When my book Reframing Women: A history of New Zealand cinema (Harper Collins) was published in 2000 New Zealand women's film was flourishing. There had been an explosion of filmmaking following the upsurge of twentieth century feminism in the 1970s beginning with the international women's year film Some of My Best Friends are Women (1975) and the subsequent production of nine feminist documentary films. The energy generated by these films and the international feminist history projects that uncovered the formerly invisible contribution of women across every sphere of creative was contagious. There was a feeling of optimism that anything was possible. Women were using the camera to focus the lens on themselves and their issues. Between 1980 and 1990 dramas and features dealing with gender issues increased dramatically while the formerly marginalised were gaining access to the technology to explore sexuality and identity politics. There were powerful films about identity by Maori, Pacific, Asian, Yugoslavian, Greek … and increasing experimentation with film form.

Since 2000 women have lost ground and film production and experimentation has declined, knocked back by the backlash against feminism, by recession and fiscal cutbacks caused by the global financial meltdown of 2008–9 and a change in political parties to a conservative, misogynist, right wing, capitalist government. I propose to investigate the situation and the changes in the film climate with reference to the global situation through a series of interviews with key creatives: leading feminist film director Gaylene Preston, academic documentary film director Annie Goldson, feature film directors Christine Jeffs (Rain and Sylvia about Sylvia Plath) and Fiona Samuel (Bliss about the life of Katherine Mansfield), the Greek feminist academic film director Athina Tsoulis, Maori screenwriter Riwia Brown (Once Were Warriors), Samoan director Justine Simei-Barton, Indian academic Schuchi Kotari and the cinematographer Mairi Gunn, along with a younger feminist director Brita McVeigh.

The paper will compare my historical findings in reframing women with the current situation in a blend of history, current opinion and analysis and reflection.

This paper outlines Wŏnhyo's theory of the One Mind as it is presented in his over 20 extant works. According to Wŏnhyo, the One Mind manifests itself in two aspects: “true-thusness” and “arising-and-ceasing.” In the first aspect, the One Mind is intrinsically pure and unchanging, able to see all things equally and without discrimination. However, in the second aspect the One Mind is subject to causality and manifests itself in various delusions, thereby appearing impure and ephemeral. Thus, the One Mind is the source of both enlightenment and delusion. We analyze the paradoxical relationship between these two aspects and how they open the path to enlightenment. Here Wŏnhyo distinguishes between original enlightenment, non-enlightenment and actualizing enlightenment. In the final section, we show what kind of subjective personhood is implied in Wŏnhyo's understanding of the One Mind and the various kinds of enlightenment.

This essay examines reflexive strategies in three contemporary Hindi-language feature films directed by women, Om Shanti Om (2007), Luck By Chance (2008), and Dhobi Ghat/Mumbai Diaries (2010). These Mumbai-set films, directed and written by Farah Khan, Zoya Akhtar, and Kiran Rao, respectively, offer insider industry perspectives and a variety of outlooks on Bollywood and Indian society more generally. I introduce the concepts of “selective reflection” to critically examine self-conscious representations of the excessively star-driven world of Bollywood filmmaking in an age of globalization (and the dominant figure of the male hero), directing styles and strategies of image-making, and the blurred boundaries between reality and artifice. This article presents a close analysis of narrative tropes (especially “breaking in” to Bollywood), filmi references, casting, spectator dynamics, and gendered agency in films that represent a taxonomic range from commercial blockbuster to art cinema.

This article starts from the observation that research on conspiracy theories is currently thriving, but that it is also fragmented. In particular there is an increasing divide between disciplines with culturalist and qualitative approaches, such as history, cultural studies and ethnology, and disciplines with quantitative and empirical approaches, such as psychology and political science. The article argues that this ‘great divide’ has to be bridged for research to arrive at a genuine understanding of conspiracy theories. As a first step in such a bridge-building process, the article engages, from the vantage point of (American) cultural studies, with research done on the other side of the divide, namely in psychology and political science. It summarizes the work done in these fields and evaluates it critically, concentrating on methodology; the assumptions about the dysfunctionality of conspiracy beliefs; the circularity of some arguments; the focus on individual rather than social and collective aspects; the lack of engagement with the definition of the phenomenon; and the neglect of cultural and historical difference. The article ends with recommendations for future collaborative research projects.

