[ecrea] CFP Cinema Journal Teaching Dossier

EXTENDED DEADLINE: CFP Cinema Journal Teaching Dossier: Critical 
Pedagogies in Neoliberal Times
Edited by Courtney Bailey and Julie Wilson, Allegheny College

The increasingly corporatized neoliberal university represents an 
aggressive threat to critical pedagogies and professors who resist the 
safe spaces of diversity discourse and actively address systems of 
privilege and oppression. On an institutional level, this threat 
manifests itself in amplified efforts to build brand identity and value 
proposition in a competitive market, policies and practices designed to 
“protect” those brands, and increased reliance on capital campaigns in 
the face of governmental austerity measures. As crystalized powerfully 
by the Salaita case, academic freedom no longer provides a sufficient 
counter-balance to these forces of corporatization.

At the same time as these larger institutional forces work against close 
examinations of power and systemic inequality, professors committed to 
these issues are increasingly likely to find their pedagogies challenged 
from below by students. On the one hand, challenges come from students 
with reactionary politics or those who do not want to confront their own 
privilege. On the other hand, challenges also come from students who 
have themselves been traumatized by systems of oppression. Prominent 
debates over “trigger warnings,” for instance, speak to fundamental 
tensions we must now navigate: how to teach about the brutal workings of 
systemic oppression in a context where neoliberal tenets of personal 
responsibility and privatization individualize suffering and its 
solutions in ever more insidious ways. Critical media and cultural 
studies scholars are poised to feel these tensions even more acutely, as 
we often teach with graphic images that reflect and make present the 
very regimes we hope to disrupt through our critical pedagogies.

For this issue of the Cinema Journal Teaching Dossier, we hope to 
collect a range of essays on critical media pedagogies in neoliberal 
times. Specifically, we are looking for essays that reflect on how we 
might navigate the myriad forces of neoliberalism impinging on our 
classrooms. How can we constitute our media/cultural studies classrooms 
spaces of resistance in the context of corporatized education? How do we 
meet, confront, and/or disrupt the neoliberal politics of identity that 
students bring to our classrooms? What are the specific challenges faced 
by critical media instructors today, and how can we productively address 
these challenges?

We welcome essays focused on specific assignments, other pedagogical 
approaches/strategies grounded in particular case studies or contexts, 
or more theoretically-oriented contributions. Please submit a 250-word 
abstract for a proposed 1500-word essay and a 150-word biography to 
Courtney Bailey ((cbailey /at/ allegheny.edu) <mailto:(cbailey /at/ allegheny.edu)>) 
and Julie Wilson ((jwilson /at/ allegheny.edu) <mailto:(jwilson /at/ allegheny.edu)>) 
by February 23th. Completed essays (including all images and links) will 
be due on May 1st.

--
Assistant Professor of Communication Arts
Managing Editor, /Film Criticism/
Allegheny College
520 N Main St., Meadville, PA 16335
tel: 814-332-2307, web: http://joetompkins.wordpress.com/