Course Projections

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What does a liberatory film pedagogy look like? In situated speculations from around the world, this volume explores the teaching of film as a practice of freedom. Widening its focus beyond the university classroom, Course Projections visits lecture halls and festivals, archives and encampments shadowed by scholasticide, fascism, ecocide, surveillance, attacks on academic freedom, and hate-based exclusion. Against this backdrop of unfreedoms, contributors consider the stakes of film education, experimenting with genres—from the satirical screenplay to the teaching diary, the personal essay to the roundtable conversation—and recuperating teaching archives as diverse as coffee-stained syllabi and customized course questionnaires. Together, these writings posit pedagogy as a field where media theories are tested and revised, histories of the moving image are made and remade, and new communities are forged around screens, opening up horizons of possibility for our collective futures.

Kartik Nair is Associate Professor of Film Studies at Temple University in Philadelphia and author of Seeing Things: Spectral Materialities of Bombay Horror.

Karen Redrobe is Elliot and Roslyn Jaffe Professor of Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. Her most recent book is Undead: (Inter)(in)animation, Feminisms, and the Art of War. In 2025, she received the SCMS Distinguished Pedagogy Award.

Contents

Week 1: Introduction

Introduction

     Kartik Nair and Karen Redrobe

Week 2: Projections, Refusals, Collectivities

1. Toward a Free Cinema: A Conversation

     Selma Shaban and Patricia White

2. Student Protest, Mediating Transference, and the Pedagogical Unconscious

     Cassandra X. Guan

3. Meaning-Making in Twenty-First-Century Classrooms: Identification, Mediation, and Spectatorship

     Nicole Erin Morse

Week 3: Pasts and Futures of the Teaching Archive

4. Studying the Syllabi: Reading Syllabi as Archival Objects in Cinema Studies

     Carmel Curtis

5. Trans Film and Media Pedagogy

     Laura Horak

6. Recall and Review: Black Film Studies

     Courtney R. Baker

Week 4: Covert Designs and Canon Debates

7. The Small Bang Theory

     Jane Simon and Stefan Solomon

8. Unsettling Film and Media Pedagogy Toward Horizons of Liberation: A Teaching Diary

     Usha Iyer

9. Story First: Roundtable Conversation with Faculty in the Department of Cinematic Arts at the Institute of American Indian Arts, Santa Fe

     James Lujan, Kahlil Hudson, Ben Shedd, Liam Lockhart, and Anthony Deiter

Week 5: Unteachable and Untaught

10. Unteachable Honeyland: Eco-Cinema, Amnesia, Moralism

     Jean-Thomas Tremblay

11. Kannywood in the Classroom: Issues in Pedagogy and Praxis

     Rukayat N. Banjo

Week 6: Transmissions

12. Finding Ourselves at the Movies: Teaching Toward the Definition of Black Women’s Diasporic Cinema

     Ellen C. Scott

13. A Pedagogy of (Mediated) Wonder

     Jaimie Baron

Week 7: Programming Visions

14. Teaching Cinema in Latin America: Challenges and Opportunities for a Critical Pedagogy

     María Paz Peirano

15. Accessing the Middle East: Area Studies and the Touristic Gaze

     Blake Atwood

16. The Film Festival as Classroom: A Conversation

     Maori Karmael Holmes and Patricia White

Week 8: Pedagogical Environments

17. Teaching Cinema Studies: A View from the Global South

     Ranjani Mazumdar

18. Cinematic Travels in the Trans-Asian City

     Arnika Fuhrmann

Week 9: Freedom and Film Genres

19. Reading from “the Outside”

     Jason Livingston

20. Decolonizing World Cinema as Pedagogy

     Rosalind Galt

Acknowledgments

Notes

Bibliography

Contributors

Index