Over the past few decades, the field of film and media studies has witnessed a rising interest in adopting global frameworks and pursuing comparative work in our research. The teaching of global media, however, has received far less attention. Following the exponential rise of platforms for watching and teaching media, the resurgence of xenophobia and nativism, and the differential impacts of a global pandemic, it is time to reassess what it means to teach media in a global context — and to evaluate the challenges to doing so. Amidst reduced tenured lines and slashed budgets, departments must decide between covering medium-specific courses and region-specific courses. As media scholars, how do we approach “teaching the world” while contending with shrinking institutional support for area studies and expanding development of international media platforms and content?

In addition to these structural issues are ideological ones. Pervasive Western-centrism in curriculum design often means that all non-U.S. content appears in a single course. Global media content is offered as an “alternative” or an addendum to the “mainstream” European and North American cinemas, implicitly maintaining the separation between the assumed “norm” and its “others.”[1] For many stakeholders in the media industries, “the global” means capturing international audience revenue and expanding markets beyond the national. However, as scholars, thinking globally must mean highlighting the power differentials shaped by decades of economic, political, and cultural influence across localities. It also means historicizing emergent, residual, and dominant global forces. During the past century, media globalization often meant contending with the unparalleled reach and influence of Hollywood. Global media today is best understood as operating at multiple scales and temporalities, “nonlinear, unpredictable, and evolving,”[2] as complex media networks operate at scale in an “increasingly porous and dynamic environment.”[3]

None of these concerns are entirely new. Media scholars have addressed the teaching of global media in the past within special edited collections, journal issues, and teaching dossiers.[4] The issues raised in these accounts — difficulty accessing teaching materials, lack of institutional support, lessening multilingual competencies in students, to name a few — have only exacerbated in the years since their publication. Many more concerns that could not have been predicted five or six years ago are all the more pressing now. As Usha Iyer remarks in her contribution to this dossier, we already know there is an “imperative and urgent need to dismantle our Euro-American curricula and canons, to address the sustained epistemic violence of center-periphery logics, and to smash white supremacist, heteropatriarchal, colonial epistemes.” What must be done is not the question. The question is how.

The contributions to this dossier offer some initial strategies to address this question of how. Building on the conversations started at the “Teaching ‘the Global’ in Media Studies” workshop at SCMS 2021, the goals of this dossier are to approach these pedagogical issues in a comparative manner and to provide theoretical and practical tools to support others in the field who likewise contend with these issues. This Teaching Media dossier brings together scholars from different kinds of institutions and departments who share disparate strategies for dealing with the questions surrounding teaching “global media.” The focus of these contributions range from big-picture stakes (whose notion of “global” we teach; strategies for decolonizing the field; incorporating feminist and anti-racist pedagogy) to on-the-ground tactics (the value of close reading; teaching video, music, and television; designing role playing assignments). Contributors also consider how different pedagogical contexts, such as high schools or international campuses of U.S. institutions, affect the practice of and stakes in teaching global media.

Despite this range of approaches, I should note that all of the dossier contributors are U.S. and Canada-centered scholars, whether by intellectual training, by institutional affiliation, or both. This is no small caveat. An important critique of early formulations of the world in film and media studies — indeed, one that several contributors bring up — is that the field tends to talk about “the world” only as an add-on to U.S. media (and scholarly) productions, a problem compounded by the inordinate influence of English as a lingua franca for media studies scholarship. Rhetorical gestures towards a truly global perspective remain disingenuous without acknowledgment of, and resistance to, the structural conditions that privilege certain views of the world over others. Aware of the stakes inherent in such shortcomings, this dossier on its own does not purport to “de-center” the U.S. hegemony over media pedagogy. Rather, each of these contributions traces possible avenues to provincialize the U.S.- and Euro-centrism of film and media studies as a way forward to a more critically global approach to the field. In other words, the pedagogical tools and strategies offered by these contributors reveal multiple ways for us to begin to dismantle the Euro-American curricula, and in the process, globalize the teaching of media studies at its core.

