IntroductionFootnote ¹

The politics of knowledge production is a long-standing debate at the heart of the discipline of international relations (IR). This debate revolves around how concepts and theories in the field are shaped by broader historical, social, political, and economic contexts and power structures, and serve to legitimize, reinforce, or challenge existing hierarchies in global politics. Scholars expose the historical situatedness of IR concepts, the role of practices in transforming academic power relations, and the importance of researcher reflexivity, and interrogate material, spatial, disciplinary, political, embodied, and temporal dimensions of knowledge production.Footnote ²

The IR classroom – by which we mean spaces in academic institutions that teach international relations – has long been identified as an important site of the politics of knowledge production in the discipline. Building on insights from the literature on critical pedagogy,Footnote ³ critical and feminist IR scholars have long placed teaching at the heart of their praxis as IR scholars and proposed innovations to explore the politics and emancipatory potential of pedagogy.Footnote ⁴ Recently, these efforts have received renewed interest in the IR literature.Footnote ⁵ In this article, we build on insights from this literature to highlight the multiple ways in which pedagogies are a site and source of power in and beyond the classroom. We suggest that filmmakingFootnote ⁶ in the IR classroom offers a particularly rich opportunity to address various dimensions of the politics of knowledge production in the discipline.

Visual IR has become anchored in IR. Numerous workshops have been organized and most big conferences in the discipline nowadays include panels on visuality and film. Scholars in IR produce films about various topics of international politics and reflexively write about their experiences of producing knowledge through filmmaking.Footnote ⁷ Film and other visual materials have also entered the IR classroom as a source of teaching and vibrant debates have emerged around their pedagogical nature and value. These debates revolve mostly around how to use visual material to illustrate and visualize IR issues or theories, the added value of doing so, the ways to evaluate their pedagogical efficiency, and the politics, performativity, and representations of visual material in international relations.Footnote ⁸ What has so far not received much attention is the potential of filmmaking in the IR classroom as a way to address the politics of knowledge production.Footnote ⁹ This blindspot is surprising, as in other disciplines – such as geography, sociology, and anthropology – the potential to address the politics of knowledge production through learner-generated films has been recognized and scholars have documented their experiences.Footnote ¹⁰ This literature highlights the potential of non-textual theorizing through filmmaking to challenge existing power structures in social sciences. In this article, we address this blindspot by focusing on filmmaking as a pedagogical process in IR and analyzing its potential to address the politics of knowledge production in the classroom contributing to the debate on the role of visuals in IR knowledge creation. Thereby, we dialogue with the interdisciplinary literature on filmmaking in the classroom; the literature on visual and arts-based knowledge production practice in the classroom in IR; and the literature on the politics of knowledge production in IR.

Drawing on the existing literature and our experiences of teaching classes where students produce their own films, we critically reflect on filmmaking in the IR classroom as a site of tackling the politics of knowledge production and non-textual theorizing in IR, and encourage IR colleagues to explore new ways to teach and theorize in the discipline. Inspired by the distinction between knowledge production and knowledge cultivationFootnote ¹¹, we propose that the practice of knowledge cultivation through filmmaking in the IR classroom can serve as a compass and generates openings to ‘stay with the trouble’Footnote ¹² of knowledge production. In this context, we understand staying with the trouble as an acknowledgement that producing a film is never innocent and requires accepting ambiguity and a process of a constant dialectic of reflection and action regarding decisions in filmmaking practice. We suggest that making films in the IR classroom encourages students to think beyond the textual production of knowledge and to reflect on, and engage in, multiple ways of theorizing IR. It also opens the possibility for addressing the affective and embodied dimensions of knowledge creation and allows for a reflective approach that addresses the power and hierarchies in knowledge creation, using the practice of knowledge cultivation as a compass. Thereby, it contributes to highlight and address power dynamics and hierarchies in the discipline and the field of international relations.

In this article, we use scriptwriting and scenes to allow us to replicate the process of structuring films and to render visible the constructed nature of narrative production (even though we are of course aware of the fact that this is still a journal article and not a film script). The script refers to a document that comprises the setting, characters, dialogue, and mise-en-scène, presenting all the elements that constitute a scene – yet as a textual part of the film production, it remains absent from the screen.Footnote ¹³ We follow textual scriptwriting praxis, such as screen directions (what can be seen or heard by the audience, description of the setting), dialogue, and slug lines written in capital letters providing details of the location, temporality, and so on. Acknowledging the destabilization of the binary between real and imagined, documentary and fiction,Footnote ¹⁴ we have taken the liberty to mix real and fiction to construct the settings and chronology of our conversations into a coherent dialogue. Instead of using the conventional ‘we’ of co-authored texts throughout the article, we use dialogical writing in the scenes where we intend to give visibility to our distinct experiences, expertise, and positionality. Acknowledging the inspiring autobiographical and autoethnographic approaches in IRFootnote ¹⁵ we use autoethnography to recall teaching the courses discussed in the article. We also draw on reflections and evaluations provided by several cohorts of students who have taken our classes since 2016 and from student films produced during our classes.Footnote ¹⁶

In the next section we situate filmmaking in the classroom in a dialogue with the various literatures mentioned above. The remaining parts are structured around five scenes. Scene one reflects on our understanding of the filmmaking as a site of tackling the politics of knowledge production; scene two focuses on filmmaking in action to present our pedagogical dispositives. Scenes three to five each address one key dimension of the politics of knowledge production raised by filmmaking in the classroom: ethics and politics; affect and embodiment; and non-textual theorizing.

