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Do human rights offer the potential to challenge neoliberalism? I argue that rather than understanding human rights as ideology, as obscuring or legitimating neoliberalism, it is more productive to see both human rights and neoliberalism as hegemonic projects. In this article I explore convergences and divergences between dominant discourses and practices of human rights and neoliberalism around key ideas 'the state', 'the individual' and 'the nation', to clear a space for appreciation of the cultural politics of human rights: divergences in constructions of responsibility and hierarchies of value of concrete individuals offer openings for challenging ideas and practices of neoliberalism through campaigns for human rights. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The moral questions raised by synthetic media are considered in the context of posthumous documentary biography. Two possibilities are explored: firstly, that synthesis of the voice in biographical documentary deceives in a distinctive way and secondly, that it is possible for synthetic media to harm the subject of posthumous documentary. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article I compare the political rhetoric of Podemos and the Tories. Ideologically opposed, both parties use populist rhetoric and both thematise human rights as central to their populism. The article compares the parties’ uses of human rights along three dimensions: Who are human rights for? What are human rights? And how should they be achieved in practice? How Podemos and the Tories construct human rights challenges the ongoing project of European legal constitutionalism, the juridicalisation of rights which means that disputes over the interpretation of rights are referred to constitutional courts, where – ideally – they become the object of impartial and definitive decisions by judges who reason only through legal principles. Podemos from the Left is challenging European legal constitutionalism in the name of social justice, the Tories from the Right in the name of security: both parties construct European elites (and in Podemos’s case, national elites too) as a danger to democracy. Demonstrating what it means to take seriously the theoretical consequences of social constructivism - human rights are necessarily political – the article proposes a framework for the analysis of explicitly politicised human rights. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What do audiences actually do with interactive documentary and how do their actions contribute to the process of meaning making? This paper presents the results of a study of user responses to the web-documentary Bear 71. Arguing that interaction and interpretation are interconnected, a methodology for interactive documentary reception study is proposed. The research considers how users structure their interaction, producing a specific audio-visual sequence by deploying interactive/interpretive strategies. The activity of the user in structuring their interaction is considered, as is the role of the text/author in promoting specific patterns of engagement. Finally, the pleasures of interactive documentary are considered. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Documentary has been so closely associated with the mediums of film and television that the emergence of new forms of documentary, made for computerized mediums such as the Internet, mobile phones and tablets appear fundamentally transformative. The potential for audiences to interact with documentary in various ways is at the heart of what makes these new modes of documentary distinctive; audiences are potentially able to engage in a range of practices from navigating virtual environments, to choosing video content from a database, taking part in ‘chat’ sessions and creating content. Engaging theoretically with these emerging audience practices raises questions about authorship and the social impact of documentary. In this paper, interactivity and participation are considered from a social perspective. It is suggested that there is a need to distinguish between user actions that impact on the documentary text and the ability of users to engage with others through documentary. The concept of documentary voice is interrogated to reveal two distinct dimensions: voice-as-authorship and voice-as-social participation. Drawing on documentary and digital media scholarship, this paper explores the social functions of documentary interactivity and participation with reference to a range of web-documentary examples. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The telling of stories unites documentary practice and ethics. Moral judgements are often central to storytelling and for that reason stories are uniquely placed to help us engage with the ethics of documentary production. Documentary ethics has developed as a broadly situationist discourse, characterized by a desire to situate individual moral judgement within specific contexts. While on one level this complicates ethical discourse, it also suggests a key role for empirical study. A significant contribution that empirical research can make, and the one that guides the research presented here, is to contribute to a full understanding of the complexity of the contexts of documentary production and reception from a variety of different perspectives. While there is a growing body of research from the perspective of the documentary maker, relatively little is known about the participant's experience of documentary production or the interpersonal relationships on which documentary depends. Two case studies demonstrate how participant narratives can inform debates around consent power and trust. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

While documentary ethics has been largely normative to date, there is growing interest in alternative forms of ethical thinking. The work of Emmanuel Levinas in particular is providing a way of thinking through both the ethics of documentary viewing and production. This article begins by drawing attention to the link between documentary ethics and aesthetics and then uses Levinas's work to consider the ethical relations established in observational documentary production. Of the different documentary modes, the observational has been the source of particular ethical difficulties, yet viewed from a Levinisian perspective it is possible to identify ways in which observation preserves the alterity of the documentary subject. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Power represents a problem for documentary, raising questions about the politics and ethics of representation. In this article the notion of power in documentary is explored. The influence of domination as a model for power relations within documentary is challenged and a Foucauldian notion of power relationships suggested as an alternative way of conceptualising the documentary-maker participant relation- ship. Drawing on empirical research with documentary maker Tom Zubrycki and participant Lyn Rule, this article brings to light the complexities of power and the importance of trust in the context of documentary. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The concept of a human rights culture has been crucial to the incorporation of the European Convention of Human Rights into UK law. In this paper media and activist representations of human rights for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender human rights are considered as indicative of an emerging human rights culture, especially around the Civil Partnerships Act 2004. A typology of representations of rights is developed and discussed. It is concluded that insofar as there is an emerging human rights culture, it is one that is concerned above all with creating and maintaining civic relationships rather than with the assertion of individual liberty, and as inviting political compromise rather than a principled stance on universal human rights. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Liberal citizenship has been seen as posing a dilemma for feminists. Either women are taken to be equal to men, in which case their specific capacities as women are unrecognised and their citizenship is substantively unequal; or else women are taken to be different, with the consequent risk that the rights citizenship allows and the obligations it imposes will again be substantively unequal. On this view, women cannot simply be included in liberal citizenship because the meaning of the liberal public sphere is constructed in opposition to the private sphere of natural feminine care and women's subordination to male heads of household. Using Derridean deconstruction to examine three significant moments in liberalism, this paper argues that the term 'women' is more productively seen as 'undecidable' in this tradition, working both to construct the binary opposition between public and private on which it depends but also to disrupt it. While the feminist critique of liberalism is important to analysing the logic by which women have been positioned outside full citizenship rights, in practice feminists have made some gains by reconfiguring the terms of liberalism around this undecidability. The aim of the paper is to carry out something like a genealogy of contemporary liberalism in order to discern its multiple origins and contingent development; we will then be in a better position to understand the practical possibilities for women's citizenship in Britain today. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Examines feminist criticism of liberalism as masculinist, and the implications for feminism as a political project. View that feminist version of liberalism is ahistorical; Information on the depiction of women in John Locke's `Two Treatises of Government'; Political power as legitimate; Use of women as a Derridean undecidable.