Teaching Transnational Cinema

Katarzyna Marciniak is Professor of Transnational Studies in the English Department at Ohio University, USA. She is the author of Alienhood: Citizenship, Exile, and the Logic of Difference, Streets of Crocodiles: Photography, Media, and Postsocialist Landscapes in Poland, co-editor of Transnational Feminism in Film and Media and, with Imogen Tyler, Immigrant Protest: Politics, Aesthetics, and Everyday Dissent.Bruce Bennett is Senior Lecturer in Film Studies at the Lancaster Institute for the Contemporary Arts at Lancaster University, UK. He is the author of The Cinema of Michael Winterbottom: Borders, Intimacy, Terror and co-editor of Cinema and Technology: Cultures, Theories, Practices.

"While the main crux of this text involves encounters with transnational cinema, and specifically how to ethically and non-violently facilitate these encounters in a classroom, Marciniak and Bennett’s book can be used as a generative destabilisation of assumptions about “the other”, about the containability of knowledge-transfer, and about spectatorship in general. Moreover, the reflections offered in the book draw attention to one’s relationship with oneself – a critical and ongoing reflection for any pedagogical or artistic experience." -Shabnam Piryaei, Sense of Cinema

• Introduction: Teaching Transnational Cinema: Politics and Pedagogy - Katarzyna Marciniak and Bruce Bennett Part One: Seeing ‘the World’ Through Film 1. Ignorance and Inequality: Teaching with Transnational Cinema - Bruce Bennett 2. A Pedagogy of Humility: Teaching European Films about Immigration - Alex Lykidis 3. Understanding Context, Resisting Hermeneutics: Ways of Seeing Transnational Relations - Matthew Holtmeier and Chelsea Wessels 4. Teaching ‘the World’ Through Film - Ruth Doughty and Deborah Shaw 5. Film-Philosophy and the Transnational Gaze - David Martin-Jones Part Two: Transnational Encounters 1. Transnational Lesbian Cinema in the Women’s and Gender Studies Classroom: Beyond Neoliberal Imaginaries of Desire? - Rachel Lewis 2. Altered States for a Critical Cosmopolitanism - Anita Wen-Shin Chang 3. Facilitating Student Engagement: A Performative Model of Transnational Film Pedagogy - Mette Hjort 4. Pedagogy and Personal Transformation through Transnational Film - Laurence Raw 5. The Pedagogy of the Piratical - Bhaskar Sarkar 6. ‘Grateful to be an American’: The Challenges of Teaching Transnational Documentaries - Áine O’Healy Part Three: Transnational Aporias 1. A Feminist Politics and Ethics of Refusal: Teaching Transnational Cinema in the Feminist Studies Classroom - Neda Atanasoski 2. Disempowering Knowledge: How To Teach Not To Help - Aga Skrodzka 3. Provocative Pedagogy: The Middle East - Terri Ginsberg and Tania Kamal-Eldin 4. The Disappearing Classroom: Streaming Foreigners and a Politics of Invisibility - Katarzyna Marciniak Coda: ‘Teaching Films as Things to Think With’: A Conversation with Rey Chow - Bruce Bennett and Katarzyna Marciniak