Available From UC Press

Course Projections

Film, Pedagogy, and Freedom from the Classroom
Kartik Nair, Karen Redrobe

A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press’s Open Access publishing program. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more.

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.