This short essay explores the conceptual and pedagogical roles that video could take in teaching global media. My central proposal is that video is a crucial global media form that could facilitate distinctive forms of encountering “the global” both within and outside the classroom. These ideas emerge from both my scholarly work and, most importantly, my teaching experience at NYU’s global campus in Shanghai. I will first elaborate on the conceptual pitfall that conditioned video’s role in teaching media and global cultures, considering both the institutional contexts where global discourses are mobilized and the challenges the current COVID-19 pandemic poses. Situated within these broader disciplinary and institutional contexts, I will then reflect on how I incorporate video as a productive and creative pedagogical tool in course design and teaching.

In their introduction to the edited volume Asian Video Cultures, Bhaskar Sarkar and Joshua Neves describe the plastic and trans-medial nature of video that allows it to circulate across high/low tech, on- and offline networks, and geographical, cultural, and disciplinary spaces.[1] But despite its ubiquity and popularity, video remains an under-theorized medium and is conditioned under multiple normative conceptual frameworks, factors that shape video’s pedagogical use in classrooms. Sarkar and Neves critique the tendency to have video forms bracketed as “aberrations by universal claims of global and digital culture” where such normative understanding of “global” digital experiences emerge from metropolitan centers.[2] This conceptual bottleneck, while being widely critiqued in media scholarship, continues to manifest strongly in the design of global media courses and pedagogical usage of video forms.

In media courses of national, transnational, and global scope, video is often flattened as explanatory “footnotes” to major cinematic works, whose conceptual significance generate more cultural authority. Or video is used merely as an illustration of unfamiliar global phenomena/socio-cultural contexts, rather than crucial component in understanding shifting global media economy and cultural conditions. 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.[3] 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. Aware of and in response to these tendencies to treat video as a form lacking conceptual purchase and care in classrooms, I explored how to teach with video in a “global media culture” elective course during fall 2020.

First let me clarify the institutional contexts where my thinking and pedagogical experiments happened. NYU Shanghai is one of the three degree-granting global campus of NYU, and it is also the first and only Sino-U.S. university that operates upon the Chinese Gaokao system.[4] Similar to many global campuses of U.S. universities, “the global” is presented heavily in NYU Shanghai’s institutional identity and language, and is assumed to be the default educational ethos given its geographical and cultural relocation. One crucial factor in NYU Shanghai’s narrative of a global campus is the diversity of the student population: 51% Chinese students and 49% International students. This profile was disrupted by the COVID-19 pandemic and global immobility, manifesting most evidently for in-person classes where the majority of the class ended up being only Chinese students. 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 go-local students (mainly Chinese nationals from other NYU campuses that stayed in Shanghai for classes due to COVID travel restrictions). ⁠These conditions were certainly not exclusive to China but were shared by educators and students across the world. Still, satellite campuses represent important sites not simply to globalize models of education to different local cultures, but more importantly to explore what different notions of “global” can surface from engaging with its situated experience.

There are multiple ways that one can perceive a course around global media cultures. It may resemble a global assemblage of media examples, and each week it takes a touristic view or deep dive into one cultural context (from U.S. and Europe and gradually branch out to the rest of the world). It may adopt a thematically-focused view into the dynamics embedded across different national contexts. I structure the course in a slightly different fashion in hope to highlight the conceptual role of media in thinking global cultures at large, and each phrase holds distinctive objectives. In the first phase, the course sets up how media have been integral to imagination of “the global” historically. Then the course turns to vernacular models of media production, circulation and consumptions that have fallen out of US-centered media economy. The subsequent phases then take up video more seriously as both an extension of the above conceptual trajectory and a key component in course/assignment design. In the first meeting, I openly invited my students to consider the situatedness of this course in the ongoing global conditions. What does it mean to (re)think “the global” and “global media” in a time of world-wide immobility and uncertainty? And how could these reflections help to mobilize media differently that may correspond to and (possibly) intervene into global cultural processes? While this course is not exclusively about video, video offers an underlying pedagogical logic that assists students to engage with the above questions.

Intervention into global knowledge production

This phase of the course focuses on video’s role in knowledge production and is designed to comparatively look at community video projects (e.g. Wapikoni Videos⁠ in Canada[5] or From Our Eyes⁠ in China[6]), activist media production (e.g. drone footage for environmental protests, citizen video on labor rights), and contemporary artist videos. In what I called “methodological week,” students discuss and engage with the video camera as a “method” to intervene into global knowledge production. One of the most productive conversations occurred when discussing documentary filmmaker Marie Voignier’s usage of video camera in two of her works. 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.[7] The accompanying short assignment then requires students to select a particular global space (either virtual or physical), build upon the critical usage of video they learn from the class, then speculate how they intend to use video to generate meaningful encounters with the space and flows of bodies, objects, and information within. The speculative nature of this assignment is in part a response to the pandemic restrictions in terms of access, but it has proven to offer an open space for students to experiment and be creative in circumventing limitations.

