Teaching with Video: A Global Media Form and Forms of Global Encounters

ABSTRACT

When video does occupy a crucial position in the global media syllabus, it is often embedded within a cultural genealogy based primarily upon North American experiences (e.g. VHS nostalgia, experimental video) and the rise of English-language mega video platforms (e.g. YouTube, Netflix), even though there is substantial scholarship on the global emergence of video as a cultural and political medium in Asia, Africa and Latin America. ® [#N3] On the technical front, while a lot of attention and commitments are given to securing copyrights, appropriate screening format and conditions for cinematic and published materials in teaching, video as a pedagogical tool is often treated with much less care. First let me clarify the institutional contexts where my thinking and pedagogical experiments happened. There were other pedagogical challenges we were facing that semester field trips were halted, external guest speakers were not allowed to enter the building, lack of media equipment due to the influx of golocal students (mainly Chinese nationals from other NYU campuses that stayed in Shanghai for classes due to COVID travel restrictions). After watching Tourisme International (2014), students debated how the video camera embodies a touristic gaze into the globally isolated North Korea and how that affects the work's overall aesthetics and critical voice;in the latter work Na China (2019), students pay attention to how video camera allows her to enter some intimate spaces and conversations among African businesswomen in contemporary Guangzhou.