Cultivating knowledge through filmmaking in the classroom

To the best of our knowledge, in the IR classroom, film and other visual materials have been used mostly as a source of illustration and an object of analysis – at least this is what published works suggest. Existing debates in the literature revolve mostly around how to use visual material to illustrate and visualize IR issues or theories, the added value of doing so, the ways to evaluate their pedagogical efficiency, and the politics, performativity, and representations of visual material in international relations.Footnote ¹⁷ For instance, in her innovative and pioneering work, Cynthia Weber proposes an introduction to the key theoretical approaches in the discipline through the analysis of films.Footnote ¹⁸ Reflecting on the added value of visuals in teaching, Lynn Kuzma and Patrick Haney propose six advantages derived from using film in class: it stimulates the senses, grounds abstract concepts, engages emotions (triggers affective learning), contextualizes history, facilitates active learning, and invites discussions of ethical issues in international relations.Footnote ¹⁹ Thus, the variety and opportunities of using visual material in the IR classroom have been widely acknowledged and documented. Inspired by the scholarship on filmmaking in social sciences classes, and the politics of knowledge production in IR – specifically research that has proposed a distinction between knowledge production and cultivation – we propose that filmmaking in IR teaching has a potential added value when compared to using film for illustration and analysis only.

Teachers in various social sciences disciplines, such as anthropology, sociology, and geography,Footnote ²⁰ have emphasized filmmaking as a vehicle to tackle the politics of knowledge production. For example, they propose that learner-generated filmsFootnote ²¹ have the potential to expose inequality, social marginalization, and injustice more deeply than books and articles because they reveal personal experiences in intimate ways.Footnote ²² Jon Anderson’s urban geography class instructed students to ‘drift’ across the city and employ film, amongst other qualitative methods, to catch different experiences in and of place, simultaneously gaining skills in digital literacy and teamwork. From their experience in sociology, Amie Hess and Kris Macomber suggest that filmmaking in the classroom supports a learning environment in which students become creators of collaboratively produced knowledge, allowing them to reflect on the nature of knowledge production processes and the tendency towards individualization.Footnote ²³ Vivienne Waller draws on her experience of teaching what she calls Sociomentary – combining sociology and documentary film – to affirm that pedagogy is ‘fundamentally about how knowledge is constructed in relations of power – how things got to be the way they are and how they might be transformed’.Footnote ²⁴ Such a classroom practice can ‘emphasize active, independent student-centred learning, encouraging students to be critical, creative thinkers, and recognizing the importance of emotions in learning’.Footnote ²⁵ We take inspiration from these insights to suggest that practising filmmaking in the classroom allows us to render visible, and critically engage with, the politics of knowledge production in IR and its wider implications for the discipline.

While critical and feminist IR scholars have long emphasized the classroom as an important site of the politics of knowledge production in the discipline,Footnote ²⁶ these efforts have recently received renewed interest.Footnote ²⁷ Contributors to these efforts position critical pedagogy at the heart of their praxis as IR scholars. Thereby, rather than keeping pedagogy separate from ‘the “real work” of research’,Footnote ²⁸ learning and knowledge production are considered political and the critique of knowledge production is linked to a commitment towards emancipation and liberation. Investigating the political implications of teaching and learning, this literature calls for recognizing the ontological dimensions of the classroom and the ways in which pedagogical practices shape the self and the world. As Erzsebet Strausz suggests: ‘With every act of knowing there is becoming, however mundane and unnoticeable it may be’. Taking seriously the ways in which teaching shapes and reflects our understanding of being and relating reveals the multiple ways in which critical pedagogies are a site and source of power in and beyond the classroom. They harbour the potential to de/un/re/script power structures and hegemonic narratives. Understanding pedagogy and the classroom as an ontological site fundamentally transforms teaching: teachers and students become both co-producers of knowledge as well as co-learners. As such, the classroom becomes an important site of the politics of knowledge production for the discipline as a whole.

In their analysis of the IR classroom, Clare Timperley and Kate SchickFootnote ²⁹ draw on Robbie Shilliam’s distinction between knowledge production and cultivation. He uses knowledge production to refer to a ‘process of accumulation and imperial extension’ – which predominantly casts (post)colonial peoples as consumers of knowledge – and knowledge cultivation to refer to a creative activity seeking ‘to till, to turn matter around and fold back on itself so as to rebind and encourage growth’ and ‘oxygenate the past’.Footnote ³⁰ In our filmmaking pedagogy, we use the notion of knowledge cultivation as a compass in the classroom. Based on our experience, the praxis of filmmaking in the classroom is rarely pure knowledge cultivation and resembles more an entanglement of knowledge production and cultivation – by which we mean a constant dialectic process of reflection and action regarding decisions involved in learner-generated films. We combine the compass of knowledge cultivation with Donna Haraway’s methodology of ‘staying with the trouble’, which emphasizes relationality and collaboration: ‘[w]e become-with each other or not at all. That kind of material semiotics is always situated, someplace and not noplace, entangled and worldly’.Footnote ³¹ Essential to this methodology is to think with other beingsFootnote ³² and thinking-with through storytelling.Footnote ³³ Haraway refers to this as SF: ‘science fiction, speculative fabulation, string figures, speculative feminism, science fact, so far’ .Footnote ³⁴ These storytelling methods are methods of tracing and pursuing multispecies justice – an essential objective for Haraway in her critiquing and dismantling of the Anthropocene and capitalism. We further suggest that filmmaking in the classroom can take such a form of storytelling that offers the possibility of rehearsing collectively the sensitivity towards subtle and mundane processes of knowledge production. This ‘requires learning to be truly present, not as a vanishing pivot between awful or edenic pasts and apocalyptic or salvific futures, but as mortal critters entwined in myriad unfinished configurations of places, times, matters, meanings’.Footnote ³⁵

