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Sylff Research Abroad 2016 Open!

April 15, 2016

Call for Applications for FY2016

Call for Applications for FY2016

The Tokyo Foundation is pleased to announce Sylff Research Abroad (SRA) ’s call for applications for fiscal 2016 (April 1, 2016, to March 31, 2017). The deadline for the first selection round is June 28 (for those planning research abroad after July 28) and for the second selection is January 9, 2017 (for those planning research abroad after February 6).

Click here for details of the announcement.

SRA supports current or past Sylff fellowship recipients to conduct academic research related to their doctoral dissertation in a foreign country. It provides the grant of up to US$5,000 each to successful applicants. We hope you will be able to become one of them.

We look forward to receiving your applications!

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Scheduled Maintenance (10-11 pm, April 15)

April 14, 2016

Access to Sylff website and Tokyo Foundation website (both English and Japanese) will be temporarily unavailable from 10 pm to 11 pm on Friday, April 15 (Japan Standard Time), while our web server is being upgraded to enhance access speed. We apologize for the inconvenience.

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Theories of Modernism in Cinema

March 31, 2016
By 19686

Miłosz Stelmach, a 2014 Sylff fellow at Jagiellonian University in Poland, conducted research at Columbia University in New York on cinematic modernism. In this article, he provides insight into two contradictory definitions of “modernism” in cinema.

* * *

Modernism in painting - Picasso's Guernica

Modernism in painting - Picasso's Guernica.

As a medium conceived at the very end of the nineteenth century, cinema is contemporary with such technological inventions as X-rays, radio, and the diesel engine, and with scientific breakthroughs like the discovery of electrons and radioactivity. It is the child of an era when modern science and modern society were being formed. Cinema is not only a modern technological invention; it is also a modern social practice. As a radically democratic medium, it served as one of the foundations of the emerging mass society and popular culture. Moviegoing was to become one of the most popular leisure activities for millions of people in the decades to come as the movie industry became one of the vital economic and social forces that shaped the modern world.

But if all that makes cinema an inherently modern phenomenon and one of the staples of modernity, what is it relation to the “art of the modern”—that is, to modernism itself? This question bothered film historians and theorists for years. The answer is necessarily related to what we understand by “modernism” in general. Only once we understand how the word is defined in terms of art history or literature can we start thinking of appropriating it to cinema.

Columbia University

Columbia University

To explore this matter more thoroughly I used an SRA grant to visit Columbia University in New York. There I was able not only to access all the basic written and visual materials in the field but also to meet distinguished scholars whose academic work has investigated various problems related to modernism. My encounters with their expertise in different fields of the humanities (comparative literature, art history, culture studies, and film studies) and their various nuanced points of view enabled me to trace how our understanding of modernism has developed.

James Joyce, one of the most important figures of literary modernism.

James Joyce, one of the most important figures of literary modernism.

The traditional and still dominant account of modernism, and the one with which I was primarily familiar before my visit to New York, developed in English-language scholarship in the 1950s and 1960s. It was during this period that a comprehensive theory of the subject was developed by scholars and critics like Clement Greenberg, Harold Rosenberg, and Raymond Williams, who defined modernism as an artistic movement that had developed in different fields of cultural production in the late nineteenth century and through the first half of the twentieth. Modernism marks a break with the conventions of nineteenth-century realism in favor of extensive experimentation with medium—subjectivity, fragmentation, and nonlinearity. As manifested in the surrealist paintings of Salvador Dalí, the 12-tone musical compositions of Arnold Schoenberg, and the stream-of-consciousness literature of James Joyce, modernism, as understood by Greenberg and others, employs a high level of self-consciousness and reflexivity, resulting in extensive efforts to explore the limits of a given medium and employ forms specific to it.

