Course Projections: Film, Pedagogy, and Freedom from the Classroom

“Like all good teaching, this volume poses questions rather than offering definitive answers. Artfully curated by Kartik Nair and Karen Redrobe, its diversity of voices and experiences projects our disciplinary practice as a site of contestation and experimentation—inside classrooms and across more informal networks of resistance, creativity, and solidarity—charting paths to reclaim our teaching from the present’s instrumentalizing logic.”—Masha Salazkina, author of Romancing “Yesenia”: How a Mexican Melodrama Shaped Global Popular Culture “Nair and Redrobe’s exceptional and imaginative anthology offers a polyphony of voices to guide us in the collective pedagogical quest to identify and defend what we value most. This book is our essential companion in resisting the dehumanization of labor and the instrumentalization of thought, as we combat a myriad of assaults on the liberal humanities.”—Priya Jaikumar, author of Where Histories Reside: India as Filmed Space“Presented as a syllabus, Course Projections delivers powerful gusts of political insight, diverse perspectives, and practical advice for those of us who teach with film. Its contributors’ collective commitment models how pedagogy can rise above mere instruction and transaction to become liberatory.”—Kay Dickinson, author of Supply Chain Cinema: Producing Global Film Workers A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press’s Open Access publishing program. Visit 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.