The media pedagogues included in this dossier offer a variety of perspectives on the stakes and approaches to teaching the global in media studies. Each of us has taught courses that address global issues through a particular genre, medium, or theoretical framework. Some of us have reconfigured survey or medium-specific courses to think about global issues through specific examples. We teach at institutions with different, often interdisciplinary, department configurations. Some have taught at the international campus of American institutions. Others teach in contingent roles or in settings outside the university. In tandem, bringing these diverse voices into conversation showcases a multifaceted range of pedagogies, resources, and strategies for teaching global media.

The articles in Part I lay out several theoretical and political foundations for designing courses with a global scope and an intersectional approach. Usha Iyer emphasizes how the queer potential of cinema enables a decolonial orientation to locating and (dis)identifying with mediated representations from around the world. Joy Schaefer illustrates how a feminist interdisciplinary pedagogy enables us to connect localized issues to their transnational resonances. Thomas Lamarre wrestles with how to address the interrelated issues of race and imperialism within area studies courses, particularly area fields that have not sufficiently addressed race in a global framework.

Part II features interventions that question our assumed notions about how to teach global media studies and take commonly perceived stumbling blocks as generative pedagogical opportunities. Jennifer Blaylock argues for the value of disorientation as a pedagogical strategy that forces students to contend with how messy and overwhelming it can be to learn about multiple media contexts at a time. Bhaskar Sarkar offers key scholarly works and media texts that help teach a conception of the global as emergence, as “a series of shifting relations” where media not only represent but also transform global processes. Hadi Gharabaghi makes the case that media studies should look at high school teaching as an earlier starting point for approaching students to think about the global dynamics of these students’ already robust media consumption habits.

Finally, the articles in Part III offer specific activities and assignments to incorporate discussions of global issues across different contexts in the media studies classroom. Pao-chen Tang offers a succinct yet powerful plea for returning to close reading as a teaching strategy that grounds students in a text before zooming out to questions of historical and geographical context. Weixian Pan describes how she incorporates video, as both an object of study and a pedagogical tool, into her courses to help students reflect simultaneously on Chinese and global concerns. Pamela Krayenbhul makes the case for music videos as a particularly useful set of media texts to foster comparative methods of study with low barriers to access and high topical flexibility. My own contribution details the Netflix Global Dossier, an assignment I developed for students to engage global thinking through the lens of industry studies while, at the same time, reflecting on and questioning their own U.S.-centric assumptions.

These contributions are intended as conversation starters that facilitate ongoing discussions about, and long-term action on, the issues raised therein. Overcoming the prevailing structural barriers and logistical hurdles to teaching global media requires continued conversation and collaboration from all of us invested in the field. New digital tools like Scalar or the Semantic Annotation Tool enable critically engaged analysis of audiovisual texts outside established cannons. Collaborative projects such as Cinegogía go a long way towards mitigating lack of resources. Several of us have included lesson plans and activity sheets within our article contributions to this dossier because sharing teaching materials remains an important aspect to supporting the development of the field. In short, it is my hope that the ideas and calls for action within these articles inspire others to share their experiences, resources, and strategies to further enrich the development of global media pedagogy.

1. See Masha Salazkina, “World Cinema as Method,” Canadian Journal of Film Studies 29, no. 2 (2020): 10–24. ↑

2. Joshua Neves and Bhaskar Sarkar, eds. Asian Video Cultures: In the Penumbra of the Global (Duke University Press, 2017): 21. ↑

3. Michael Curtin, “Post Americana: Twenty-First Century Media Globalization,” Media Industries Journal 7, no. 1 (2020): https://doi.org/10.3998/mij.15031809.0007.106 ↑

4. Katarzyna Marciniak and Bruce Bennett, editors, Teaching Transnational Cinema: Politics and Pedagogy (Routledge, 2016); Masha Salazkina, “Film Theory in the Age of Neoliberal Globalization,” Framework: The Journal of Cinema and Media vol. 56, no. 2 (Fall 2015): 325-349; Shekhar Deshpande and Meta Mazaj, “Centers, Forms and Perspectives in World Cinema,” Cinema Journal Teaching Dossier 2, no. 1 (2014): https://www.teachingmedia.org/centers-forms-perspectives-world-cinema/ ↑