In efforts to highlight the politics of knowledge production in the classroom and to encourage knowledge cultivation practices IR scholars have proposed various innovative pedagogies. They use visual or arts-based pedagogiesFootnote ³⁶ and pedagogies of embodimentFootnote ³⁷ techniques not only as didactic devices, but as an opportunity to interrogate the fundamental power-knowledge nexus in the IR classroom. Thereby, visuals play a key role. For example, sharing their experience of the design, implementation, and assessment of an art gallery project as an assignment in a class on gender and international studies, Heather Smith and her colleaguesFootnote ³⁸ emphasize the disruptive power and transformational value of student-centred collaborative visual projects that visibilize the discipline’s patriarchal knowledge production practices and empower students as co-curators of knowledge. Collaging also aims towards knowledge cultivation.Footnote ³⁹ Saara Särmä suggests that ‘unlike conventional academic arguments, which tend to foreclose other possible interpretations, art-based methods such as collaging open up multiple possible interpretations simultaneously’.Footnote ⁴⁰ Anni Kangas et al. emphasize that the materiality of collaging can create an ‘embodied community of co-learners’ Footnote ⁴¹ and destabilize teacher and student hierarchies. Similarly, Frank Möller and Rasmus Bellmer suggest that producing visual material in various forms in the classroom helps students to critically reflect on their socialization to visual cultures as connected to their situated social positions.Footnote ⁴² Thereby, the classroom becomes a network in which active engagement with visual images includes changing, sharing, and producing them to visibilize the politics of knowledge production. Developing courses that aim to enhance political visual literacy in the classroom, Yoav Galai proposes to move beyond conventional practices in IR whereby ‘visual analysis is often flattened to images that inspire criticism’ and emphasizes the importance of classroom pedagogies that centre around the production process of visuals to invite questions about power and oppression.Footnote ⁴³

Based on our teaching experience and in dialogue with the above literature, we suggest that filmmaking in the classroom has the potential to raise questions about power and oppression in the field and the discipline and to encourage the practice of staying with the trouble of knowledge cultivation in the IR classroom. Through filmmaking, students literally become cultivators of knowledge and develop a more in-depth and engaged understanding of the topics they study. In our experience, filmmaking pushes students to reflect on their knowledge creation practices: they engage in critical, self-reflexive analysis of the ethical and political dimensions of knowledge cultivation. Furthermore, filmmaking in the classroom mobilizes beneficial elements of active and experiential learning, for example, allowing students to experience the power dimensions involved in determining who gets to take the stage, remain invisible, or hold the camera. Addressing Priya Dixit’s concern that IR tends to ignore ‘the relationships between those who visualize and those who are visualized,Footnote ⁴⁴ filmmaking encourages students to not only discuss but experience ethical issues related to knowledge cultivation first hand. Furthermore, learner-generated films, as other visual methods, centre the embodied dimensions of knowledge production. Thus, we suggest that creating, instead of only consuming and analyzing films, allows students to experience these embodied dimensions – on top of all the other specific and transversal skills that they acquire through filmmaking, such as collaborative work, knowledge dissemination, critical thinking, scripting, interviews, recording, and editing.

Scene 1: Filmmaking praxis in the IR classroom

Setting: SUMMER 2023. RAHEL AND MARJAANA WORK ON THE GOOGLEDOC SIMULTANEOUSLY OR IN TURNS. ONE DAY THEY MEET ON ZOOM TO DISCUSS WHAT DROVE THEM TOWARDS FILMMAKING.

Rahel: I think we need a short section on our understanding of classroom filmmaking praxis. From where do you draw inspiration?

Marjaana: One starting point for me was to seek alternative ways of co-creating knowledge. Filmmakers in IR emphasize that using the medium of film provides alternative ways of creating knowledge. For instance, Justin de Leon suggests that there are contradictions between IR and filmmaking: whereas IR prioritizes literal and explicit ways of knowing, documentary film offers visual and empathetic forms of communication. To him, ‘[f]ilm … often resists the confines of language and explanation, which can actually limit meaning’.Footnote ⁴⁵

Rahel: I really like this quote. He nicely describes the fascinating possibilities that visual productions offer in terms of empathetic, implicit, non-linear ways of communicating. In this way, filmmaking can enrich knowledge of the international. It reminds me of William Callahan’s suggestion that documentary filmmaking offers an efficient way to appreciate ‘the power of the nonlinear, nonlinguistic, and nonrepresentational aspects of knowledge’.Footnote ⁴⁶ These aspects are difficult to produce through text-based studies or audio productions, which illustrates the ways in which the politics of knowledge production can limit our access to, and creation of, meaning, as suggested by de Leon. Of course, learner-generated films do not always necessarily mobilize this potential. But in my teaching, I encourage students to explore the possibilities of film to produce layers of meaning through a simultaneous flow of various forms of information, for example, by using editing techniques to convey something without necessarily expressing it explicitly, or to express something through voice that is opposed to what people are seeing on screen. One such strategy of creating multilayered meaning is what Michael Shapiro calls ‘shock-by-juxtaposition’,Footnote ⁴⁷ which allows filmmaking to offer various oppositional perspectives. Thus, filmmaking can cultivate knowledge by using flows of tensions and circularity. And it allows students to reflect on the processes of knowledge translation, for example, conveying (theoretical) knowledge to a non-academic audience. Importantly, film is not only an expression of the results of an inquiry, but it’s a way of learning; it’s a way of knowledge creation. Actually, the first year I did this course, the students did not write scenarios but started by writing essays and then transformed them into films. And that was a totally different process. I realized straight away that this was not what I was looking for. And so the year after, I restructured the course to divide up the filmmaking process into four elements to hand in with deadlines spread across the semester: an abstract of the film, a detailed script, a first version of edited videoclips, and the full version of the film. I inserted a feedback session for each of these tasks (sometimes involving professional filmmakers) to accompany students in the filmmaking process. I insisted that students see filmmaking as a process of knowledge creation and theorizing, writing scripts rather than papers, and creating knowledge through and with visuals right from the beginning. So, students actually create their object and analysis through a collage of found footage or through their own material. In that process, learning happens a lot through association, like for example during the editing, where there’s a lot of things you just kind of assemble, it’s like a form of collaging – it’s a different way of creating and learning.

