Teaching Film and Media Against the Global Right

Cinema Journal Teaching Dossier Vol 5 (1)
Edited by Priya Jaikumar and Kay Dickinson

Table of Contents

Lebanon
On the Private in Private Higher Education and Pedagogical Interventions in the Context of the American University of Beirut by Ghalya Saadawi, American University of Beirut

United Kingdom
Liberal fascism by Lee Grieveson, University College London
On the Edge Practice: Reflections on filmmaking pedagogy in the Age of the Creative Industries by Yael Friedman and Steve Whitford, University of Portsmouth

India
A Conversation with Ranjani Mazumdar on the attacks on Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) by Priya Jaikumar, University of Southern California

Australia
Public education in cinema: Resistance pedagogies for student teachers by Nisha Thapliyal, University of Newcastle

Hungary
Our networks will be anti-racist and our pedagogy critical by Mihaela Brebnel, Winchester School of Art, writing about the Central European University, Hungary

United States
Experiments with Pedagogy’s Forms by Tara McPherson, University of Southern California

Introduction

Priya Jaikumar and Kay Dickinson

Does the ascendance of right-wing and rightward-leaning electorates and elected officials in the United States, the United Kingdom, India, Bangladesh, Poland, Hungary, Turkey, Australia, Germany and a range of comparable contexts fulfill narratives of modernity and globalization that we presumed in our accounts of their national and media histories? Can we continue with business as usual at a time when media in all its forms plays a central role in abetting a global crisis, wherein nations function as securitized and emotional borders for the mass of humanity while capital and capitalism’s elite move freely, and democratic governance fails? How are universities and institutions of higher education, under attack as bastions of left and liberal thought and actively reshaped by socially conservative and economically libertarian donors, implicated in current political and economic shifts? What is our work now? 

We initiated this dossier because we found ourselves writing and teaching with these questions at the forefront. Within the curricular rubric on national cinema courses offered regularly at the University of Southern California’s School of Cinematic Arts, Priya Jaikumar designed a course (see Jaikumar syllabus) on refugee, migrant and stateless cinemas in Spring 2017, because it felt impossible to continue to teach national cinemas without accounting for unfolding crises around questions of borders and citizenship globally.  After years of convening critical labor studies classes that confronted neoliberal curtailments of (media) workers’ rights, Kay Dickinson saw it necessary to bring these urgent concerns more roundly into how our own sector of higher education operates, most pointedly through a critical interruption of graduate “professionalization” (see Dickinson syllabus). In conversation with each other, Kay and Priya wanted to ask other media scholars whether or not they found it incumbent to interrogate and adapt their courses in response to the major or minor politico-economic upheavals occurring at local, national or global scales.

Histories of the contemporary are elusive, in part because it is difficult to abstract the present and situate it within a longer durée. Accepting the challenge, we wanted to take the measure of our times by gathering reflective as well as analytic essays on pedagogy by media scholars and practitioners who are teaching in a range of national contexts, and reassessing the structure, curriculum, strategies and assignments of their existing and forthcoming media courses.  Our contributors in this dossier hail from four different continents. Each contributor grapples with how pervasive neoliberal and neo-fascist agendas have engulfed particular institutional and educational contexts.  All seven of these short pieces propose ways in which we might counter such impingements within higher educational sites that increasingly ballast and extend a politics and economics of the right.  

Ghalya Saadawi’s paper launches this dossier with an insistence that there is nothing new about how US universities function in the Global South. Nor should we presume a left-leaning consensus among their faculty or student body, she notes.  Her examination of escalating fees and curricula that fail to address structural economic concerns exposes how private higher education maintains and shores up a beneficiary class, all the while preparing them for a specific role in contemporary global capitalist divisions of labor. Lee Grieveson unveils how the United Kingdom’s “austerity” measures advance, as they do elsewhere, the enlargement of property rights that serve the interests of the elite. Urging us not to abstract our objects of study from our contexts of learning, he shows that ascending proprietary media practices such as data mining are part of the same neoliberal denudation of the state that repositions students as fee-paying consumers. Continuing the examination of neoliberal policy in the UK, Yael Friedman and Steve Whitford expose how British universities are forced to produce job-ready media practitioners, even as their media curricula are stripped of the critical tools to question class injustices that limit entry into this selfsame workforce. As such, the task they set themselves is to infuse vocational training with an awareness of inequality, to invite students into filmmaking environments where they can confront and challenge social stratification.   

