Global Cinema Symposium
Engaging Global Cinema Cultures: Discourses and Disruptions
Nov. 1-2, 2024
The Driving Questions of the Symposium
- How can we explore the possibilities of studying alternative cartographies and epistemologies in global cinema?
- How do we understand contemporary spectatorship as interconnected global film cultures?
- Acknowledging the blurred geopolitical and economical boundaries in global cinema, where do we place the study of national cinemas?
- How do we reframe film studies curricula to reflect the innumerable possibilities of production, distribution, and exhibition of global cinemas offered by global cinema?
- What are the harmonies and chasms in transnational filmmaking practices in a globalized world?
Conference Format
The in-person symposium was held at The University of Texas at Dallas. Its aim was to create a network of scholars from around the world to develop theories, conceptual frameworks, and methodologies to reshape the field of global cinema.
The two-day symposium included two keynote addresses by prominent scholars in the field, a featured panel of invited scholars to reflect on the state of the field, a workshop on syllabus development, and four traditional panels comprised of speakers selected from the open call for papers.
We welcomed submissions that broadly engage with questions raised by the symposium theme, including but not limited to:
- Global sites of film production, reception, and exhibition: early cinema to present
- Theorizing world cinema
- Decolonizing film studies
- Complicating identity, authenticity, and belonging in global filmmaking practices
- Conceptual intersections: national, transnational, world, and global cinemas
- Methods and methodologies in studying and teaching global cinema
- Interconnected cinema cultures: over-the-top (OTT) platforms, film festivals, and classrooms
- Global cinema in the archives
- Global movements, interstices, and global cinema
- Filmmaking practices of diasporic, exilic, and immigrant communities
- Nationless cinemas, transnational activism, and transregional audiences
- Alternative production and reception practices in global cinema
- Politics of global cinema
- Avant-garde cinema in global cinema ecosystem
- Paradigm shifts in global cinema pedagogy
Keynote Speakers
Dr. Lúcia Nagib
Professor of Film, University of Reading
Dr. Lúcia Nagib is an internationally recognized specialist in world cinema, cinematic realism, and cinematic intermediality, which she has explored through a novel approach in many publications, including her single-authored books, Realist Cinema as World Cinema: Non-cinema, Intermedial Passages, Total Cinema (Amsterdam University Press, 2020) and World Cinema and the Ethics of Realism (Bloomsbury, 2011). She is an expert in a number of national cinemas, such as Brazilian, Japanese and German cinemas.
Dr. Lalitha Gopalan
Associate Professor in Radio-Television-Film, The University of Texas at Austin
Dr. Lalitha Gopalan’s research and teaching interests are in the areas of film theory, feminist film theory, contemporary world cinemas, Indian cinemas, genre films, and experimental film and video. Essays and books written by her include Cinemas Dark and Slow in Digital India (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021; Orient Blackswan 2021), Cinema of Interruptions: Action Genres in Contemporary Indian Cinema (London: BFI Publishing, 2002) and Bombay (London: BFI Modern Classics, 2005); and the edited volume The Cinema of India (London: Wallflower Press, 2010). Her current book project explores various experimental film and video practices in India. Gopalan is also an affiliate faculty member in the Department of Asian Studies and South Asia Institute at UT Austin.
Invited Panelists
Samirah Alkassim
Assistant Professor of Film Theory, George Mason University
Samirah Alkassim is an experimental documentary filmmaker and Assistant Professor of Film Theory at George Mason University. She is the co-editor of the Palgrave Studies in Arab Cinema and her publications include the co-authored book The Cinema of Muhammad Malas (Palgrave, 2018), contributions to Cinema of the Arab World: Contemporary Directions in Theory and Practice (Palgrave, 2020), the Historical Dictionary of Middle Eastern Cinema, 2nd Edition (Rowman and Littlefield, 2020), as well as chapter in Refocus: The Films of Jocelyne Saab (Edinburgh University Press, 2021), Gaza on Screen (Duke University Press, 2023), and an anthology text book Global Horror: Hybridity and Alterity in Transnational Horror Film (Cognella Academic Publishing, 2022) which she co-edited. She is currently editing a documentary about Jordanian artist Hani Hourani and researching for her book, A Journey of Screens in 21st Century Arab Film and Media (Bloomsbury, forthcoming).
Dr. Iggy Cortez
Assistant Professor of Film & Media, UC Berkeley
Dr. Iggy Cortez is a scholar of world cinema and contemporary art whose research and teaching are broadly concerned with diasporic thought and visual culture; racialization in relation to labour and technology; the visual and sensory culture of digital media; debates on form and aesthetics across theories of anti-colonialism and race; and questions of sexuality, cinematic performance, and embodiment. He is currently at work on a book project entitled Wondrous Nights: Global Cinema and the Nocturnal Sensorium that explores nighttime as a conceptual and sensory threshold across recent world cinema. Through a global range of nocturnal films, this project looks at the relationship between technology-mediated perception and the affective and sensory dimensions of the historical present. His writing has appeared in The Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, camera obscura, Film Quarterly, ASAP/J, caa: reviews and several edited volumes. With Ian Fleishman, he is also the co-editor of Performative Opacity in the World of Isabelle Huppert (Edinburgh University, 2023).
Dr. Shekhar Deshpande
Professor of Media & Communication, Arcadia University
Dr. Shekhar Deshpande is a professor of Media and Communication at Arcadia University. His teaching interests include world cinema, anthology film, visual culture, film and philosophy and critical theory. He writes on these topics, plus identities, diaspora, and representation, and his writing has been featured in Senses of Cinema, Studies in World Cinema, and other publications. He is a co-author, with Meta Mazaj, of the landmark book World Cinema: A Critical Introduction. He is also the author if Anthology Film and World Cinema and Cinema and Popular Memory: Critical Theory, History on Film and Popular Memory.
Dr. Meta Mazaj
Senior Lecturer in Cinema Studies, University of Pennsylvania
Dr. Meta Mazaj is a Senior Lecturer in Cinema Studies at Penn. She has published on critical theory, Balkan cinema, new European cinema, film and nationalism. She is the author of National and Cynicism in Post 1990s Balkan Cinema (VDM Verlag, 2008), co-author with Timothy Corrigan and Patricia White of Critical Visions in Film Theory: Classic and Contemporary Readings (Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2011), and co-author with Shekhar Deshpande of World Cinema: A Critical Introduction (Routledge, 2018).