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Paper short abstract:

This paper traces the generative potential of critical pedagogy to teach ethnographic media. Building upon Anne-Ruth Wertheim, Jane Rendell and bell hooks, I engage with the political responsibilities we have as educators of ethnographic media.

Paper long abstract:

This paper traces the generative potential of critical pedagogy to teach ethnographic media. Building upon Anne-Ruth Wertheim, Jane Rendell and bell hooks, I challenge the reduction of ethnographic film to epistemological and representational issues by engaging with the affective implications and political responsibilities we have as educators of ethnographic media.

Positioning the radical perspectives and intersectional approaches of interdisciplinary educators within the context of visual anthropology and media studies, I will share strategies and activities to create a community that encourages and facilitates supportive contexts for experimentation, self-organisation, and collaboration. I will do so by sharing experiences from Story Lab - a practice-led master's course for Media Studies students, leading to a co-created open-access curriculum. First run in the spring of 2020, the course works towards a collaborative platform for writing, curating, and producing multimodal and ethnographic media. Story Lab aims to provide a platform for curiosity, generosity, collaboration, experimentation, serendipity, doubt, ambiguity, uncertainty, and, what filmmaker Agnès Varda calls, 'inspiration and good mood'.

Specifically, I will scrutinize the anomalous creatures who call themselves teachers and students, including how we move into and resist read-made roles. How do we allow for a high tolerance of uncertainty - both in the classroom and beyond? What is needed to transition from a static syllabus to a critical and constructive mode of learning that resonates with the sensibilities of ethnography? And how do we break down hierarchies between educators and students - following anthropology's endeavor to challenge power relations between researchers and interlocutors?