Search

Lists books related to education. "Bakhtinian Perspectives on Language, Literacy, and Learning," by Arnetha F. Ball and Sarah Warshauer Freedman; "Breaking the Code of Good Intentions: Everyday Forms of Whiteness," by Melanie E. L. Bush; "Childhood and Postcolonization: Power, Education, and Contemporary Practice," by Gaile S. Cannella and Radhika Viruru.

The paper contributes to the theme of the special issue by making auto/biography the focal point of analysis and theorising its potential to be mobile or immobile. The theoretical developments of the paper are grounded in a mobilisation of life-without-children auto/biographical non-fiction across the last 10–15 years, in which those who do not have children, whatever the reason, have opened-up about their stories and found ways to share them with one another. The paper explicates an original concept immobile autobiography defined as: 'life narratives that are invisible and side-lined, essentialized or not told in first person, and whose circulation both within (intra) and between (inter) generations is structurally limited'; and its converse mobile autobiography. (Im)mobile auto/biographies include, but cannot be reduced to, digital and physical mobilities. The potential of the concept lies in its ability to consider how lives, and the stories told about them, evolve, circulate and perform transformation, as they intersect with, transgress and re-shape changing cultural climates of a mobile world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Presents a list of books concerning African Americans. "Pan-African History: Political Figures From Africa & the Diaspora Since 1787," by Hakim Adi and Marika Sherwood; "Theorizing Diaspora: A Reader," edited by Jana Evans Braziel and Anita Mannur; "Race, Racism & Reparations," by J. Angelo Corlett.