In her interview with dossier co-editor Priya Jaikumar, Ranjani Mazumdar details how her colleagues and students are standing up to escalating authoritarian university governance and violent impositions of religious and ethnonationalism.  Such activism necessarily unfurls both within the classroom (through course content and the production of media counter-narratives) and well beyond (via flash mobs and hunger strikes), and it serves as a reminder of the real threat of political interference in universities, as well as the need for viable strategies of resistance from within.  Nisha Thapliyal offers insights from her disciplinary context of teacher education in Australia, a public sector ever more encroached upon by private, corporatized management and conservative dogma.  Her classes foreground media literacy as a practical means of analyzing economic relations and market identities, through a critical study of visual material that exposes her students to the casualized employment of teachers, and through texts that model diversions away from such infrastructures and templates for learning.  In a congruent search for alternatives, Mihaela Brebenel ponders the potential of the summer school format as a means of reimagining solidarity and communality amid the upsurge of right politics in Eastern Europe. Mindful of how such opportunities are sparse and transient, how they replicate the precarity spreading at great pace throughout contemporary higher education, she nonetheless puts forward ways of reconfiguring networks and networking that can carve out autonomous resistant spaces.  Concluding the dossier, Tara McPherson extrapolates that critical course topics can be matched with radical modes and forms of media pedagogy. A politicized teaching praxis brought together with critical content encourage modes of subjectivity, consciousness and interaction that not only familiarize students with vital activist responses to issues like US migration policy, but also involve them within these very struggles.

We hope these pedagogical articulations and resistances to the global right in its neoliberal or neo-fascist forms, however dispersed and atomized they may feel in the everyday practice of our teaching, present a sense of the collective efforts underway that can be built upon further. 

Teaching Biographies

Co-Editors

Priya Jaikumar is Associate Professor at the Division of Cinema and Media Studies in the University of Southern California’s School of Cinematic Arts. He is also an online tutor in the The Teaching Media Community. At the University of Southern California, she teaches graduate seminars and undergraduate courses on topics in international cinema, film aesthetics, genre studies, critical space studies, anticolonial and postcolonial theory, cinema and modernism, Indian cinema, and other national cinemas. Her thoughts on teaching anticolonialism and postcolonialism in a film studies course appeared in Postcolonial Cinema Studies (Routledge University Press, 2011), in conversation with the anthology’s co-editor Sandra Ponzanesi. 

Kay Dickinson is Professor of Film Studies at Concordia University, Montréal.  She teaches a range of different classes with particular attention to labour (“Academic Labour”, “Women’s Work”) and the Global South and the transnational (“Arab Revolutions”, “Transnational Approaches to Cinema”). She addresses the politics and economics of teaching (Global Northern) theory as a norm in an essay in the “Geopolitics of Film and Media Theory” dossier to be found in Framework Vol. 56, No.2 (Fall 2015) and has contributed to a roundtable on “World Cinema and Pedagogy” for the Canadian Journal of Film Studies (forthcoming).

Contributors

Ghalya Saadawi is an adjunct lecturer at the fine arts and art history department of the American University of Beirut (AUB), and the visual art department of the Lebanese Academy of Fine Arts at the University of Balamand (ALBA), and forthcoming faculty at the Dutch Art Institute (DAI). She offers courses in art history and theory geared towards art majors as well as all AUB and ALBA department majors. The DAI is a postgraduate program. Regular courses Saadawi teaches in Beirut include “Art After the Lebanese Wars” (at AUB) and “War and Civil War in Lebanese Cinema Art and Thought” (ALBA) “Contemporary Art and Theory (AUB) and “Is there, can there be contemporary art?” (ALBA). The former courses cover in small part the Lebanese civil wars and their officially declared end, followed by a critique of postwar private reconstruction and the formation or disintegration of the postwar state. This is followed by a node that focuses on the 1990s-early 2000s art practices through the lens of theories and tactics of political modernism and its incumbent ideology critique, prior to the onset of global art formations and funding strategies. Another node works through the legacy of leftist struggles in Lebanon, and the documentary essay genre in particular. The two subsequent courses are critiques of the formation of the category of Contemporary Art through a range of literature, unpacking contemporaneity, globality, and art’s infrastructure.

