Our networks will be anti-racist and our pedagogy critical

Cinema Journal Teaching Dossier
Against the Global Right Vol 5 (1)
Mihaela Brebenel, Winchester School of Art, University of Southampton

Introductions

I write this in the time of historical repetitions: once more, the rise of ethno-nationalisms and racism in Central and Eastern Europe, coercive action against institutions with critical curricula and pedagogies, and a generalized gearing up towards heteronormative patriarchal futurity (see, most obviously, Romania’s attempts to include the definition of the “traditional family” in its constitution and recent threats against reproductive rights in Poland). In such a context, this intervention is minor. Its scale is determined by my personal experience as a queer white woman researcher raised in Eastern Europe, in a working-class background, but receiving all my postgraduate education and most of my critical and political education in the U.K. My account and experience as a researcher and as a teacher are shaped by the language I write in: the standard British English I started learning before being enrolled in any school, as it was my mother’s conviction that this language would be the driver for my class mobility. They are also shaped by the various English university contexts where I studied, and by the intersections of areas that I explore: film and screen studies, politics and aesthetics, cultural studies, digital cultures. My PhD research in Romanian moving image art and history has been an intrinsic part of my investigation into my identity and belonging in the spaces of academia (as a researcher and as a teacher from Eastern Europe). Moreover, the struggles that I have come to align myself with and offer my solidarity to continuously help me learn and further the investigation into my position in academia, my Eastern European whiteness, my gender, sexuality in and out of a given geographical context, or my privilege when coded as a “good immigrant” in opposition to, for one, the Romanian Roma who live and work in the UK. What follows is a speculative call for a new form of critical network, shaped by my position as I currently stand at the intersections of these geographies and spaces of identity and experience. 

Fragmentary Field Notes

By naming this section “fragmentary field notes,” I gesture towards the role an event has recently played in my thinking through my research and practice. One wants to make note of a formative situation, event, book, or encounter, which extends and opens up, in planned or contingent ways, one’s commitment and responsibility to research and pedagogy. For instance, keeping an academic journal, which was one of the most expressive techniques that Professor Les Back shared in his Academic Practice course at Goldsmiths University (see http://www.academic-diary.co.uk).

In this brief essay, I use fragments to shape my text like an academic diary entry stemming from experience; an auto-ethnography containing prop-notes about a pedagogical event, extended as a call into wider concerns on ways of collaborative organization around research and pedagogy. The event was my attendance at a summer school, Screened Memories: Historical Narratives and Contemporary Visual Culture (2016), directed by Oksana Sarkisova from the Central European University (CEU) in Budapest, Hungary. The aim of the school was to “approach visual material as historical sources and ‘non-transparent’ objects, embedded in the intellectual and cultural contexts of their production and interpretation.” This scope and the course content aligned well with my existing research interests and also offered new avenues for investigation. The syllabus and the participants’ background were inter-disciplinary, as the course invited “advanced graduate students, researchers, young faculty, audio-visual archivists, filmmakers and visual artists to explore the functions of visual testimony and to open up new directions for research, teaching, and art.” Yet, there was something more to this academic experience than the furthering of my research: in particular, the ways in which participants established forms of sociality and how some of these relations have been sustained thereafter.

Why did this experience feel formative? What did it provide that I longed for, through coming together with these individuals? What lingered when we parted?

Perhaps it was the simple need for coming together and sharing experiences. But crucially, its context also needs to be investigated. CEU has been running their Summer University programme for the past sixteen years and it has in place the infrastructural support of CEU’s University resources, such as its own Residence Centre, academic, administrative and support staff, and funding to invite International speakers. One year after the summer school, the university has been affected by a legislative proposal of Prime Minister Viktor Orban, which targeted the George Soros-founded institution and created debates in the region and in some of the UK press, making Hungary visible in a critical global geography. I will not treat the issue in-depth here, but it is important to say Soros’s presence in Eastern Europe after 1990, in setting up education and contemporary art spaces, has been problematic on account of its overall pursuit of a US (neo)liberal agenda. At the same time, although Soros is one of the founders of CEU, the curricula of CEU’s programmes and some of the research staff at the university have been critical of Soros, and of the US position on issues related to human rights, equality, gender, ethnicity, and sexuality. These complicated histories are continuously played out in the region. In short, Orban’s law against CEU has opened up the need for a fundamental investigation of Hungary’s historical narrative, where, as Agnes Gagyi’s article in LeftEast suggests, “making sense of the present crisis [in Eastern Europe] may demand that we wholly revise the post-Cold War narrative of post-socialist democratization itself.” Given this complexity, what I am advocating is that such an investigation is best pursued outside of institutional structures, in autonomous spaces that may bring together affiliated and independent researchers and artists working in and outside of the Central, Southern and Eastern European space for sharing critical pedagogy and research.