Marjaana: I also want to emphasize that for de Leon turning to film was not just another method, but to be, as a researcher, useful to Native American communities.Footnote ⁴⁸ When I met him in 2016, he explained that for his work to be useful to native communities had meant that at times, recordings would be kept amongst the native communities – and not screened to those who have not participated in the process of making them (such as IR scholars at conferences). As a result, the focus for the filmmaker is bound to shift towards the relationships that are built in this process – and taking care of the needs of the participants when deciding what to do with the film archive created through the relationship. This was such an important critique towards the imposed necessity of films to be screened publicly at film festivals and archived increasingly in online platforms such as Youtube and Vimeo – a necessity that was present at least in the documentary film production vocational training scene I had entered a year earlier in the context of my work on the video embedded monograph Scraps of Hope in Banda Aceh.Footnote ⁴⁹ Yet, de Leon also suggests that ‘theory without action does not benefit the lives of those located at the margins’,Footnote ⁵⁰ which suggests that engagement with a topic through film should not stop when the filming and its production is completed, but rather, the commitment to ‘stay with the trouble’ should continue beyond the production, and perhaps even beyond the classroom.

Rahel: Yes, I think that’s how filmmaking becomes a pedagogy. It’s about recognizing it as a process of creating knowledge and exploring its possibilities to communicate otherwise which challenge and complement conventional forms of knowledge in the IR classroom and in IR more broadly. But, maybe for our conceptualization of filmmaking we could also draw on your chapter on ‘Visual Methodologies’?Footnote ⁵¹

Marjaana: The piece I wrote for the Oxford Encyclopedia of International Studies? For that I wanted to close read/watch the works of some of the scholars using visual expression who have challenged the way in which we continue, and at times decide to discontinue, our visual practices. By this I mean: what we understand as visual knowledge, and how we create it, and for what purposes. I have used this piece a lot in my methodology teaching, first with global development studies and now with peace and conflict studies. It allows me to discuss visuals not (only) as a method but as knowledge on their own as we discuss in scene five on filmmaking as theorizing. Filmmaking pedagogy similarly allows drawing such conclusions: it ‘can create and convey meaning’.Footnote ⁵² What we did in all our courses was that students were asked to define a research question to be answered through filmmaking instead of through an essay. But, as de Leon has also reflected upon, the dilemma remains: how to survive with film that does other things, in a discipline such as IR that is obsessed with literal knowing? I think, this is where filmmaking pedagogy allows us to point towards fundamental tensions of the politics of knowledge production in IR.

Marjaana and Rahel [SPEAKING IN UNISON]: To conclude, we suggest that filmmaking in the classroom has multiple dimensions as it offers: a praxis of collective dialogue regarding the complexities, tensions, and power relations of knowledge production; a medium for staying with the trouble of knowledge creation and for destabilizing existing practices of knowing, being, and theorizing; and an opportunity to acquire a range of technical and transversal skills. As a praxis it encourages us to push and transgress the boundaries between teaching, learning, and knowledge creation – as teaching encounters become research processes.

Scene 2: Classroom filmmaking in actionFootnote ⁵³

Setting: MARJAANA AND RAHEL SITTING IN A CAFE IN LAUSANNE AND REFLECTING ON HOW TEACHING FILMMAKING STARTED AND EVOLVED

Marjaana: I remember how you invited me for a guest lecture in 2016 to share my experience with producing films and do a session on scriptwriting with your students. That made me super excited, as it was my first attempt to turn the filmmaking praxis into classroom pedagogy – and I thought you were ahead of time in many ways. What led you to design a course with filmmaking?

Rahel: Basically, what happened is that I wanted to explore different ways of teaching and creating knowledge, so I started recording podcasts with my BA students in 2014 and in 2016 I thought why not try producing short films with my MA students? At that time, I had very little experience with producing films and so I collaborated with colleagues at the University of Lausanne, in particular with an association called Maîtres de la Caverne Footnote ⁵⁴ who provided filmmaking workshops to my students. I also invited experts from the field to share their experience with filmmaking linked to their research, and that’s how you came into play.

Setting: FLASHBACK TO 2016, SHOWING MARJAANA’S INTERVENTION AND DISCUSSION WITH THE STUDENTS IN LAUSANNE, AND PRESENTING EXTRACTS OF WHAT WOULD LATER BECOME HER FILM-BOOK.

Rahel: And how did your filmmaking class start?