What we regard as real are the objects of the phenomenal world which we perceive. We regard those that we see objectively, as in the third person perspective, as real. What then is the mind that perceives the world? Is it possible for us to realize the very mind that perceives the world?

This article discusses the existence of the world perceived by the mind in order to deal with the existence of the mind which perceives the world and the knowability of the mind. Phenomenal world is a perceptual world which is a fictitious world constructed by our conceptual language system. And the base of the fictitious phenomenal world, the object itself, is emptiness. The emptiness is the emptiness of the mind that perceives and constructs the world. Thus, the awareness of the emptiness of the world is the self-awareness of the mind.

Since the emptiness of my mind is the same emptiness of all other beings, the mind is the capacity to sympathize with the whole world, the universal mind, One-mind. Every man is aware of oneself as One-mind. “Gong-juk-young-ji” or the “original enlightenment” of Buddhism is the self-awareness of the mind as emptiness.

In her 2011 documentary, La Langue de Zahra/Zahra's Mother Tongue, Algerian/French filmmaker Fatima Sissani “gives voice” to her Kabyle mother, Zahra, who lived in France as an immigrant woman for years after Algerian independence without speaking French. Often considered uneducated and ignorant, these women act as archives of oral tradition, history, and poetry in a language their children often do not speak. In this paper, I will look at how this performative documentary film creates “spaces in-between” cultures through its uses of performance, orality, and cinematic space. A number of recent Maghrebi and sub-Saharan African documentaries have emerged that can be described as performative documentaries in which historical evocation and emotive connection to the subject matter is as important to the filmmaker as factual referencing. The filmmaker plays a self-reflexive role in the text, which often shapes the content.

It is important to note that the film is not about being forced to choose between two geographical locations, and it does not seek to hybridize two cultures, but rather is concerned with other sorts of questions such as the nature of Berber culture and language, how it impacts not only the representation of Algeria's post-Independence history (the troubled context of the 1990s, the history of Algerian migration to France), but also the practice and aesthetics of this contemporary documentary filmmaker. The film suggests possible new ways of looking at questions of minority language (Kabyle), culture, and identity that could potentially greatly contribute to the understanding of contemporary independent documentary film practices, discourses, and aesthetics.

Through an empirical approach of several conspiracy theories (Knight Templars, Jesuits, Illuminati, Free-masons or Jewish conspiracy), I have noticed they develop six main characteristics. First, the conspiratorial myth points out scapegoats in a non-aleatory way. They usually belong to ethnical or religious minorities. Secondly, those scapegoats try to acquire an overwhelming power in all fields. Thirdly, to achieve this goal, they corrupt the whole society, especially on mores and sexuality. Fourthly, to set up their domination the scapegoats use the art of simulation and dissimulation. They yield a cult of secrecy. Fifthly, the scapegoats are consistently portrayed through symbolic morphological types, frequently as animals. Finally, conspiratorial myths undergo a process of hybridization and creolization. They go through transformations, alterations and medleys. Every conspiracy theories mix up into one another.

This paper elaborates on two classical theories of “Open Society,” i.e. Henri Bergson's and Karl Popper's. It outlines their differences, qualities, and limits. It provides some suggestions about the new enemies of open society in a globalized world, that these new enemies are identified in fanaticism which appears as religious fundamentalism, closed nationalism and political populism. Open society is characterized by the critical use of reason, freedom and tolerance.

This paper examines how, building on earlier filmic representations such as Ousmane Sembene's La Noire de… and Abderrahmane Sissako's Bamako, Khady Sylla's Le Monologue de la muette traces a continuum of women's exploitation, from slavery to colonization to globalization.