This definition of modernism, underlining formal innovation, self-referentiality, and medium specificity, was easily (and readily) transferred to the field of film studies. This wasn not difficult, especially given the self-evident link between developments in cinema and the other visual arts in the 1920s. Avant-garde artists like Man Ray, Marcel Duchamp, Hans Richter, and Salvador Dalí made movies themselves, and a number of cinematic movements were clearly inspired by the visual arts of the time, as reflected in names like German Expressionism and French Impressionism. Surrealism and constructivism also had a clear influence on the development of the esthetics of cinema.This understanding of modernism as a high-art tradition involving avant-garde experimentation with film language carried over to postwar international art cinema.

Ingmar Bergman, a chief modernist of cinema, working on the set.

Ingmar Bergman, a chief modernist of cinema, working on the set.

Scholars like András Bálint Kovács (author of Screening Modernism: European Art Cinema 1950-1980) and John Orr (who wrote Cinema and Modernity) demonstrate how this type of cinema, best represented by the so-called New Waves and New Cinemas spreading all over the world in the 1960s and 1970s, ultimately stems from modernist traditions. We can call this definition “exclusive” because it refers to the rhetoric of innovation and auterism (as epitomized by figures like Ingmar Bergman, Michelangelo Antonioni, and Jean-Luc Godard, to name a few well-known examples) and sees these trends as marking a break with classical cinema realized in the elitist field of highly sophisticated artistry. Summarizing this point of view, Kovács identifies subjectivity, reflexivity, and abstraction as the basic characteristics of all modernist art and finds these qualities in the postwar films associated with the French New Wave, New German Cinema, and Soviet post-Thaw films, among others.

The “Modernity Thesis”

When I started my research on the concept of cinematic modernism, the standpoint described above seemed to me to be widely accepted and uncontroversial. But once I started digging deeper I realized that strong opposition to this view has emerged over the last two decades and that this understanding of the relationship between cinema and modernism has increasingly been challenged and reconfigured. From the 1990s on, many critics contradicted the traditional, Greenbergian theory of modernism as a drive toward formalist, artistic sophistication and medium specificity with their own, “inclusive” definition. These critics saw modernism simply as a cinematic reflection of modernity and its various aspects, one that did not focus on “high art” in particular but rather embraced mass culture in its entirety.

Probably the most emblematic and influential case made on behalf of this definition was an essay written by Miriam Bratu Hansen in 1999 entitled The Mass Production of the Senses: Classical Cinema as Vernacular Modernism. In the course of her argument, Hansen called classic Hollywood cinema “vernacular modernism.” In her words, “modernism encompasses a whole range of cultural and artistic practices that register, respond to, and reflect upon processes of modernization and the experience of modernity, including a paradigmatic transformation of the conditions under which art is produced, transmitted, and consumed.” In this sense, newspaper comic strips of the 1930s and Soviet socialist realism of the same period are just as modernist (if not more so) as the novels of Marcel Proust or the paintings of Jackson Pollock because they exploit the new possibilities of production, perception, and cultural engagement brought about by the modern world and transformed by the spirit of modernity. This theoretical standpoint was later dubbed the “modernity thesis.” One of its basic conceptions is that cinema as a whole is a modern art—an inherent product and consequence of modernity defined necessarily by its technological and industrial character.

The Gap

After studying the most important bibliographical materials and consulting with specialists in the field of modernism studies, I am coming to believe that the two theories of the same object (cinematic modernism) I have outlined above might not in fact be as distinct (and contradictory) as they appear. In my opinion, the difference between them is not that they approach the same phenomenon with different tools and conceptions, but that they are actually examining two different fields, and merely claiming the same name for them. The gap between the “exclusive” and the “inclusive” traditions is seen not only in the choice of material their proponents wish to analyze (“high” and “popular” culture) but also, more importantly, in the way they want to approach them.