Marjaana: You, without knowing it, provided me with the courage to push the visual teaching at the University of Helsinki. The first one ‘Visual Methods in Social Sciences’ in 2019 was a result of a collaborative effort with colleagues Kazimuddin Ahmed, Henri Onodera, Andrea Butcher, and Salla Sariola targeting global development and anthropology MA students.Footnote ⁵⁵ It was a visual anthropology course in which we offered students a combination of practitioner-led lectures, workshops, and film screenings and hands-on experience in making participatory ethnographic documentary film. It took a while to get there, as we realized that in order to make this collaborative effort a reality, we would need to convince our faculty that such a course requires institutional structures and resources: firstly, instead of an individual-teacher led course, we wanted to co-teach and bring our collective audiovisual expertise into the course. This required convincing the faculty to invest in hourly-based teaching to compensate groundbreaking academic labouring of those of us who were not contracted with the university at the time. Secondly, our starting point in terms of audio-visual infrastructures was zero: computers were crashing because the student dedicated desktops at the campus could not run the heavy video editing programs. Here, we practised commoning strategies: we mapped the availability of computers and editing programs by public libraries and schools with which students had connections. The course ended with a film screening where invited filmmakers commented on the student-produced films on a variety of topics, such as Extinction Rebellion, Finnish sauna culture, use of art in public space for resistance, and the Hare Krishna movement in Finland. After this encouraging first experience, we continued to build the filmmaking infrastructure at our university (e.g. microphones, stands, cameras). During this process we consulted documentary filmmaker Jouko Aaltonen to learn from other institutions – such as the Arts University that trains filmmakers – about how collectivized audiovisual infrastructures are maintained and stored, and how a workable loaning system can be organized. We also discussed how to structure our course in sustainable ways – which at the visual ethnography course was a mix of lectures on visual ethnography and technical aspects of making videos with intensive filmmaking workshops. How did you build your course?

Rahel: So, my course is on globalization and the way I set up the class is that we have lecture and reading sessions on various topics linked to the course theme where students can acquire content knowledge. Then, we offer film production workshops where students learn visual analysis and filming and editing techniques, and where we talk about the importance of audio, science film production, and visual theorizing. Alongside these sessions in class, students work in groups to pick an ‘object’ and to analyze globalization through this object in the form of a short film. Across the semester, I organize tutorials and peer-feedback sessions where students present their topic, write a script, and later share and comment on first versions of their short film. Throughout the years, students have chosen to work on objects such as graphite, chocolate, yoga, roses, rap, data centres, smartphones, t-shirts, and walls. Similar to your experience, at the end of the semester, I organize a festive film gala evening where colleagues, friends, and family are invited to watch and discuss the student productions. How did you structure your course?

Marjaana: Your experience sounds very similar to my second course in 2021, when, in collaboration with Helsinki University colleagues Marianna Vivitsou and Johanna Götz, I experimented with filmmaking on a climate change and global justice course. The course consisted of lectures, readings, and online digital storytelling clinics as the campus was closed due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Students would present their initial ideas, scripts, and at a later stage, clips. Given the challenges of physical distance, my experience of the two years running that course is that many students enjoyed learning new skills, but also to collectively produce something creative on a topic that they wanted to communicate with the wider public. Also, the latest turn to video-making technology on smartphones has definitely lowered the threshold to engage with visual storytelling. However, some students still feel overwhelmed by the idea of doing a film, so in more recent iterations of the course, I opened the format, so that they could work instead on podcasts or media-embedded blogs.

Rahel: Yes, this is a real challenge. Often, when I present the syllabus at the beginning of the semester, students are like ‘Oh, so cool we are going to make a film!’ and then a moment later, ‘Ah, but how are we going to do this?’ So, we discuss their apprehensions and I reassure them that no group ever ended up not producing a film in this class. I also show them films produced by their peers from the previous years, so they can get inspired and see that it’s totally feasible. And I’ve started inviting former students to talk to the new cohort about their experiences. Engaging the students with different hands-on camera and editing exercises immediately can also lower the initial fear of making a film. Another issue I’ve been wondering about is how to best evaluate student films.Footnote ⁵⁶ I’ve prepared an assignment guide and a detailed evaluation grid (see annex). I present these guidelines at the beginning of the semester so students can use it to guide the filmmaking process. I also inform students that the formal and ‘aesthetic’ criteria are not exclusionary. But I sometimes find myself telling students, ‘Hm, your film could be more analytical, you need more analysis’, and then I realize how such comments are conditioned by ‘mainstream’, textual, linear ways of theorizing and analyzing in the discipline. I think this speaks to general debates regarding the politics of knowledge production and the meaning of theory and theorizing, and also regarding the ‘evaluation’ of forms of knowledge that are not the usual student essays. How did you organize the evaluation?

Marjaana: We discussed amongst us teachers the evaluation criteria and decided to not only grade the films, but to also ask students to write a reflective diary. This encourages them to reflect on their ways of creating knowledge in an attempt to ‘stay with the trouble’ – that is, reflect upon choices and decisions critically from the point of view of knowledge creation. I later created a similar assessment matrix to yours that focuses on clarity or perspective, coherent plot and character/topic development, and clarity of producer’s voice/main message.

Rahel: I agree, I think that’s crucial, so the focus is also on the whole production process, not just on the outcome! My students write a production log where they reflect on their filmmaking experience and explain their methodological, theoretical, and aesthetic choices, and how they addressed the practical and ethical challenges they faced.

Marjaana: We should also mention the really positive feedback that we get from students. Our students appreciated the chance to work on video productions as it also showed them what they were able to complete over the duration of the course.