Whereas the Humean accounts of causality in terms of contiguity, temporal priority, constant conjunction, and contingency face difficulties of one sort, the dispositional explanations of causality in terms of reciprocity, simultaneity, ubiquity, and holism seem to meet difficulties of another sort. But the difficulties which dispositionalism faces may be dissipated if one can appeal consistently to the logic of naturalism, rather than to the grammar of an implicit dualism, for example, as it is illustrated when G. Molnar tried to advance the analogy between the mental intentionality and the physical intentionality.

The notion of integration is taken to allow a conceptual space for naturalism of one kind. It may be expressed in the thesis that there is integrationality in any entity like dispositions, such that the integrationality is a power to realize the embedded objective of it in the context where it interacts with all others. The thesis would help to see how dispositions can be intentional, how the notion of information may be read integrationally from any object, and how the notion of fitting plays a role in the metaphysics of integrationality.

The terrorist attack against the satirical weekly newspaper Charlie Hebdo and the subsequent hostage-taking in the kosher supermarket in Paris on the 7th and 9th January 2015 profoundly shocked the French public. The term ‘conspiracy theory’ very rapidly came to be used in the media to account for accusations of a ‘false flag operation’ and for the circulation of doubts concerning certain details relating to these events. The use of the term ‘conspiracy theory’ in these contexts seemed to show up an extremely broad application of it, an application, which, in some cases, was accompanied by a rather impassioned approach to the events and one not always free from ideological presuppositions which aligned phenomena which, even though linkages between them could be shown, should more properly be distinguished one from another.

This article proposes to examine the media and institutional applications of this term during the episode of the ‘anti-conspiracy theory panic’, which followed upon the Paris incidents. This study will permit the very notion of ‘conspiracy theory’ to be brought into question, both on the level of definition and from a heuristic perspective.

The ubiquity of gender-bending and sexually ambiguous imagery in the media seems to herald a post-gay era. But are LGBT/Q identities and representation politics really a thing of the past? Inspection of the circulation patterns of LGBT/Q images on a global scale suggests a more nuanced story. Taking the lead from distribution and film festival studies, in this essay I sketch out how LGBT/Q images travel around the world. The festival network was always an alternative channel to mainstream work. Therefore, I pay particular attention to the international film festival circuit with its art film bias, on one hand, and activist festivals, such as LGBT/Q film festivals and their LGBT/Q-themed films, on the other. Utilizing Lisa Henderson's notion of “queer relay” I argue that the relationship between the queer film ecosystem and the larger art film circuit is highly ambivalent. The deployed art film strategies reveal that we have not yet arrived at actual acceptance and universality in a post-gay, post-identitarian world. However, the positions on the side of distinction and cultural capital do not just lean towards exploitation of queer subcultural productions by neoliberal forces but offer also a relay position that accounts for queer agency in the wider cultural arena.

This paper considers a recent claim that Confucianism and feminism are compatible since both are care ethics. I examine some aspects of contemporary care ethics and compare them with Confucian ethics from a feminist viewpoint. I argue that for Confucianism to be made compatible with feminism, the former must be transformed to the extent that it loses its main features.

Care ethics can be feminist ethics only when women have been made moral subjects because of their perceived ability to care for others. Caring in a Confucian culture is not as much a feminine value as a male value. I do not find Confucian ethics as care ethics to be particularly liberating for women. For Confucianism to be viable in a contemporary democratic world, it must be supplemented by feminist ethics that take justice and equality as the primary values.

The term “self” refers to the subject which persists through the changing experiences of a person. We think of it at least as the center of personal identity, or the organizing function within the individual. It may be desirable to examine cultural identity if there is something like “the communal self.” Kant believed that there is a “transcendental self” which transcends our experiences. Following him, we may analogously claim that there is a communal self, which transcends the history and the culture of the community, maintaining their identity throughout time by means of providing the unity principle. Korea is a typical example of a nation whose process of transculturation is most dynamically ongoing. Such a nation should apply this concept to her current cultural situations in order to be successful in the age of globalization.