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As the oldest surviving film by an African American director, Oscar Micheaux's Within Our Gates (1920) has been the object of considerable curiosity as both a historical artifact and a formative work of Black art. Of particular interest is the densely intertextual nature of the film's narrative, which takes substantial cues from many tropes common to race fiction of the early twentieth century. This is perhaps most clearly evidenced by the film's opening hour, which plays out as a nearly exact specimen of the racial uplift stories that dominated the era's Black literary scene, and by its final five minutes, which clearly replicate the marriage plots that defined contemporary women's literature. Crucially, these allusions—and, more importantly, the optimistic racial and socioeconomic philosophies they entail—are complicated by the presence of a late flashback sequence whose traumatic contents, rife with brutal racial and sexual violence, seem diametrically at odds with the idealism that defines the rest of the film. This paper investigates this seemingly problematic tonal disjunction by seeking to examine the flashback in its proper narratological context, exploring its aesthetic roots in mediums as diverse as newsprint, novels, and lynch photography, in order to better understand the ways in which the flashback's inclusion modifies—or even challenges—the film's dramatic thesis. The argument is finally made that the flashback's disruptive nature is in fact its greatest strength, generating a complex interrogation of the platitudinous narrative archetypes that define both the remainder of the film and the race literature of Micheaux's time.

Our central interest in this essay is to consider the role of the database as a technology of governance and the scramble of power as it relates to a capacity to model the world and exert influence upon it. We argue Software as a Service is more than a new vogue term of the IT industry, constituting a longer temporal horizon and more complex rearrangement of relations between data and labor to which the database and its entailments remain critical.

Purpose– The purpose of this paper is to examine the history of the standardisation of two largely overlapping electronic document formats between 2005 and 2008, and its implications for future IT standards development.Design/methodology/approach– The document format controversy is researched as an exemplary case study of the institutional rivalries, perspectives and strategic interests at play in standardisation processes. The study adopts a methodological lens of discursive institutionalism in order to explain how actors assume and perform a variety of roles during the controversy. It consults a range of documentary sources, including media commentary, corporate press releases and blog posts, financial reports and technical specifications.Findings– The study shows that: first, intentions to increase competition in the office software market through the standardisation of document formats led to a standards "arms race"; second, this further entrenched the position of a single market actor; and third, the resulting public debate nevertheless has reinvigorated the push for genuinely open standards.Social implications– Information technology standards are often touted as mechanisms for increasing the competitiveness of a market, thereby benefitting consumers and the greater public. In the presence of dominant institutional actors, efforts to standardise can, perversely, undermine this benefit. Increased public scrutiny through online media offers a potential remedy.Originality/value– This research presents a novel account of the controversy over the document format standardisation process, understood through the lens of discursive institutionalism. It also shows the increasing and potentially putative role of online media in the development of IT standards generally.

In this article we explore various constraints and potentials of academic publishing in the digital age. Advancement of digital platforms and their expansive reach amplify the underlying tensions of institutional and scholarly change. A key affordance of these platforms is that of speed: rapidly distributing the outputs of a precaritised profession and responding to pressures to publish as well as the profit motive of publishers. On the one hand, these systems make possible alternative modes of contributory content and peer-production for supporting the commons. On the other, they turn all too readily into privatising devices for contracting labour and profit in the corporate sector and, within the academy, for accentuating subtle power effects. Drawing upon platform studies and integrating insights from political philosophy and property law, our article seeks to problematise neat binaries of possession and dispossession associated with the sector. We examine in particular how co-existing and emergent socio-technical circuits-what we term digital binds-modulate the political economy of academic publishing on a number of scales. These entangled binds constrain but also indicate mechanisms for opening up new possibilities. We introduce three ethical executions of code towards this end: dissuading, detouring, and disrupting. Together, these mechanisms show how mutually beneficial boundaries can be drawn for designing otherwise: by blocking dominant systems and bargaining for fairer practices; exploring sanctioned and unsanctioned systems which offer more diverse publishing pathways; and, disrupting systemic processes and profits towards more inclusive and equitable conditions.

