Child's play: The political imaginary of international relations and contemporary popular children's films

Many scholars in International Relations (IR) have drawn from popular films to examine various problématiques that have informed the discipline's main theorisations. As Cynthia Weber remarks, popular films are powerful because they engage in the very ‘serious political work’ of mythologising the ‘truths’ and ‘realities’ which provide the foundation for many of IR's main theoretical envisionings of our world. To date, however, children's films have received very little attention. For the purpose of this paper, three have been isolated: Toy Story (1995), A Bug's Life (1998) and Rescue Heroes: The Movie (2003). Children's films, it can be argued, help to craft and restore certain perspectives for each new generation of young minds during the crucial years when the world is being textualised for the first time. The objective of this paper, therefore, is to read these films as working towards producing and sustaining the power/knowledge that seeks to defend contemporary forms of world order while concurrently extending and disseminating the rule of these forms of world order through the medium of children's popular cinema.     

Asian literature as a tool for cultural identity creation in Europe. Goethe’s Hafiz

By the eighteenth century the colonial powers in Europe already had well-defined images and self-images, crystalised from their native cultures, their significance within Europe, and their mercantile and political relations with other continents. Yet Germany, which would have no prospect of a unified polity till late in the following century, remained severely challenged in all these respects. From the mid eighteenth century, however, Germany’s greatest minds sought to mould for it a cultural identity, and as a vital step in this, the poet, statesman and scientist Goethe, a man indebted to a form of patronage which peculiarly qualified him to undertake such experiments, conducted a series of literary encounters with the great traditions of Asia. Their purpose was to situate Germany within the wider world culture, for one can only be a cultural force within a world to which one has some cultural relation. Goethe’s forays into the worlds of Persian, Indian and Chinese literature were attempts at creative imitation, cultural absorption and public confrontation, but their culture-building and appropriative character was also a form of vicarious imperialism, a new-world enterprise conducted by means of old-world patronage. Goethe’s carefully nuanced representations in the West-Eastern Divan indicate the advocacy of a secular cosmopolitanism, the popular impact of which has been hitherto underestimated.     

WORKING TOGETHER

Family Court of Australia has employed four Aboriginal Family Consultants within the Family Court Mediation Service in Darwin and Alice Springs. The consultants were selected from local indigenous people and assist indigenous families who are often in heated dispute over children following family breakdown and separation. The program ultimately seeks to promote access to justice for Aboriginal and Torres Stvait Islander people in the jurisdiction of family law. The program seeks to achieve this by assisting indigenous people to access and utilize the dispute resolution services provided by the Family Court. Family consultants work closely with court mediators in responding to the needs and issues of indigenous families in dispute. The article describes the model of intervention adopted and highlights the benefits of the program with reference to case studies.     

Leadership Harvard Style

The John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard is teaching a new approach to leadership. This article outlines some of the elements of this approach and contrasts them with standard models on leadership in the literature.