Film Education Journal - Special Issue - Decolonising Film Education (to be published June 2022) 

Guest Editors: Professor Jyoti Mistry (HDK-Valand Academy) and Dr Lizelle Bisschoff (University of Glasgow) 

Decolonizing Methodologies is not a method for revolution in a political sense but provokes some revolutionary thinking about the roles that knowledge, knowledge production, knowledge hierarchies and knowledge institutions play in decolonization and social transformation. 

(Linda Tuhiwai Smith, 1999, Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples) 
 

This special issue on decolonising film education highlights some of the contemporary and at times contrasting conceptions of the term and its applicability to research and practice. This relationship between research and practice has direct implications for reanimating pedagogies in both film education and screen studies. Moreover, it presents an opportunity to investigate how synergies might be developed between film history, theory, analysis and its praxis. The focus of this issue attends to the multiple understandings of decolonial and its potential to advance scholarship in film studies, to expand creative film practice and to address film education curricula that revitalizes pedagogic strategies.  

This call for contributions invites practitioners and pedagogues involved in film education to draw from their own experiences, challenges and resolutions in engaging with decolonial propositions in the classroom, in curriculum content and at the institutional level. What forms of student-teacher dialogues are necessary in order to facilitate open exchange about the historical structures of knowledge and representation? How do institutions support the political urgency for social change by decolonializing learning, teaching and research? How can film education expand the references of its aesthetic forms to include a broader spectrum of film practices? And how do we rework modes of representation in film, in order to address historical power structures that have marginalized or elided certain narratives and subjects in cinema?    

We propose the following (but not limited to) areas of interest: 

• Decolonising strategies in film production pedagogy 

• Decolonising approaches to teaching film studies  

• Interviews with filmmakers whose practice and work embraces decolonial perspectives 

• Case studies from teaching experiences that foregrounds decolonial processes in film production and film studies 

• Institutional, cultural and political challenges and resolutions towards decolonising film education 

• Potential and imagined propositions for decolonising film production and film studies 

Contributions may be drawn from experiences gleaned from teaching and reflections from working with students to develop curricula that attends to the political urgencies of decolonising the frameworks of education on the levels of content, modes of teaching and the structures necessary to support these interventions.  

In keeping with the ethos of decolonial propositions as inclusive and expansive of multiple forms of knowledge and expression, we invite different written forms and audio-visual formats. We invite papers, contributions on case studies or focused interviews with film practitioners or teachers of between 4,000 to 8,000 words each. Interviews need a strong contextual framing and theoretical and/or analytical basis. Audio-visual essays should capture decolonial approaches or exemplify aesthetic and conceptual engagement with decolonial strategies or processes. Audio-visual essays should be a maximum of 20 minutes in length and accompanied by a written supporting statement of 1,000 words maximum, articulating the research aims and how these aims are achieved in the audiovisual format.

Abstracts of proposed written contributions or audio-visual descriptions should not exceed 500 words and must include a bio of no longer than 150 words. In the case of proposed interviews, please include the bios of both subjects and brief description of the interview framework. The guest editors will enter into a dialogue with the confirmed authors of the proposed submissions towards shaping the final contributions.   

Abstracts and bios should be emailed to filmeducationjournal@ed.ac.uk by Tuesday 6 April 2021. Any questions should be directed to the same address.