Would a structurally precarious yet autonomous and critical summer school have anything to offer by way of more reflexive forms of research and pedagogy to decolonize the “revolution – transition  –  postcommunism  –  crash” paradigm, which foreclosed futures and re-inserted the nationalist, xenophobic and racist narratives of the right? What can this format attain when it is dedicated to the voices of Roma women, gender non-binary and queer people, and to addressing race and ethnicity by examining the kinds of whiteness and privilege some of us inhabit in these political, economical and geographical spaces, or in the spaces where we circulate as immigrants, workers, educators?

Save the network from networking

Could the summer school, in a version of this re-imaged format as one that practices modes of temporary communal living and being together, recalling Alexandra Kollontai (Kollantai, 1980), be extracted from its own or our own drives towards instrumentalizing it, either by the habits we have formed around being together, or through given structures of the academe, like conferences and an instilled incessant drive for networking? The ways in which we currently think of networks in this context is derived from the abuse of the noun mobilized as verb in its present continuous form, to punitive and guilt-mongering purposes. It works to make us aware of the insufficiency, or of the flawed or missing traits of our professional selves. To be (a)praised, we need to be networking. To be published, we need to be networking. But what if we were to weave, to build and bring into being our own versions of these networks? The need to put in place these latter types of networks, those born from self-affirming, caring and solidary forms of working, being, feeling and thinking with each other is what I would like to explore. These types of groups, circles, and gatherings are familiar to us from our engagement with different struggles in direct actions and other forms of political organizing. What if we reclaimed some of those forms of being and thinking together within academic grounds? In a time when we are reminded by our political realities that using liberatory discourse in our research and teaching is not enough, how do we maintain sustainable commitment to our critical and engaged pedagogical and research practices? Scaling these concerns to an issue within smaller-sized networks might bring us closer not only to an ecology of being-with other humans, but perhaps enlarge our imagination around forms of co-habitation with non-human others, in the spirit of the critical posthumanities, alongside authors like Rosi Braidotti’s (Braidotti, 2013), or following Donna Haraway’s commitment of staying with the trouble and/or making kin (Haraway, 2016).

Future Schools

Could the summer school take us, move us physically and in our imagination, at least for a given time and space, to teaching and learning and to “education as the practice of freedom”(hooks, 1994)? The school is not the university. We go away for a summer school, something we are not always able to easily do. Customarily, there is less teaching in the summer, when we can go to learn from each other and to learn about how to critically reflect on our own pedagogies inside and outside of the university. In the UK, the past three summers have brought the inspiring example of Anti-University Now!, which has been set up “with the intention to challenge academic and class hierarchy and the exclusivity of the £9K-a-year-degree by inviting people to organise and share learning events in public spaces all over the country,” following on from the historical 1968 precedent of the Antiuniversity of London. What the summer school I am advocating for here could learn from and share with initiatives like the AntiUniversity Now! is the collective dedication to creating “autonomous spaces for radical learning that follow, nurture and enact anarchist, feminist, anti-racist, anti-fascist, anti-homophobic and transphobic, de-colonial and anti-capitalist values through conversation and direct action.” A summer school that would transgress and where we teach each other to organise, to replenish, to reflect, where we institute ways of being together, teaching each other to learn and to teach.

Nevertheless, the precarious nature of such an initiative, as much as the organizational question it opens, is undeniable: where would the funds come from, how often will it occur; who would facilitate and organize if it is non-institutionally affiliated; how would participants be invited/how would they apply; where would it take place that would allow, on an infrastructural level, the enactment of those forms of communal living and work, together with their challenges, inequalities, and their ways of reinforcing hierarchies?

I take this opportunity to make a call for such a school, yet I have only questions to put forward. But I have also a feeling that coming together is needed once again (if it ever stopped being needed) and we can only collaboratively organize this in yet another “region” where any forms of critical thought and pedagogy are under increasing attack.

Bibliography

Braidotti, Rosi. 2013. The Posthuman. First Edition. Cambridge, UK ; Malden, MA, USA: Polity Press.

Haraway, Donna J. 2016. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham: Duke University Press Books.

hooks, bell. 1994. Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom. London: Routledge.

Kollontai, Alexandra 1980. Selected Writings of Alexandra Kollontai. New York: W W Norton & Co.

---

Mihaela Brebenel is Lecturer in Digital Media Culture at Winchester School of Art, University of Southampton. She teaches on various courses concerned with technology, media and cultural studies (Digital Cultures, Global Media, Critical Media Practice). She has also lectured in Film and Screen studies at Brighton University and in the Media and Communications department at Goldsmiths, University of London. She is particularly interested in issues around practice-based and practice-led teaching in film, media and screen studies. She is aFellow of the Higher Education Academy and holds a Postgraduate Certificate in the Management of Learning and Teaching. If you would like to (co)respond, please email at: . 

Promise of online teaching for English tutors online