This roundtable, inspired by the 2026 PAMLA conference theme “Our Ruling Classes: Culture, Power, Conflict,” invites short (5-minute) presentations on possible approaches and challenges to teaching figures who have been rejected by cancel culture for their harmfully dated representations of marginalized figures and communities or their creators’ mistreatment of other people or toxic attitudes: writers like Mark Twain, Vladimir Nabokov, and J.K. Rowling; filmmakers from Alfred Hitchcock to Woody Allen; and performers like Kevin Spacey and Louis C.K. Possible approaches might include:

• endorsing cancel culture by refusing to teach canceled figures
• making distinctions between canceled figures who are beyond and not beyond the pale
• proposing the canceled as negative or cautionary models
• inviting students to trust the tale, not the teller
• requiring students to read expurgated versions of problematic texts
• offering new testimony intended to rehabilitate canceled figures’ reputations
• focusing on the collaborative nature of cinema in order to decenter canceled figures
• emphasizing the value of education vs. the value of entertainment
• deploying canceled figures to contrast their cultural moments with our own
• using canceled figures to teach about cancel culture
• ignoring cancel culture on the grounds that “they all do it”
• teaching specifically to provoke arguments about cancelation, authorship, and power

Just as this list is not meant to be exhaustive, the goal of the session is to provoke fruitful discussion rather than to promote a single view of cancel culture, a subject well worth arguing about.