March 3-4, 2022

Online symposium

The Department of Communication, Media and Film is thrilled to host “Cinemas of Global Solidarity”, a two-day virtual symposium with an outstanding list of international speakers.

This symposium will explore the entwined legacies of anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist internationalism in the cinema with a view toward contemporary forms of politicized moving image culture. Presentations will focus on how film, in both its aesthetic strategies and broader circuits of distribution and exhibition, has worked as an instrument of global coalition building, imagining alternatives to the uninhibited flows of market finance and the militarized borders of the nation state. In confronting the problem of solidarity in its diverse geopolitical, historical, and conceptual dimensions, the symposium brings together a group of scholars whose work spans from the Communist international solidarity documentaries of the 1920s and 1930s, to the third cinemas and counter-cinemas of the 1960s and 1970s, to more recent iterations of world cinema, decolonial cinema, and the militant image. We aim to respond to a growing impetus within film and media studies to reopen both the influential and overlooked film radicalisms of the past in order to better conceptualize the role of cinema within the ideological battle-lines of advanced capitalism.

Speakers include:

• Rizvana Bradley (University of California, Berkeley)
• Luca Caminati (Concordia University)
• Matthew Croombs (University of Calgary)
• Rosalind Galt (King’s College London)
• Malini Guha (Carleton University)
• Sarah Hamblin (University of Massachusetts Boston)
• Pato Hebert (New York University)
• Alexandra Juhasz (Brooklyn College)
• John MacKay (Yale University)
• Mariano Mestman (University of Buenos Aires)
• Lakshmi Padmanabhan (Northwestern University)
• Philip Rosen (Brown University)
• Masha Salazkina (Concordia University)
• Ling Zhang (Purchase College)

Please register at cinemasofglobalsolidarity.com to attend.