The supporters of the “modernity thesis” and the idea of vernacular modernism are interested mostly in the context (as opposed to the text itself), focusing on the social, industrial, and cultural forces shaping the work. This is why Hansen and others look closely at the specific conditions that made the cinema an important part of modernity as experienced in the early years of the twentieth century. As she declares, her aim is to identify a certain historical point of “paradigmatic transformation of the conditions under which art is produced, transmitted, and consumed.” By contrast, the idea of modernism developed by Clement Greenberg and represented in the field of film studies by András Bálint Kovács concentrates more on the relationships within cinema history itself. It emphasizes such questions as aesthetic autonomy, along with the internal evolution of specific narrative and artistic forms and their characteristics. Political, social, and cultural contexts naturally still play a vital role in these lines of investigation, but they are usually seen as possible explanations for certain formal and stylistic features and are not the main point of interest.

This is why I would like to argue that the conflict between the two theoretical orientations is in fact only illusionary. They are intertwined and in some cases complementary to each other—but most of the time they constitute different areas of film and culture studies, revealing to us different contours of what we call modernity.

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Anti-immigrant Policies in Arizona and Their Impact on Mexican Families

March 23, 2016
By 19613

As media coverage of the 2016 US presidential election has shown, recent terrorist attacks and the ongoing influx of immigrants into Europe have caused an increase in xenophobia and related phenomena.

Eduardo Torre-Cantalapiedra, a Sylff fellow at El Colegio de México, used an SRA grant to research the impact on Mexican immigrants of the highly controversial anti-immigrant laws passed in Arizona in 2010. Can enforcing immigration laws decrease the number of undocumented immigrants? Should the living conditions of undocumented immigrants be ignored because their stay is illegal? This article reveals the true difficulties they face, as experienced by the immigrants themselves.

* * *

Introduction

In recent years, Arizona has passed some of the harshest anti-immigrant policies in the United States. The Republican Party has adhered strictly to its doctrine of “attrition through enforcement,” and Democrats have done little to stop them. This policy has caused serious damage to Mexican families and to the population in general in that state, (My own estimates based on the American Community Survey suggest that there were approximately 248,000 Mexican households in Arizona in 2010). The doctrine is based on the idea of making everyday life for undocumented migrants so difficult that they will be motivated to go back to their countries of origin. In response to Arizona's anti-immigrant policies and the hostile environment they have generated, Mexican families have developed a set of strategies to make the difficulties more bearable. Some families have also decided to migrate from Arizona to other parts of the United States.

Fieldwork Evidence

Sheriff Joe Arpaio in front of the federal courts in Phoenix.

Sheriff Joe Arpaio in front of the federal courts in Phoenix.

The fieldwork I carried out in Phoenix, Arizona, has allowed me to make a diagnosis of the situation. I now have a clearer idea of the problems that these anti-immigration policies have caused for Mexican families and for the social environment in Arizona. The main results of my fieldwork will be incorporated into the central chapters of my dissertation. My basic finding is that these state policies have not achieved the goal of making immigrants "without papers" leave the state. However, they have meant the systematic violation of civil rights of the migrant families. The police have been one of the largest sources of abuses and violations. US District Judge G. Murray Snow issued a sweeping decision finding that that Sheriff Joe Arpaio and his agency (Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office) had relied on racial profiling and illegal detentions to target Latinos during immigration sweeps and traffic stops (ACLU, 2015). Most of the people I interviewed told me they had been stopped while driving simply because of their skin color and physical appearance. Most had been subjected to heavy fines or had had their vehicles confiscated for a month. Several were subjected to deportation proceedings, even though they had never been convicted of any crime.

Undocumented migrant workers have also been pushed into the informal economy and have been forced to take increasingly precarious jobs. Manuel1 preferred to work as a day laborer rather than work without papers because he was afraid of being accused of identity theft if he used another person’s social security number. José was fired from the restaurant where he worked when the chef started to use the E-Verify system. (Arizona has required that most employers use the E-Verify system to verify the migration status of employees since 2007.) Because of this same system he could not find a new job in another restaurant. He now spends his time cleaning yards and does not earn enough money to support his family. Ramón spent two years unemployed, occasionally working small jobs for friends and acquaintances to get by.

