Spotlight: Activist and Revolutionary Film and Media Scholarly Interest Group

Spotlight:Activist and Revolutionary Film and Media Scholarly Interest Group Sarah Hamblin (bio) and Christopher Robé, SIG Co-chairs (bio) HOW DID THE SIG ORIGINATE? The Activist and Revolutionary Film and Media scholarly interest group (SIG) emerged from a desire for community. There are lots of people invested in radical political film and media, but since the 1980s, this research has become increasingly factionalized. Although we both knew people working in this area, things felt pretty disconnected. We wanted to develop a SIG that would reconnect scholars and practitioners working across these subfields and forge a scholarly community that would help formalize and legitimize this area of study. Interdisciplinarity remains central; we didn't want to create a group around a singular definition of activism or that privileged a particular type of media or methodology. We work in quite different areas ourselves—Sarah is interested in aesthetics and tends to focus on more traditional conceptions of cinema, whereas Chris takes a more ethnographic approach that centers community media—and we wanted to draw on these complementary investments as a way to bring in scholars and practitioners working across a variety of historical periods, geographical contexts, theoretical perspectives, and methodological approaches. Creating the SIG in 2019 felt timely as well; we're facing an exponential series of socio-political and environmental crises that have coupled with the emergence of new forms of digital media and major transformations in the structures of production, distribution, and exhibition to spark a profound [End Page 1] reinvestment in activist and revolutionary film and media of all kinds. We wanted to build a SIG that would connect people working on these urgent contemporary issues. HOW DO YOU SEE THE SIG IN RELATION TO THE SOCIETY FOR CINEMA AND MEDIA STUDIES (SCMS) AS AN ORGANIZATION AND FILM AND MEDIA STUDIES AS A FIELD? The SIG is an extension of our investment in the politicization of both the organization and the field more broadly. This is a vital task in the current climate, which includes frequent attacks on academic freedom; the infiltration of well-funded far-right groups like Campus Reform and Turning Point USA onto campuses; the evisceration of humanities funding; and the increasing neoliberalization of the university and the precarization of academic labor. Making political work and the engaged analysis of it more visible is important; it provides a support system for those of us who teach and research material that might put us at risk from these attacks while also affirming the significance of this approach and the wide range of politically engaged media we study. We also want to push SCMS as an organization to take a more active stance on these issues and to dedicate itself more explicitly to offering guidance and support around politically engaged teaching and research. We're hoping we can work with the Executive Committee and other SIGs and caucuses to develop resources for advice and assistance when a faculty member is targeted by Campus Reform or is attacked for teaching critical race theory, for example. We'd also like to encourage SCMS to engage in institutional advocacy and activism around professional issues that affect those working in cinema and media studies. Overall, we see the SIG as more than a means to connect scholars around shared research interests, although this is central. The conditions of academic work need to be addressed just as much as the movements, filmmakers, and artists that we write about. After all, thoughtful and engaged research requires substantive resources. In light of this, we want to engage with other SIGs and caucuses working at these intersections to help make SCMS more inclusive and inviting to non-white, non-middle-class scholars. HOW DOES THE SIG RESONATE WITH THE CURRENT MOMENT OF ONLINE AND OFFLINE ACTIVISM? We see the current wave of protests as a partial extension of grassroots resistance to the Great Recession of 2007–2009, which included global student movements against tuition hikes and reduced funding; Take Back the Land and other land reclamation movements influenced by the Brazilian Landless Workers' Movement and Indigenous activism; copwatching and community organizing against the murder of Oscar Grant in 2009 and others; climate justice movements like...