Rahel: That’s true! Course evaluations show that most students appreciate the experience and the skills that they acquire through filmmaking. They welcome the opportunity to create visual knowledge, having spent most of their studies writing papers. Do you remember what Yannick Perticone, a former student of mine, said at the SPSA conference when we presented our thoughts on filmmaking pedagogy?

Rahel continues: This year, when my former students came to talk to the new cohort, one student mentioned that what their group really liked about the experience of working together on this film project was that it allowed them to build friendships. And when I contacted a group of former students to get their permission to mention their work in this paper, they wrote back enthusiastically saying that they still have very good memories of their film project back in 2018.

Marjaana: That is nice! And it also points towards the important collective and collaborative dimensions of filmmaking pedagogy as a form of experiential learning, which goes against the predominance of individualism, competition, and rankings in teaching and academia more broadly. One student just wrote to me a few months back thanking me for the course. She had to take extra time to submit a final reflective essay, but she said she was happy to do it, as it was a course of which the themes covered by the different film projects have remained as vivid memories even now, years afterwards!

Rahel: On this positive note, shall we move to the ‘troubles’ of filmmaking?

Scene 3: The ethics and politics of filmmaking in the classroom

Setting: BACK IN 2016, MARJAANA AND RAHEL ARE IN THE CLASSROOM AT THE UNIVERSITY OF LAUSANNE, DISCUSSING WITH STUDENTS THE ETHICS AND POLITICS OF FILMMAKING

Student A: I realized that I felt weird being filmed. It was strange to see myself on the screen and hear myself speak. I prefer holding the camera and remaining invisible.

Rahel: That is really interesting! I wonder if we are ever really invisible in the work we produce, even if we do not appear on screen? I think we leave traces in whatever we do: whose story we tell, how we decide to tell a story, who we give the floor to, who gets to speak. We are always there even if we don’t explicitly bring ourselves in. What seems important is to reflect on HOW we are present, what that tells us about the power dynamics of filmmaking, and how we can deal with them using a compass of knowledge cultivation. And maybe we can also think more about how decisions get made regarding who gets to hold the camera, who is filmed, and who has the privilege to become visible or remain invisible?

Marjaana: Perhaps we could pause for a bit here and think about what it means to hold the camera? What does it tell us about the power of telling a story, and choosing the gaze towards objects around us? Knowledge creation is always embedded in power relations that intersect with different hierarchies around race, gender, access to cameras, and so on. Perspectives chosen, or even small instances such as how the camera is focused, or the image is framed [what’s in and what’s out of the frame], participate in creating representations of the world around the camera. It is never neutral and there is always a risk of perpetrating violence and reproducing existing power relations through filmmaking. Ariella Aïsha Azoulay describes how the idea of a ‘universal right to see’ and the click of the shutter materialize imperial technology – embedded in violent imperial logics of destruction of colonized worlds, people, and their cultures.Footnote ⁵⁷

So, given the camera’s legacy in surveillance and colonial governmentality, in our course, a Roma filmmaker Carmen Baltzar addressed the gaze, representations, and potential violence it causes with two exercises. We first watched her film ‘Gypsy’ which is in her words an anti-ethnography, where majority white Finns sit in front of her and the camera, and describe what Roma culture and people are like. The film painfully reveals microlevel attitudes and stereotypes towards Roma people in front of the camera. After watching the film, Baltzar showed some other examples of oppositional gaze – where, for instance, white Australian and European cultures are treated as an exotic other. The students were then asked to develop a script for a film that uses the technique of oppositional gaze to their chosen phenomenon.

Marjaana and Rahel [SPEAKING IN UNISON]: Such exercises of staying with the trouble of filmmaking can help us in developing a critical understanding of the desire to gaze, frame, and tell a story. We should not just leave it there, but instead plan concrete steps to practise empathy towards others and the representations that are produced, in order to turn filmmaking into something less violently connected to coloniality, privilege of whiteness, and educational and economic status. This requires establishing knowledge cultivation as a compass for filmmaking – or as Haraway puts it, practising response-ability – that is, ethical relationship and ability to respond to the relationships that we are entangled with.

Student B: Yes, we actually discussed how to interact with the group of taggers that we would like to interview for our film project on graffiti and the global city. We had some contacts, but people sometimes hesitated to speak to us or wanted to remain anonymous as they fear retribution. And others wanted to have a say in the images we produced to use our film to promote their ideas. How do we deal with this?

Rahel: I think this illustrates really well the responsibility we have towards our research and the communities we work with. We need to be aware of the power involved in representing and creating realities through filmmaking. At a minimum, we always need to make sure that our interactions and productions do no harm. It’s crucial and enriching to cultivate a dialogue with our interlocutors regarding their visions of the film, and desires to remain silent, anonymous, or unseen need to be respected rigorously. As we saw with Azoulay (2019) and de Leon (2018),Footnote ^58, Footnote ⁵⁹ this sometimes means not seeing, not doing, not showing, or not disclosing – but staying with the trouble of creating knowledge.