In addition, family members are often afraid to contact the police to report crimes—even when they witness felonies, of which in many cases they are also victims. Marta's car was stolen in front of her house, but she never ventured to report the crime to the police. Manuel, an undocumented immigrant, was too afraid to go to the police to report an attempted rape of his daughter (still a minor) for fear that the police would ask about his immigration status. He was finally able to report the incident to the police with the support of a family member who is a US citizen.

Mural showing a Latina student, Phoenix.

Mural showing a Latina student, Phoenix.

The entire state has been affected by the implementation of the anti-immigrant policies. Underutilization of labor, strengthening of racist and xenophobic groups, the breakdown of the social fabric and severe economic losses are just some of the major problems that these policies against undocumented immigrants have caused.

Young people have also been affected by anti-immigrant policies. One law decided that undocumented immigrants must pay out-of-state tuition for their education. Some of the students I interviewed told me they were finding it very difficult to continue their studies because the tuition had increased by 300%. Others had already given up their studies. Only when President Barack Obama approved a new policy that deferred action for certain undocumented young people who came to the United States as children did some of them decide to continue their studies.

Protest against anti-immigrant policies, Phoenix, April 23th 2015

Protest against anti-immigrant policies, Phoenix, April 23, 2015.

My study also documented the adaptation and mobility strategies that families have developed to deal with the anti-immigrant policies in Arizona. These strategies have included staying away form public spaces to avoid the risk of deportation, using members with some kind of legal status to attain certain benefits, seeking measures that allow them to circumvent the prohibitions on driving and working in the state, and others. María was so afraid of being deported and separated from her family that for many months she refused to leave her house except when it was absolutely necessary. Some families decided to emigrate from Arizona to other part of the United States. Some of those who had emigrated told me that enforcement of immigration laws by police in other states is different: they do not stop your car in the street simply because you look Latino. Interstate migration of foreign-born migrants is therefore not motivated only by social networks and economic issues. The varying immigration policies of different states provide another powerful incentive for some families to move.

New Policies

To reverse these adverse effects, changes on two levels are necessary. The first step must be to get rid of all laws based on the doctrine of “attrition through enforcement.” The economic boycott, international and domestic pressure, protests against the unconstitutionality of these laws, and other measures, have been partially effective in fighting these laws in the medium and long term. While many local migration initiatives have been repealed, many remain in force today and continue to damage Mexican migrant families in the state. Second, the continuing daily struggle of families against the anti-immigrant policies is essential. Although this struggle stands a good chance of reversing the current policy framework in the long run, it is also needed as a means of empowering migrant families through information about their rights and participation in social movements and organizations that fight for the civil rights of migrants, regardless of their legal status in the United States. We must not forget that “undocumented” status does not mean that migrants have no rights according to United States laws. Among other constitutional rights, for example, an immigrant has the right to due process when he or she is arrested. An immigrant can be indemnified if he or she is a victim of a crime. Undocumented migrant children (K-12 or less) have the right to attend school according to the Supreme Court.

The logo of the Comités de defensa del Barrio.

The logo of the Comités de defensa del Barrio.

During my stay in Phoenix I had the opportunity to participate in activities organized by the Barrio Defense Committees (Comités de defensa del Barrio, or CDB for short). I was able to observe the important work being done by this and similar organizations in mitigating the adverse effects of the policies against migrants "without papers" and their families. CDBs are a genuinely grassroots movement that emerged in response to the attack against resident Mexican families represented by the 2010 Support Our Law Enforcement and Safe Neighborhoods Act, or Arizona SB 1070. The ongoing hard work of the CDB has allowed many Mexican families to move out of a position of isolated defense to take actions in defense of their rights along with other family units. As its members argue: Unity is strength ("la unión hace la fuerza").

