CFP Cinema Journal Teaching Dossier: Critical Pedagogies in Neoliberal Times

CFP Cinema Journal Teaching Dossier: Critical Pedagogies in Neoliberal Times

Edited by Courtney Bailey and Julie Wilson, Allegheny College

 

The increasingly corporatized neoliberal university represents an aggressive threat to critical pedagogies and professors who resist the “safe spaces” of diversity discourse and actively address systems of privilege and oppression. On an institutional level, this threat manifests itself in amplified efforts to build brand value in a competitive market, policies designed to “protect” those brands, and increased reliance on capital campaigns in the face of austerity measures. As crystalized powerfully by the Salaita case, academic freedom no longer provides a sufficient counter-balance to forces of corporatization.

At the same time, professors committed to examining power and systemic inequality are increasingly likely to find their pedagogies challenged from below by students. On the one hand, these challenges issue from students with reactionary politics, while on the other hand they also come from students who have been traumatized by systems of oppression. Prominent debates over “trigger warnings,” for instance, speak to fundamental tensions we must navigate: how to teach about the brutal workings of systemic oppression in a context where neoliberal tenets of personal responsibility and privatization individualize suffering and its solutions in ever more insidious ways. Critical media and cultural studies scholars are poised to feel these tensions even more acutely, as we often teach discomforting material that is aimed to reflect and make present the very regimes we hope to disrupt through our critical pedagogies.

For this issue of the Cinema Journal Teaching Dossier, we hope to collect a range of essays that reflect on how we might navigate the myriad forces of neoliberalism impinging on media studies classrooms. How can we constitute our classrooms as spaces of resistance in the context of corporatized education? How do we meet, confront, and/or disrupt the neoliberal politics of identity that students bring to our classrooms? What are the specific challenges faced by critical media instructors today, and how can we productively address these challenges?

We welcome essays focused on specific topics (e.g., trigger warnings) and/or assignments, other pedagogical approaches/strategies grounded in particular case studies or contexts, or more theoretically-oriented contributions. Please submit a 250-word abstract for a proposed 1500-word essay and a 150-word biography to Courtney Bailey ([email protected]) and Julie Wilson ([email protected]) by February 16th.  Completed essays (including all images and links) will be due on April 17th.