(Cultural) Infrastructure for making the global from Asia

Throughout the entire class, students work with videos not as singular media texts or objects that are explanatory in nature, but as a medium responding to thinking of the global - as intervention, as interfaces of exhibition, as informal archive. Building upon the previous works done in the semester, students’ final project takes the shape of a video essay that will allow them to use the medium to enter, engage with, and intervening into global spatial dynamics, cultural economy and flows of bodies and objects. Video essay is certainly not novel in pedagogy discussion in film and media studies, and there are plenty of references for educators to incorporate this assignment into their courses.[9]

In the final phrase of the course, I guide my students to think of video essays as both visual and discursive medium that can help to foreground cultural infrastructure underlying the production of “the global,” especially from the perspective of Asia/China. I used Wang Bo and Pan Lv’s 2 Channel Video Miasma, Plants, Export Paintings (2017) as a guiding example. This artist video constructs an inter-medial cultural sphere through archival images and video, commercial cinematic footage, and painting. This cultural sphere offers a critical investigation into the cultural infrastructure that span across nineteenth century Canton and contemporary Guangdong/HK—from imperial networks of scientific research (e.g., botany, disease), global export of commercial paintings, and circulations of cinematic representation of a racially-marked Asia.[10] These representational, scientific, and material making of the “global” reflected in the artist video become a significant reference point for students as they conceptualize and create their own video-facilitated research essay. These student projects encompass a wide range of thinking: from culture history of (pirated) Chinese console gaming, to localization of Disneyland in Shanghai/Hong Kong, social and racial relations around Shanghai’s cosmopolitan nightclub culture, to fan networks underlying global K-pop industry. Despite their thematic diversity, each of these student video essay foregrounds their insights into the cultural, socio-economic, and material infrastructures that support the making of global media and global spaces.

In a time when mobility is no longer a de facto condition of everyday life, teaching with video becomes more than experimenting with its pedagogical role in global media courses. Video has long been embodying a mediated desire to “move” even when formal structures failed, when global transports halted, and when networks became blocked. These movements expressed and created by videos are not an assumed ability to flow seamlessly in physical and mediated global spaces. Rather, videos are most vigorous when they work (or are put to work) to propel or disturb social and cultural structures that help to fixate a singular notion of “the global,” as this short essay tries to demonstrate. However, this should not be the goal of only scholarly work or any single courses, but collective pedagogical efforts to rethink how we teach not only “globalized” media but also mediation that construct different globalities.

Weixian Pan is an Assistant Professor of Interactive Media Arts at NYU Shanghai and Global Network Assistant Professor, NYU. She received her PhD in Film and Moving Image Studies from Concordia University, Montreal. Her current book project examines how media intervenes into the materiality and imaginary of geological, riverine and oceanic environments, a process corresponding to contemporary China’s geopolitical desires. Her work previously appeared in Asiascape: Digital Asia, Culture Machine, and Journal of Environmental Media.

1. Joshua Neves and Bhaskar Sarkar, “Introduction,” in Asian Video Cultures: In the Penumbra of the Global (Durham: Duke University Press, 2017), 6. ↑

2. Ibid., 2. ↑

3. Specifically in the Asian contexts, see Ishita Tiwary, “Unsettling News: Newstrack and the Video Event,” Culture Machine, Vol.19 (2020); Luzhou Li, Zoning China: Online Video, Popular Culture, and the State (Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2019); Marwan M. Kraidy, “The Politics/Popular Culture Nexus in the Arab World: A Preliminary Comparison of Reality Television and Music Video,” In: Lena Jayyusi & Anne Sofie Roald (eds) Media and Political Contestation in the Contemporary Arab World. (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016). https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137539076_8 ↑

4. Unlike many global campuses in China that have their own admission process, in order to apply to NYU Shanghai, Chinese nationals need to attend the national colleague entrance exam (also known as the Gaokao system) on top of a university interview process. This dual process acknowledges the values of training in Chinese educational systems while emphasizing the scope of global knowledge. But pedagogically, especially during the freshman year, the difficulty lies in channeling learning styles and knowledge gaps come from multiple educational backgrounds. ↑

5. Wapikoni Mobile Studio that travel to Indigenous communities for workshops, screenings of short films made by indigenous directors, and support First Nation youth. Accessed July11, 2021, http://www.wapikoni.ca/home ↑

6. Yunnan Rural Documentary Initiative From Our Eyes, what provided videography training to rural communities in Qinghai, Yunan, Guangxi, Sichuan and Guizhou provinces in China, and shown works to over 50,000 local audiences. Accessed July11, 2021, http://www.xczy.org/aboutus ↑

7. Biljana Ciric and Cai Qiaoling, “Reimagining Gender Discourse Through New Modes of Globalization: Marie Voignier on the Making of Na China.” Issue 1: South of the South, Times Museum, 2020, accessed July 12, 2021, https://www.timesmuseum.org/en/journal/south-of-the-south/an-interview-with-marie-voignier ↑

8. Aihwa Ong, “On Display: The State of the World,” in Shanghai Expo: An International Forum on the Future of Cities (London&New York: Routledge 2012), 102-103. ↑

9. See Christian Keathley, Jason Mittell, and Catherine Grant, The Videographic Essay: Practice and Pedagogy, 2019, accessed August 10, 2021, http://videographicessay.org; Kevin B. Lee. “Video Essay: The essay film – some thoughts of discontent.” Sight and Sound, 2017. accessed July 12, 2021, https://www2.bfi.org.uk/news-opinion/sight-sound-magazine/features/deep-focus/video-essay-essay-film-some-thoughts ↑

10. Wang Bo and Pan Lv, Miasma, Plants, Export Paintings. Two Channel Video, 2017, accessed July 12, 2021, http://www.bo-wang.net/miasma.html ↑