In short, I am hopeful that the fieldwork I conducted with the support of Sylff Research Abroad will produce valuable information for policymaking in both Mexico and Arizona that will serve to defend the civil rights of Mexican families in Arizona and improve their living conditions, and to repair the broken social fabric by allowing closer links between Mexican and American families who live in the state.

References:
American Civil Liberties Union (March, 2015). Ortega Melendres, et al. V. Arpaio, et al. Retrieved from https://www.aclu.org/cases/ortega-melendres-et-al-v-arpaio-et-al

1Names have been changed to preserve the anonymity of the people interviewed.

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SRA Awardees for Fiscal 2015, Second Round

March 18, 2016

SRA Awardees for Fiscal 2015, Second Round

SRA Awardees for Fiscal 2015, Second Round

The Tokyo Foundation is pleased to announce the 12 recipients of SRA awards in the second screening round for fiscal 2015. We received a large number of applications from fellows around the world, and the selection process was very competitive. All applications were carefully screened for eligibility, the feasibility of the proposal, and the relevance of the proposed research to the applicant’s academic pursuits. Congratulations to the winning applicants! We send you our best wishes and hope that the findings of your research abroad will further enrich and enhance your dissertation. The name of the awardees and their home and the host institutions can be viewed here.

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Helping to Develop Young Leaders in Community Resource Management

March 16, 2016
By null

Four Sylff fellows from Chiang Mai University, Thailand—Pradhana Chantaruphan, Olarn Ongla, Saiwimon Worapan, and Alongkorn Jitnuku—jointly organized a field study to raise students’ awareness of environmental sustainability through community resource management. This coauthored article describes highlights of the field study and explains how collaboration among Sylff fellows helped to facilitate students’ learning.

* * *

On April 4-5, 2015, four Sylff fellows from Thailand organized an interactive activity in Pa Ngue village, Tanuer sub-district, Mae On district, Chiang Mai Province, Thailand.“Potential development for young leadership through participation in community resource management” was a joint project organized by Chiang Mai University and Silpakorn University. The idea of the project was to encourage students to become more aware of their potential as effective agents of change in society. Learning through real experiences helps students to understand their real potentiality.

Chiang Mai University collaborates with Silpakorn University in Bangkok to provide opportunities for students from both universities to work with villagers as a part of their efforts in community engagement. For students, community engagement serves as a real-world learning opportunity. Besides participating in activities related to their own areas of study, students must serve the needs of the community to help develop wider society and themselves as well. Becoming involved with the community in this way provides useful practice, training, and learning for students and encourages them to develop into active, responsible citizens.

After the university’s Sylff fellows group meeting in 2014, the four authors of this article felt strongly that there was a need for greater community engagement. It was this shared belief that made us decide to undertake a project together. Through our discussion of the strengths of our group, we thought of tapping into the community networks we have established through our various research and projects. We divided our work into several categories. Pradhana Chantaruphantook responsibility for coordination between the two universities as a faculty member of Silpakorn University, while the fieldwork sites were selected by Olarn Ongla based on his experience of research in this village.

Site Selection: An Important Step

The story of Pa Ngue village illustrates how the process of forest management takes place in the community in response to external pressures that can include state policies and economic conditions. One thing that is peculiar to this village is the coexistence of different ethnic groups in the same area. These ethnic groups are the Karen and the so-called native or indigenous people. These consist of two groups: one group is a mixture of indigenous locals and Tai-lu from Mae-Sa-Puad village; the other is made up of indigenous people from the On-Klang sub-district. Together these ethnic groups search for ways to protect their local resources and develop strategies to deal with the state and bargain for autonomy. This is one of the things that make the village so attractive as a learning area for students. The students can see examples of conflict management among stakeholders and witness the development of ideas consistent with the historical and social circumstances. The Sylff fellows selected this area for the project based on these merits.