This paper explores how documentary cinema in war contexts can challenge gender representations. To do so, we adopt a feminist and postcolonial approach to analyze the work of Catalan non-fiction filmmaker Alba Sotorra in Kurdistan, Afghanistan and Catalonia. In her films, Sotorra positions herself close to a series of subjects absorbed by wars and armed conflicts that (re)define their identities while acting beyond gender stereotypes. In particular, the paper analyzes the modes of production and representational strategies of two of Sotorra's latest feature films, Game Over and Commander Arian, documentaries with which the filmmaker aims at overcoming the visual exploitation of alterity. After an introduction to Sotorra, and a brief revision of the theory of postcolonial feminist cinema, our argument unfolds in four parts. Firstly, we reflect on cinematic representations of women and men at war; secondly, we introduce our methodology, based on in-depth interviews with the director to support our film analysis; thirdly, we contrast our hypotheses by means of close-readings of the films; lastly, we reflect on how the filmmaker aligns herself with intersectional feminism by using empathy and solidarity towards her subjects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Werner Herzog avers that cinema reveals a truth beyond mere fact, a truth he calls 'ecstatic truth'. The film that offers the clearest view of this conception, the mockumentary Incident at Loch Ness (2004), remains understudied and obscure. In Incident, Herzog plays a fictionalized version of himself who is making a documentary about the Loch Ness monster. This fictional version of Herzog shares the real Herzog's filmmaking philosophy, a philosophy Incident lays bare for study: namely, Incident reveals how the pursuit of ecstatic truth takes us to the limits of human understanding. While Incident helps us explore the concept of ecstatic truth, I argue it also helps us understand much of Herzog's oeuvre, including 2005's Grizzly Man. In this paper, therefore, I analyze ecstatic truth as presented in Incident and apply that understanding to Grizzly Man and its controversial tape scene. Examining said scene through the lens of the ecstatic truth will, I argue, not only garner us fuller insight into Herzog's films, but will also shed light on the effects of Herzog's controversial choice to not play the tape of Timothy Treadwell's death in Grizzly Man. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper establishes the motif of 'child spectators' within the self-reflexive tradition of modern European cinema since the 1940s and within discourses on the affinity of childhood and cinema, dating back to the beginning of the twentieth century. Through a close reading of The spirit of the beehive (Víctor Erice, 1973) and Jacquot de Nantes (Agnès Varda, 1991) that deals with the impact of the cinema experience on a child's life, I analyze how this motif stages spectatorship, cinephilia, and filmmaking. First, I show how these films reflect on the impact of film experience and the process of film education as based on the existential being described by phenomenology. Second, I argue that this motif implies specific aesthetic strategies that are often linked to childhood and cinema. The child spectator calls for the understanding of childhood as a film aesthetical category and invites us to engage in a distinctive form of spectatorship. If the children in these films represent and address the phenomenological dimension of film experience, they also invite us, third, to reconsider aspects rarely addressed by phenomenology, especially the integration of imagination and materiality in film experience, and the interdependence of film experience and education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is the beginning of the new millennium. Globalization is picking up the pace, and Marxist media theorists warn about affective and 'immaterial' modes of extraction, as well as the rise of the attention economy. It is within this web of post-Fordist anxieties and chameleonic, flexible mechanisms of control that Thomas Elsaesser first charts the rise of the mind-game phenomenon, in his 2009 article 'The Mind-Game Film'. Elsaesser and his successors perceptively trace the mind-game film back to a range of global conditions and technological innovations which marked the passage from the twentieth to twenty-first centuries, from interactive VCR and DVD technology to confrontations with post-colonial Others. However, little-to-no mind-game scholarship thus far has centered the rise of Web 2.0 and the concurrent privatization of the Internet; furthermore, with the obvious exception of the Matrix trilogy, the mind-bending hacker films of the 1980s and 1990s (e.g. WarGames, Sneakers, The Net) have been largely overlooked as mind-game and mind-game-adjacent films. Accordingly, this paper examines whether and how the hacker film might be folded into the broader field of mind-game scholarship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sea-level rise is a dramatic effect of climate change, with profound implications for societies around the world. In the past few years, a rush of literary non-fiction books have appeared that aim to explain the threat of rising seas to the public. This paper critiques how sea-level rise is framed in many of those books, on two accounts. First, anthropogenic sea-level change is frequently framed by accounts of natural variations of sea level in earth history, focusing on geological rather than societal processes. Second, single and sudden floods are often used to exemplify sea-level rise in ways that draw attention away from incremental environmental change in favour of fast-paced but de-contextualized events. The paper argues that both these frames de-politicize sea-level rise and may steer public understanding and discussion away from relevant social, cultural, and ethical considerations. As examples of climate reductionism, these depictions may obstruct rather than facilitate appropriate negotiations in response to predicted sea-level rise. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Western gaze instituted by the cinematographic apparatus constructs racialized subjects and supports processes of dispossession. My present transmedial artistic research project engages with the biopolitics of representation in archival film material, from a decolonial perspective. By drawing from academic and non-academic sources on relations between colonialism, capitalism, and technologies of control, this paper studies manifestations of surveillance in non-fiction film, to analyze the sub-genre of medical propaganda in former European colonies. Moreover, it proposes to scrutinize the long-term impact colonial cinema and its structures of representation had and still have on processes of subjectification, haunting present-day gender and race-determined profiling by mainstream film, CCTV, and drones. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As a documentary educator and practitioner in Australia, 'truth' is an area of concern for both my students and I in undertaking the risky capturing and the representation of the lives of others. Documentaries are deceptively difficult to make, especially for the novice, and most especially when considering hybrid non-fiction genre forms. The questions my students pose often centre on how much can they blend reality in the 'post truth' moment, and what are the practical and ethical challenges of doing so? This paper urges teachers and makers alike to refer to established documentarians who investigate at truthful depictions that often transcend the didactic recitation of facts. Citing the examples of Conjuring the Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story (directed by Martin Scorsese, 2019) and The Rehearsal (created by and starring Nathan Fielder, 2022), I present a pragmatic discussion as to how disruptive non-fiction form a pure triadic relationship between participants, audiences, and filmmakers, which necessarily involves the overlap of ethics and creativity. I refer to a recent student hybrid documentary film Bustard Head (directed by Lucy Lakshman, 2021) as an example outcome of this pedagogically oriented approach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]