Marjaana: The question of producing representations is an important one. We have a choice between different filmmaking methodologies that address the question of representations slightly differently. On our course we decided to focus on participatory methodology.Footnote ⁶⁰ Compared with a more conventional ‘film crew’ approach – where the student groups make up the ‘crew’ and, thus, hold the strings of the production in their hands – in the participatory video methodology, students become facilitators of a filmmaking process with a group of people. Instead of choosing what the film should be about beforehand, the first task is to collectively decide what the film will be about – the group chooses a research question, does the scripting, recording, and editing together. Instead of adopting a cinematic gaze of an outsider, the participatory process, ideally, pushes the group to deal with the question of representations throughout the production process: how would we, as members of a group that is being filmed, want ourselves to be represented? Michelle Raheja calls such a filmmaking process practising ‘visual sovereignty’, whereby details of the film are negotiated with participants, directors and producers enact as facilitators instead of being in charge of making the film’s final decisions, and relations are continued long after the camera work is completed.Footnote ⁶¹ Such an approach requires constant attention to the politics of the process of filmmaking. Using knowledge cultivation as a compass helps to recognize moments during the knowledge creation process when power relations and hierarchies of knowledge become salient, and allows the group to address emerging ‘troubles’ collectively. However, based on my later experiences, this approach might require a longer process than our current 7- or 12-week course structures offer, so I have been thinking of expanding the course to two semesters. Furthermore, Vivienne Waller raises an important institutional ethics review question: a 12-week course is not sufficient time to produce a film if ethics clearance is required for learner-generated films that involve human subjects.Footnote ⁶² In such a case, learner-generated films could draw from existing research and use animation or collaging techniques, instead of recording new material involving humans.

Rahel: Perhaps this is the right moment to discuss affects and embodiment as it provides another dimension of the politics of knowledge production in filmmaking.

Scene 4: Affects and embodiment in filmmaking in the classroom

Setting: ONLINE WRITING SESSIONS IN JUNE AND AUGUST IN PREPARATION FOR THE EISA 2023 CONFERENCE IN POTSDAM

Marjaana: Rahel, when we met earlier this year on Zoom to plan for this piece, it was you who brought up the importance of covering affects and embodiment in filmmaking pedagogy. Would you like to kick off the conversation on this? What initially prompted you to suggest it? I have to admit that when embarking on the journey of filmmaking in the classroom, I was not really primarily thinking of it as embodied praxis. My own take on it was much more focused on representations – which of course, retrospectively, connect intimately to questions of embodiment and affects. Taking seriously the ontological dimensions of filmmaking pedagogy, it becomes clear that films constantly construct gendered and racialized embodied subjectivities that have material consequences.Footnote ⁶³

Rahel: During the first year, I realized that students often experience filmmaking as an embodied way of creating knowledge and affect really plays an important role too. For example, there was a group of students who worked on the global governance of graphite. In their film, they document how in their efforts to find out more about the origins and extraction practices of graphite, they physically traveled to a graphite mine in the Swiss alps and continued their travels virtually to China by means of documentary material. During the production process and in their film, they use graphite to draw and write on screen and to play with the material, creating artistic representations of their object of inquiry with their fingers drenched in graphite. This scene is juxtaposed with a scene that shows how workers in China extract graphite and how their houses, clothes, and skins are soaked in graphite, turning them gray and making them ill. I find this a strong illustration of the affective and embodied dimensions of filmmaking. It also painfully illustrates the unequal forms of embodiment in international relations. Being conscious of the often-fatal effects for extraction workers who are exposed to graphite turned the students’ playful and artistic touch of graphite into particularly intimate experiential insights into the violence of the global political economy. The affective dimensions created through embodiment and juxtaposition allowed them to convey a complex picture of graphite and the tensions and power relations involved in its global traveling. It also illustrates the ways in which we can interact with materiality through filmmaking – in response-able ways. The viewer gets to see and ‘touch’ graphite and its complex, contradictory, and sometimes deadly materiality, highlighting the potential of filmmaking to create multi-layered meaning in an attempt to follow the compass of knowledge cultivation. And I think that we can really explore this potential of filmmaking pedagogy to render students aware of the multiple forms of knowledge creation. The embodied and affective dimensions of filmmaking also emerged in my own experience of producing a short film related to a co-authored article on “The financialization of remittances: Governing through emotions”Footnote ⁶⁴ where we filmed a scene throwing paper planes made out of fake green dollar notes, the symbol par excellence used to represent remittances. This playful enacting and embodying of the process of sending remittances allowed us to relate differently to migrants’ experiences and the emotional regimes that seek to discipline migrants into sending more money.Footnote ⁶⁵

Marjaana: I think you are touching upon something very important that I keep returning to, especially when discussing work or labouring with my contemporary dancer friends. For them, labouring is always embodied – they are trained to think through their body from the start. Whereas for, at least Western epistemologically trained scholars, we rarely do so, but rather differentiate mind and body, or as Susanna Hast calls it, we practise ‘disembodied research methods’.Footnote ⁶⁶ As a result, we explore and learn to find the embodiedness separate from the thinking processes. Yet, we often end up complaining how sitting and writing in front of the computer makes our bodies hurt! Clearly, we’ve learned to ignore our bodies and, thus, the embodied, and affective labouring of scholarship is often left out from the scholarly equation.