Project Design

Three activities over two days provided students with opportunities to work with villagers. On the first day, students and villagers cooperated with pupils from the local school to construct a check dam. On the second day, students surveyed the area where the community lives and shared with villagers in a discussion on resource management, leading to an exchange of ideas between villagers and students. This project was devoted to improving the environmental sustainability of the community and to promoting leadership among students at the same time.

Day 1: Check Dam Construction by Students, Villagers, and Local Pupils

The schedule started with an introduction of participants and the community. Villagers told participants about their history and spoke about community development and the management of community resources. Later in the afternoon, students got to put their skills into practice in a real-world setting, working alongside villagers and local students on a resource management project by constructing the dam.

Check dams are made of a variety of materials. Because they are typically used as temporary structures, they are often made of cheap and readily accessible materials, such as rocks, gravel, logs, hay bales, and sandbags. Villagers usually cannot receive financial assistance from the government to construct check dams. They have to depend on their own resources, including manpower. Check dams are also limited in duration. These factors make students’ help relevant to the need of the villagers.

Check dams are a highly effective way of reducing flow velocities in channels and waterways. Compared to larger dams, check dams are faster to build and more cost-effective, being smaller in scope. This means that building a check dam will not typically displace people or communities. Nor will it destroy natural resources if proper care is taken in designing the dam. Moreover, the dams themselves are simple to construct and do not rely on advanced technologies. This means they can be easily used in more rural and less “developed” communities.

After dinner students shared their thoughts on the work of the community, their feelings on working alongside the villagers, and their ideas about young leadership.

Day 2 : Surveying the Community Area

The first activities got underway early in the morning, with the students separated into two groups. The first group carried out a survey on villagers’ working lives. Most of the villagers are farmers, producing corn on contract for the Thai Royal Project. Farming on contract with the Thai Royal Project brings many benefits, including useful information, access to raw materials, and experts who can give farmers advice. The contracts also guarantee farmers an income, giving them security and stability. This binds the village economy tightly with local resources, and brought home to us how important it is for the villagers to be able to manage the areas they use and share resources among the community in a sustainable way.

The second group conducted a survey on water management. The geography of the village is mountainous, and ensuring a steady supply of water is no easy task. Villagers have constructed a water supply system by themselves.

The group walked into the forest to survey the headwater. The villagers told legends about ancestor worship and the animist beliefs that the members of community act out in rituals that pay respect to the local spirits. Nature is therefore something that protects the villagers and their way of life. These traditional beliefs also help to encourage the community to use the water and other resources of the forest with respect. Animists beliefs make it less likely that people will take advantage of one other and help to instill a spirit of coexistence in the community.

Group Discussions

After the students had explored the community, they compiled the data and knowledge they had gained from the course. They shared with friends in the group and passed on these findings to other friends in the separate group who carried out their surveys in a different area. At the same time they exchanged ideas with the villagers about activities in the area and doubts arising from their experiences in the field. In this way, the students were able to learn from one another, and this helped to evoke an atmosphere of enthusiasm. Through the course, participating students came to understand that community resources need to be appropriately managed and that activities of all kinds can act as a bridge to new knowledge, whether the activity involves learning from storytelling, taking part in the everyday activities of villagers, learning about resource management strategies, or taking part in discussions after the activities are over.

Significance and Impact of the Project

(1) Effects on the Community

The community will be strengthened in the management of resources already available. Participation in this activity helped to generate confidence and a sense of pride that will empower the community to put their tacit knowledge into use. The project also served as a reminder that the knowledge of the community has been handed down from generation to generation. Owing to the university’s support, helping communities in this way earns them greater bargaining power with the state. By strengthening academic networks, it also helps to give confidence to youth leadership in the village.

