Overview

Description

CALENDAR DESCRIPTION:

Explores social, economic, and political change around the globe, through documentaries and feature films. Examines pressing issues that shape and reflect people’s lives in diverse countries and regions, from Asia and Latin America, to Africa, Europe, and the Middle East. Breadth-Humanities.

COURSE DETAILS:

What can a film tell us about the world that a textbook cannot? This course takes seriously the idea that cinema is not merely entertainment, but a form of knowledge and a way of seeing social structures, historical forces and political struggles in a way that might otherwise remain invisible or abstract. Each week, we travel somewhere different: from colonial Algiers to the Japanese countryside, from the streets of Dhaka to the deserts of Saudi Arabia, from Gaza to the Pacific Ocean. In each of these contexts we ask: who made this film? For whom, and from what position? Whose experience is centred, and whose is left at the margins?

The films in this course span documentary and fiction, the canonical and the overlooked, the celebrated and the controversial. Together they address some of the most pressing questions in our world today: How does colonial violence shape the present? Who performs the labour that sustains global economies, and at what cost? How do people move across borders and how do states, employers and communities respond when they arrive? What does desire look like under occupation or displacement? How do capitalism and extraction reshape environments and the people who depend on them?

Students will learn to read film analytically, using short paired readings alongside them. No prior knowledge of film studies or international studies is required – only a curiosity and willingness to sit with difficult material.

COURSE-LEVEL EDUCATIONAL GOALS:

In this course students will develop the ability to:

• Analyze film as a primary source clearly identifying how cinematic choices construct particular accounts of social and political reality.
• Apply core concepts in international studies – including colonialism, migration, labour, capitalism, sovereignty and representation.
• Connect global and local scales depicted on screens by connecting them to processes like global supply chains, border regimes and ecological crisis.
• Develop analytical writing skills in order to construct clear, evidence-based arguments about film and world politics in their written work.

Grading

Materials

MATERIALS + SUPPLIES:

All readings will be available electronically and hyperlinked through the course Canvas page. You will not be required to buy any textbook for this course.