In Sounds of War Susanna Hast explored using songs for creating embodied knowledge of war through ‘aesthetics of non-combatant experience’ with specific attention given to compassion, dance, children’s agency, and love.Footnote ⁶⁷ The book introduces bodily awareness and song writing as research methods to be able to theorize on aesthetics, meaning-making through interaction with sensibilities and thought.Footnote ⁶⁸ Hast has also worked on what she calls autotheory, whereby she draws from Lauren FournierFootnote ⁶⁹ to connect feminist practices across media and form, such as conceptual art, body art, film, and performance, and experiential writing. Thus, in many ways, pushing and transgressing the boundaries of canonized academic expression connects filmmaking pedagogy with insights of feminist theorizing on the body and embodied politics.Footnote ⁷⁰

Rahel: I find that affective dimensions actually play out in many different ways in filmmaking pedagogy. Inspired by Cynthia Enloe and Linda Ahäll who encourage us to follow our (feminist) curiosity and affective reactions in research,Footnote ⁷¹ I encourage students to observe and take seriously their affective reactions during the research process, to follow them, and to use them as indicators that they are up to something interesting. During classes, we discuss the role of affect in filmmaking with the students and reflect on how to concretely deal with affect in their films, which affective reactions they aim to provoke in the viewers, how to ‘create’ them through visuals and audio, and so on. And we also reflect on the ways in which emotions can be used as a governing tool in various sites, in particular, in neoliberal settings. For example, one group investigated the emotional regimes related to the production and consumption of ‘roses’ and its role in creating a global industry and a ‘logistics of love’. Filmmaking provides particularly effective tools to convey such emotional regimes in non-representational and non-linear ways.

Scene 5: Filmmaking as theorizing

Setting: MARJAANA AND RAHEL PRESENT THEIR IDEAS AT THE SPSA CONFERENCE. A PARTICIPANT ASKS A QUESTION THAT PROMPTS A DISCUSSION ON THEORIZING THROUGH FILMMAKING

Member of audience: I have a very quick question, but maybe the answer is more complex, how can theories and concepts go through films without necessarily explaining them? Maybe through soundtracks, through video editing techniques? I don’t know. Or maybe this is something that we have to accept that is partially lost. Lost in translation, basically.

Marjaana: Good question. In the visual methodologies pieceFootnote ⁷² I illustrate theorizing disasters through visuals, using examples of work from other scholars. I think that theorizing through visuals requires a different ‘language’ or form of expression that we need to learn. And we need to challenge our notions: what do we mean by conceptualizing? One film from the climate justice course focused on the question of food security and seed sovereignty, inspired by Vandana Shiva’s book Making Peace with Earth.Footnote ⁷³ The students drew on the genre of poetry film – using a mix of word poetry, visuals, and sounds – to create a juxtaposition of the current global food system that disconnects consumers from the environmental concerns. Theorizing here happens with the medium of a film that uses a storytelling technique without a clear plot and turning the seeds and mountains into the main protagonists of the film, combining visuals with poetry. Thus, the film embodies a shift from anthropocentrism to the recognition of the sovereignty of the more-than-human – the seeds and the Himalayas – moving beyond textual theorizing. I connect this to Haraway’s methodology which is based on science-fiction authors such as Ursula Le Guin. Haraway writes: ‘her theories and stories are capacious bags for collecting, carrying, and telling the stuff of living’.Footnote ⁷⁴

Rahel: I agree, the key question is: what do we mean by theorizing, by concepts? And maybe what are the possibilities that filmmaking offers for theorizing in non-representational ways? Of course, one key aim of filmmaking pedagogy is to get students to theorize, maybe in different ways. Here we draw from postcolonial feminist thinkers that encourage embodied and sensuous knowledge in a response and critique towards Europatriarchal knowledge dependent on rationality and a dualistic worldwiew in which rational knowledge is juxtaposed and prioritized over affects and embodied experience.Footnote ⁷⁵ For example, looking at the films that my students produce, I can see that they use various ways of theorizing, on a large scale between, and mixing, explicit and implicit, representational and non-representational. These are not dichotomies, in the end. Some insert concepts into their films in explicit ways, for example by adding a quote on screen or with a voice-over developing a concept. Others use more implicit ways of theorizing, translating their theoretical readings into a story or a drawing. For example, one group put the concept of assemblage in action through an animation of the global governance of PET bottles and the circular economy. In some ways, filmmaking pushes us to visualize our concepts through worlds of images and families of symbols, which also affects the process of theorizing itself. Still other students actually theorize through their experience of the filmmaking process, as with the focus on experiential knowledge in the film on graphite.

Marjaana: I want to further discuss the idea of films, or film pedagogy for that matter, to be non-representational – if we understand it to mean work that does not represent a being, place, or a thing. As an ethnographer I am cautious of turning complex lived experiences or phenomena into manageable and often invisibly framed stories. There’s a whole debate regarding the politics of (visual) storytelling. For example, Sujatha Fernandes suggests that the curation of Pakistani education activist Malala Yousafzai’s story presented her as ‘a deserving empathetic subject; nonconfrontational compared to the angry Muslims who dominate Western media coverage’.Footnote ⁷⁶ Thus, curating the experiences of one person can justify a political discourse, or as Fernandes suggests, a ‘tool of philanthropy, statecraft, and advocacy’.Footnote ⁷⁷

So, there’s, of course, that element of danger present in filmmaking, which Susanna Hast has tackledFootnote ⁷⁸: how can stories that are written or filmed become violent if they are ‘stilled’Footnote ⁷⁹ (Manning 2007, xvii)? Hast writes: ‘bodies and politics are stabilised in the name of a larger system like the nation-state or the body-politic … Stills are choreographed and composed to set boundaries for people and their imaginations’.Footnote ⁸⁰ This reflection suggests that theories and concepts that we use also participate in ‘stilling’ and thus can be potentially violent, highlighting the politics of knowledge production. One way to stay with the trouble of filmmaking in this context could be to keep the stories of filmmaking open – through what Möller and BellmerFootnote ⁸¹ call a cycle of interaction and change – that is, watching films from the editing software, with the possibility of cutting, but also, returning to the original video clips, rather than only screening final cuts. Or we can use knowledge cultivation as a compass to rather focus on the processes of doing films as embodied relationality, as de Leon suggests (2018).Footnote ⁸²