(2) Effects on Sylff Fellows

This project had a positive impact for the fellows from its very outset, involving as it did collaboration between fellows from three disciplines (anthropology, economics, and political science). The project served as a useful reminder of the importance of working with local communities in order to understand the social and cultural phenomena that led us to pursue these careers in the first place. In addition, a joint project of this nature reflects the interdisciplinary work and exchange of ideas between fellows with knowledge in three different fields, each with something to contribute to the project. Political science is relevant to the idea of resource management and the community’s bargaining power vis-à-vis the state, while anthropology covers concepts of culture and beliefs in collective consciousness and community benefit, and economics helps to understand the wealth accruing to the community through resource management. All of this has helped to expand fellows’ understanding and is an example of interdisciplinary work.

(3) Effects on Participating Students

Involving students from different universities and different fields, the project successfully enabled the exchange of knowledge between disciplines and interdisciplinary work among fellows. The project also raised students’ awareness of several important issues, including the struggle between state control and community autonomy and the efforts being made to protect shared resources despite ethnic differences. Witnessing the way that events unfold within the community was in itself a lesson in diversity. By exchanging this newly acquired knowledge with fellow students laid down a basis for applying these insights to other social phenomenon. It is to be hoped that this taste of hands-on learning outside the classroom will help to foster an open and constructive mindset among the young generation.

 

Pradhana ChantaruphanReceived a Sylff Fellowship in 2013 at Chiang Mai University, Thailand, while conducting her PhD studies in anthropology. She is a lecturer in the Department of Anthropology, Faculty of Archeology, at Silpakorn University in Bangkok.

 

Olarn OnglaReceived a Sylff Fellowship in 2013.Completed a master’s degree in Political Science at the Faculty of Political Science and Public Administration, Chiang Mai University.

 

Sasiwimon WorapanReceived a Sylff Fellowship in 2013. A master’s student in the economics program at Chiang Mai University, Thailand. Areas of interest include business economics, international economics, and the uses of economic theory and quantitative methods to analyze problems. Her thesis is titled “Impact of Remittances on Economic Growth in ASEAN Countries.”

 

Alongkorn JitnukulReceived a Sylff Fellowship for the 2013-15 period. An MA student in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Chiang Mai University, Thailand.

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Internet Policymaking and the Case of Brazil’s Marco Civil

March 7, 2016
By 19622

Guy Hoskins, a Sylff fellow at York University, traveled to Brazil to study the implications of a new civil law on Internet freedoms with huge implications for privacy, freedom of expression, and network neutrality for Internet users around the world.

* * *

When the revelations made by former US government contractor Edward Snowden emerged regarding his country’s practice of dragnet surveillance of global digital communications, the repercussions were manifold. Some of the consequences, such as diplomatic tensions and a heightened public awareness of data privacy issues, could have been foreseen. Others, however, were much less predictable. One such outlier was the passing into law in Brazil of a bill called the Marco Civil da Internet (the Civil Framework for the Internet) enshrining a substantive set of civil rights for the country’s more than 100 million Internet users, built upon the three pillars of privacy, freedom of expression, and network neutrality. Having been subject to abandoned votes on 29 separate occasions in the country’s lower chamber, the success of this partially crowdsourced, multi-stakeholder policy document was far from assured. The public and executive outrage generated by news of the National Security Agency’s practice of intercepting sensitive Brazilian communications proved to be the tipping point. President Dilma Rousseff signed the bill into law on April 24, 2014.1

Within a global media environment marked by almost daily stories of government infiltration of digital communications, threats against the neutrality of the Internet by telecommunications companies seeking to impose a tiered system, and state and corporate suffocation of freedom of expression online, it is little wonder that a bill of online civil rights in one of the most populous countries on earth should attract the interest of the world. That story, at least for English-speaking audiences, has yet to be fully told. It is the purpose of my doctoral dissertation to address that shortfall. By undertaking a detailed analysis of the development of this world-first bill of rights for Internet users, my hope is that a viable framework can be developed for other countries to follow and to safeguard an Internet legislated according to civic logic. It is not enough to hold aloft the bill itself and point only to the provisions contained therein. In isolation they cannot provide a cogent and replicable model for the rest of the world if the means of their resolution are not properly chronicled and understood.

