Report on 2021 – 22 Accomplishments

This report memorializes our progress over the past academic year and outlines our plans for the upcoming year.  We remain committed to the College’s implementation of anti-racism by framing all that we do in our program through an ADEI lens.  Indeed, regular conversations among all staff and faculty in Film and Media Studies about ADEI are central to our planning, curricular scheduling, hiring, and more.

Student Engagement

Paraprofessional Position

Our paraprofessional position is one of the more demanding positions of its type on campus.  Our para-profs have significant responsibility in the operation of our program by aiding our technical director, supporting gear check-out for our filmmaking courses, co-producing our documentary series In Short for Rocky Mountain PBS, and supporting our many public-facing events (including visiting speakers, artists, and screenings).

At the start of the academic year, we made a concerted effort to give our para-prof (Melissa Mañuel) greater autonomy, freedom, and voice in our program.  Realizing that some previous para-profs had felt that they faced many demands in the job but had few opportunities to contribute their own perspective on the program’s day-to-day operation, we emphasized to Melissa that she had an equal voice to contribute and to take initiative. Melissa took full advantage of the opportunities, creating “Film Fridays,” a twice-per-block film screening, emphasizing contemporary films attuned to ADEI issues. We committed a significant portion of our operating budget to fund Film Fridays, providing catered meals so that students (not limited to FMS majors) and faculty could gather in an inclusive space to view and discuss films without academic pressures or expectations. Though Melissa has moved on to new opportunities, we are continuing the program and making it a core feature of Film and Media Studies for the future, emphasizing Film Fridays as a space for future para-profs, majors, and other interested students to curate screenings based on their interests.

Teaching

Course Content

Three of our four core faculty applied for and received Mellon “Humanities for Our Times” grants to develop new courses in Equity and Power. Scott Krzych is developing a new course, “Racial Capitalism in U.S. Film and Media (1970 to present). Arom Choi and Baran Germen are developing a new team-taught course, “Genre Filmmaking: Realism,” which intends to teach students how artists from diverse ethnic, racial, gender, and sexual backgrounds rigorously expanded what reality is and how it can be represented on screen.  Dylan Nelson plans to propose a new course of her own in the upcoming year.

We also remain committed to our institutional relationship with Georgia State University’s department of Moving Image Studies. The program at GSU is our first point of contact whenever we have visitor blocks available in film studies.  We’ve scheduled a block in Spring 2023, taught by Professor Alessandra Raengo, titled, “The Liquidity of the Black Arts,” a course that “focuses on ‘ensembles’ of contemporary black visual artists and filmmakers who practice what, at a 2004 conference on Romare Beardern’s work, Toni Morrison described as the ”liquidity” of the black arts, i.e., a constant intermingling between art forms and the understanding and practicing of one in terms of another: jazz as collage, photography as music, sound as moving images, cinematic movement as color.

Practices, Processes, & Policies

We made significant strides this year to address ADEI issues in our Documentary Exploration Grant program.  Under Baran Germen’s leadership this past year (as current FMS faculty lead for the program), we sought to make the program more welcoming to a diverse body of students by eliminating the tax inequity faced by international students when receiving awards (which can be as large as $10,000 for a single project). Previously, unlike US citizens and permanent residents, international students without “native” collaborators would be charged with an amount (up to 30%) that would be deducted from their grant monies, thus ending up with much less funding than their original award. Now, the grant program covers the extra tax expenses on behalf of the students, and the more equitable distribution of our resources allows us to reach a wider student population. Last year we were able to support two solo projects led by international students. We consider this an important development in that it allows us to think about our anti-racism transnationally.

In line with our effort to remove barriers to access grants, we have also prioritized more underrepresented stores, unheard voices, and urgent issues in the decision-making process of the selection committee. This was largely due to the composition of the committee, each year including three new members culled from faculty and students. The compositional makeup of the committee was not only diverse; we also emphasized projects that addressed matters of social justice. In short, the committee has been increasingly motivated not simply by the merit of the applicants but also the significance of their proposed stories.  The committee has opted to support projects engaged with larger social questions especially this year, such as the ones on the ecological and habitual effects of the border wall construction in the Guadalupe Canyon and on the social afterlife of an ex-mining town in Zambia, both told from local perspectives.

Finally, Dylan Nelson has worked to diversify our pool of mentors who work with our student grantees, trying to reach out to, and include, mentors from various backgrounds.

Plans for 2022 – 2023

Our most significant plan for the upcoming academic year concerns a complete re-vamping of our senior thesis process and requirements, as we embrace a more liberatory approach to the proposal process, faculty review, mentoring, and final output.

Historically, students have been tasked with proposing a senior thesis capstone by the end of their junior year. The entire faculty (as well as the para-professional) review these proposals, approving or requesting revisions over the summer. We realized that the structure of the proposal process might privilege domestic students who may, at times, more easily develop strong social networks among their peers, or who may be more comfortable being outspoken about their ideas. In response, we have broken down the hierarchical structure of the senior thesis, emphasizing collaboration among students and faculty along all steps of the process. Perhaps most significantly, the stakes of the proposal have been reduced because all seniors are assured in advance to participate in a senior film. We have also dismantled the hierarchical structure of the thesis projects: if students wish to write/direct their own project from start to finish, that remains a possibility; but if a student is passionate about one area of creative practice (say, costume design), then they may choose to work on multiple projects, emphasizing their area of interest/passion and likewise making the entire thesis process more holistic and collaborative for the senior class as a whole.

In effect, we have made the students co-collaborators in the very crafting of the thesis requirements and grading process, taking inspiration from liberatory and de-colonizing pedagogies that seek to make students equal participants in the development of their own education and educational practices.