Lee Grieveson is Professor of Media History at University College London. In recent years his teaching has broadly explored media and political economy, exploring the roles media plays in shaping political and economic practices across the globe and across time. Usually this pursues a history beginning with cinema, as the first mechanized mass media emerging from the second stage industrial revolution, and then radio, before exploring the expansion of television and the digital, stretching, then, from extractive imperialism to surveillance capitalism via the Cold War to sustain liberal capitalism and the ongoing War on Terror. The “Political Media” class included with this dossier is one example of this. (Another would be an undergraduate class called “Manufacturing Consent.”) Recently this teaching has come to focus more clearly on the neo-liberal era, from the early 1970s, in conjunction with emerging research projects. The “Capital Screens” draft of a class included with this dossier is one example of this.

Yael Friedman teaches contextual studies and documentary practice at the University of Portsmouth and has been a joint course leader of the BA Film Production Course until recently. Her research in recent years focused on concepts of Transnational, especially in relation to production contexts of film emerging from the Middle East.  Her publications on the subject include: “Guises of Transnationalism in Israel/Palestine” Transnational Cinemas, 6:1 and “Israeli Animation Between Escapism and Subversion” in Stefanie Van de Peer (ed.) (2017) Animation in the Middle East: Practice and Aesthetic from Baghdad to Casablanca, London: I.B Tauris. 

Steve Whitford teaches production practice at the University of Portsmouth and until recently has been a joint course leader of the BA Film Production Course.  He has been leading curriculum change to develop a responsive focus on greater student employability, including the embedding of professional/industry productions in curriculum, the synergy of practical and contextual elements of the curriculum and developing a transnational orientation for the course.  Before joining the University of Portsmouth he has worked for over 25 years as a Sound Recordist in the Film/TV industry, specialising in observational documentaries, for international broadcasters.

Nisha Thapliyal is a teacher educator at the University of Newcastle, Nisha Thapliyal has incorporated modules on media in all the undergraduate and postgraduate courses she teaches including: “Global perspectives on education – Issues for Teachers”; “Schooling and Society”; “International Education Policy”; and “Social movements for Public Education”. These modules incorporate the critical analysis of news as well popular culture media (print, audio, video, digital and so on) in relation to teachers, public education, gender and sexuality, race/ethnicity, and international development. She also incorporates into these courses alternative protest or resistance media produced in and by social movements and other sites of collective struggle. 

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.

Ranjani Mazumdar is Professor of Cinema Studies at the School of Arts and Aesthetics at Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) where she offers several graduate courses on the history, theory and aesthetics of the moving image.  In her seminar on “Cinema and City” she locates cinema as an innovative and powerful archive of urban life. Her course on “Film and the Historical Imagination” makes connections between history and evidence, and historical memory and representation. “Film/Media Theory and Aesthetics” explores the ontological status of Cinema, its relationship to other media forms and its transformed nature in the digital age. A required seminar on “Research Methodology” explores the context of media via histories of technology, perception, production, circulation and consumption. “Critical Theory to Cultural Studies” is taught as a seminar to introduce conceptual debates on the complex status of culture in industrial and post-industrial societies. A course titled “Indian Cinema: Past and Present” is taught every year to provide a background to the landscape of Indian cinema as well as trace the specific genres, thematic concerns and formal makeup of popular cinema.

Tara McPherson is Professor and Chair of Cinema and Media Studies in USC’s School of Cinematic Arts.  The content of her courses varies widely, from “Stars and Celebrities” to “Television Theory” to “Learning in the Digital Age,” but all of her courses center issues of race, gender, and other vectors of difference.  Her most recent writing about feminist pedagogy and activism appeared in The Routledge Companion to Media Studies and Digital Humanities (edited by Jentery Sayers, Routledge University Press, 2018), while she reflects upon building practice-based and collaborative environments for learning and research in her contributions to Applied Media Studies (edited by Kirsten Ostherr, Routledge University Press, 2018.)

Print PDF

Promise of online teaching for English tutors online