With an undergraduate degree in Latin American studies, fluency in Portuguese, and experience living and working in the region, I had always attempted to integrate developments in Latin America into my graduate research in communication studies. So when I first read reports about the Marco Civil at the outset of my doctoral studies, it was immediately clear that this would make an excellent object of study. I first traveled to Brazil in March 2014 on a preliminary fact-finding mission while the Marco Civil was still in development. I had the immense good fortune not only to establish a network of contacts among civil society organizations that were promoting the bill but also to be granted access to the Brazilian Congress on the evening of March 25, 2014, to bear witness to the historic successful vote.

Buoyed by these experiences, and with financial assistance from SRA, I planned a period of formal field research in Brazil to coincide with the one-year anniversary of that first vote in March 2015. My primary objective was to interview some of the main protagonists who had participated in the open contribution phase of the bill’s development initiated by the Ministry of Justice. These people represented some of the major stakeholders in the Brazilian Internet, including telecommunications corporations, government bureaucrats, members of Congress, civil society leaders, traditional media companies, and web service companies. In gathering firsthand testimony from these individuals, I sought to discover how different groups of social actors were guided by particular logics with regard to the future direction of the Internet—profit, state security, surveillance, civic engagement, innovation, etc.—and how these were tied to the social values of privacy, freedom of expression, and economic freedom that ultimately form the technical and legal operating environment of a national Internet.

Network neutrality has received much media and public attention in recent months as the subject of major regulatory decisions in the United States, India, and the European Union, as well as of course in Brazil. It was fascinating to observe how what might appear at first glance to be a rather arcane technical premise—that all the data that flows on the Internet must be treated equally without any attempt by network administrators to allow data from certain sources to travel faster than any other—was articulated and interpreted by the different stakeholders in the Marco Civil case.

Traditional media companies, dominated in Brazil by the ubiquitous Globo Group, saw net neutrality as a means to ensure mass access to their commercial content. Web companies interpreted it as a safeguard for innovative new online services. Telecommunications companies opposed it on the grounds that it would stifle the potential for new business models. Civil society organizations generally viewed the legislation as essential to both consumers’ rights to digital services and citizens’ rights to freedom of knowledge. Identifying and charting these diverse interpretations of one element of the technical architecture of the Internet can allow us to better understand why these details are so fiercely contested and to appreciate the deeply social process that underpins these apparently neutral technological considerations.

Another essential facet of the Marco Civil process that I was able to appreciate much better after speaking with my interviewees was the way in which the object of the policymaking process—the Internet itself—had influenced how the various groups were able to “operationalize” their agendas or logics. The Brazilian government’s use of an online consultation forum opened the bill to large-scale public scrutiny and input. This made the legislative project much more democratically legitimate—a fact that helped considerably to overcome partisan opposition in Congress. Civil society groups took advantage of the same mechanism to raise public awareness of the substantive issues under discussion while the telecommunications companies, with no little irony, were the group most disadvantaged by the transparency and ready coalition-building facilitated by the Internet and continued to pursue their traditional tactics of backroom lobbying rather than exposing rational arguments to the oxygen of (online) publicity.

I am now in the early phases of data analysis as I translate, transcribe, and codify the hours of interview footage I gathered during my fieldwork in Brazil. As I work, I seek the insights that will allow me to portray as accurately as possible how, in spite of a concentration of forces applying logics of profit and control online, “another Internet is possible” (Franklin, 20132)—one premised on safeguarding freedom of expression, data privacy, and network neutrality.

1http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn25467-brazils-internet-gets-groundbreaking-bill-of-rights.html
2Franklin, M.I. (2013) Digital Dilemmas: Power, Resistance and the Internet, Oxford: Oxford University Press.