict access to food, international law is often seen as a mechanism for addressing these issues. However, this has not always been successful. In this article, I argue that we must take time to imagine international law differently and dream of utopias. I utilise feminist and queer approaches to rethink international law via a discussion of food insecurity. I see food as the lynchpin for both understanding international law’s limitations and reaffirming the importance of prioritising feminist methods
Ploughing the Field: YA Literature and Justice in the Anthropocene
Get PDFIn lieu of an abstract: In an age of climate collapse, systemic inequality, war, and mass displacement, the narratives through which we make sense of the world matter more than ever. As Hubert Zapf argues, “literature is a form of cultural knowledge which stages, in the medium of language and discourse itself, complex dynamical processes of life on the boundary of the culture-nature interaction” (865). YA fiction, in particular, can serve as a charged site where dominant ideologies are both reinforced and challenged, offering young people ways of recognising their social realities while imagining alternative futures. Through the experiences of protagonists navigating worlds that are metaphorically and literally burning, YA illuminates how narrative itself can become a tool for negotiating power and agency under conditions of ecological precarit
The entangled research team: research inquiry through collective and diffractive engagement with data
No full textExplores the messiness and creativeness associated with self and mutual reflexivity during the time a research team came together
Learning from tobacco control to tackle gambling industry harms
Get PDFFailing to learn from the overwhelming evidence that the conduct of the gambling industry and other health harming industries consistently mirrors that of the tobacco industry is causing large scale avoidable harm
Neural Image Abstraction Using Long Smoothing B-Splines
Get PDFWe integrate smoothing B-splines into a standard differentiable vector graphics (DiffVG) pipeline through linear mapping, and show how this can be used to generate smooth and arbitrarily long paths within image-based deep learning systems. We take advantage of derivative-based smoothing costs for parametric control of fidelity vs. simplicity tradeoffs, while also enabling stylization control in geometric and image spaces. The proposed pipeline is compatible with recent vector graphics generation and vectorization methods. We demonstrate the versatility of our approach with four applications aimed at the generation of stylized vector graphics: stylized space-filling path generation, stroke-based image abstraction, closed-area image abstraction, and stylized text generation