How (not) to clap, cheer or “check the box” on diversity in the film classroom

In this paper, I share approaches I use to develop a critical engagement with diversity in documentary media education. I discuss the inclusion and curation of diverse documentary media and interdisciplinary theoretical materials through which cinema can be recognised as a space of competing discourse formations and aesthetics. My classes on documentary media combine documentary and film studies, postcolonial and feminist thought and ethnography to equip students in developing a historically contextualised understanding of media texts. Through contextualisation, students are equipped to appreciate the sociohistorical worlds that documentaries depict/represent and the specific history of film aesthetics as they develop in dialectical relationship to the wider politico-cultural and economic frameworks within which films get made and circulate. I share a range of exercises students undertake that facilitate them in contextualising their own reactions to documentaries as tied to their subject positions and that alert them to the differences in the histories and social formations of the subjects they see on screen. This facilitates students in appreciating film texts on specific terms, for the work they do in the contexts of their production and reception. The paper uses specific examples of materials and approaches from courses I teach.