[Commlist] cfp: "Cinema / Education / Activism"

Cinema / Education / Activism

October 30-31, 2025

University of Groningen (The Netherlands)


Over the past few decades, the field of film studies has undergone a 
significant reorientation toward social and political issues once 
marginalized within academic discourse, partly prompted by the 
encroachment of neoliberal rationalities that recast academic research 
as impact-driven and market-oriented. Topics and perspectives previously 
considered peripheral have gradually entered the mainstream, determining 
not only the questions we pose but the frameworks and methods we employ. 
Although shaped by present conditions, this shift also bears the 
influence of earlier generations of politically engaged scholars. As a 
result, our histories are now more diverse, our analyses more situated, 
our theories more interventionist.


While film studies may appear to be expanding its political horizons, 
this engagement often takes place within the constraints of 
institutional pressures, funding demands, and neoliberal logics. These 
constraints command attention to how politically meaningful work can be 
pursued from within the academy. In this light, we are to question what 
forms of engagement emerge and what kinds of practices become possible 
at the intersection of scholarship, education, and activism. The 
challenge lies not only in how cinema is analyzed, but in how it is 
activated and mobilized—as a mode of teaching, a site of organizing, and 
a tool for collective action. Amid the ongoing decline of public life 
and the erosion of civic institutions, cinema may in fact represent one 
of the few remaining spaces where political imagination can be 
cultivated and sustained.

By bringing together scholars, filmmakers, educators, and activists, the 
conference will explore the intersections of cinema, education, and 
activism understood as overlapping and interdependent articulations of 
the political. In order to do so, it will address how film pedagogy can 
result in political consciousness and impact, while also expanding the 
possibilities for public engagement through cinema.

Topics include but are not limited to:

  *

    Citizenships, civic education and cinema;

  *

    Histories and practices of educational cinema across institutions;

  *

    Theories of militant cinema in education;

  *

    Radical and counter hegemonic film pedagogies;

  *

    Community filmmaking and exhibition practices;

  *

    Activism and the political economy of film production, exhibition,
    and distribution;

  *

    Impact and functions of film pedagogy;

  *

    Film programming/ curation as pedagogical strategy;

  *

    Practice-based research on cinema/activism/education.


Please email an abstract (250–300 words) and a short bio to 
(cineactedu /at/ gmail.com) <mailto:(cineactiedu /at/ gmail.com)>by 27 May 2025. 
Notifications of acceptance will be sent by mid-June.

Organizers: Giuseppe Fidotta, Şirin Fulya Erensoy, Madeline Dot 
(University of Groningen)



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