This article draws upon content analysis of Australian parliamentary transcripts to examine debates about asylum seekers who arrived by boat in three historical periods: 1977–1979, 1999–2001, and 2011–2013. We analyze term frequency and co-occurrence to identify patterns in specific usage of the phrase "boat people." We then identify how the term is variously deployed in Parliament and discuss the relationship between these uses and government policy and practice. We conclude that forms of "discursive bordering" have amplified representations of asylum seekers as security threats to be controlled within and outside Australia's sovereign territory. The scope of policy or legislative responses to boat arrivals is limited by a poverty of political language, thus corroborating recent conceptual arguments about the securitization and extra-territorialization of the contemporary border. ; Cet article s'appuie sur une analyse de contenu de transcriptions de débats parlementaires australiens sur les demandeurs d'asile arrivés par bateau lors de trois périodes historiques: 1977–1979, 1999–2001 et 2011–2013. Nous analysons la fréquence et cooccurrence des termes afin d'identifier des tendances dans l'utilisation spécifique de l'expression « boat people ». Nous identifions ensuite comment le terme est déployé dans les débats parlementaires à travers le temps et discutons du rapport entre ces utilisations et les politiques publiques et pratiques gouvernementales. Nous en arrivons à la conclusion que des formes de traçage discursif de frontières ont amplifié les représentations des demandeurs d'asile comme une menace sécuritaire devant être contrôlée à l'intérieur et à l'extérieur du territoire souverain de l'Australie. L'étendue des réponses politiques ou législatives à l'arrivée des bateaux est limitée par la pauvreté du langage politique, corroborant ainsi les arguments conceptuels récents autour de la sécurisation et de l'extra-territorialisation de la frontière contemporaine.

This paper explores current debates, data products and key implications of what has been called the urban data revolution, which has emerged to international prominence in recent years. We engage with critical appraisals of the new urban data revolution, and discuss what they can learn from both the successes and the failures of the earlier wave of data enthusiasm, the community indicators movement. Second, we analyse the different challenges, dangers and implications of the urban data revolution that both complicate and can sustain a citizen-centred vision of good city governance. We further consider the potential for deliberation and participation in the use of data to define and measure urban progress and success. In the face of a mounting volume and velocity of urban data, these lessons nonetheless pose democratic challenges to the urban data revolution today.

Kolorob is a participatory platform connecting informal settlement communities with services and informal jobs in Dhaka, Bangladesh. Alongside technological systems, expertise from community, non-government, private-sector, volunteer and academic fields has been integral to the platform's development. These socio-technical connections and networks, manifest through participatory design, agile software development and collaborative knowledge practices, have become productively entangled in the labour of platform production. We introduce a framework, participatory platform analysis, through which distinct layers – in the form of audiences, intermediaries, interfaces and databases – of this labour can be distinguished and examined. Our analysis draws upon focus group discussions, conducted in Mirpur in 2016 with emergent experts: youth facilitators, field officers and developers. We argue that the interests and tensions of co-designing participatory platforms relating to matters of public concern in South Asian mega-cities are reflective of the rising hybridity of expertise, generated through both institutional training and grass-roots practice, in contemporary urban life. The 'narrative of expertise in the future' compels us to recode knowledge production in the here and now: how we are making participatory platforms, the role of socio-technical expertise and the labour of communicating publics.

Cover; Title; Copyright; CONTENTS; List of figures and tables; List of contributors; Preface: Towards a new paradigm; PART I Setting the global-local scene; 1 Confronting a world in crisis; Cities are at the centre of these crises; The new urban paradoxes; Why do our responses remain short term?; Towards flourishing sustainable cities; Case study: Melbourne, Australia; 2 Defining the world around us; Sustainable and good development; Negative and positive sustainability; Cities and urban settlements; Globalization and localization; Community and sustainability; Case study: New Delhi, India.

This article draws upon content analysis of Australian parliamentary transcripts to examine debates about asylum seekers who arrived by boat in three historical periods: 1977-1979, 1999-2001, and 2011-2013. We analyze term frequency and co-occurrence to identify patterns in specific usage of the phrase "boat people." We then identify how the term is variously deployed in Parliament and discuss the relationship between these uses and government policy and practice. We conclude that forms of "discursive bordering" have amplified representations of asylum seekers as security threats to be controlled within and outside Australia's sovereign territory. The scope of policy or legislative responses to boat arrivals is limited by a poverty of political language, thus corroborating recent conceptual arguments about the securitization and extra-territorialization of the contemporary border.