The Office of Student-Industry Relations

For those interested in exploring careers in the film industry, The Office of Student-Industry Relations offers frequent career meetings (both group and individual) and workshops.

Teaching Statement

Below you will find a copy of the teaching statement sample distributed in class.

Statement of Teaching Philosophy

Priya Jaikumar

5331 N. Winthrop #3, Chicago IL 60640

priya-j@nwu.edu

I was drawn to teaching communication and media studies courses after working as a print and television journalist in India because I found a dearth of critical spaces within which it was possible to examine, contest, and understand the contemporary mass-mediated socio-political environment. Sic years ago, I was given my first opportunity to teach in the United States, a country that was then unfamiliar to me except as a hyper-construction of its own media and texts. Experiences during this first encounter with teaching formed the kernel of my teaching philosophy. I found that I had an easily available comparative international framework of analysis with which I could inform class discussions. Moreover, I was keenly interested in my student's views, because they gave me access to the lived experience of a media context that I had studied, and that I had entered only recently. In conscious continuity, I would say that today my teaching philosophy rests on a belief in critical pedagogy and student involvement.
In any course, there is a core of information that I expect all students to acquire by the end of the term. I take for granted the value of clarity, both in my expectations from my students and in the structure of the course. But a class must go beyond this. I do not believe that teaching should contribute merely to the accretion of information. My best teachers have been those who provided me with a durable vocabulary for analysis, informed by a sense of history and a conception of what was at stake. Whether I have been employed to teach a course on Public Speaking, Popular Culture or Film History, I have tried to cultivate the same attitude towards pedagogy, which depends on a comprehension of what the students find relevant while extending their concerns with new material and questions. For this, teaching requires a degree of preparedness combined with spontaneity. Strong syllabi, readings and screenings remain ineffective unless they are brought alive in class. Knowing how to present material, phrase questions, provide an assortment of information, draw links between the familiar and the unfamiliar are some ways in which learning can be made more dynamic. Additionally, nothing communicates itself more contagiously than a genuine interest in the course material. Students are inspired to do better if the teacher is herself enthused about the texts.
I do not believe there is an ideal proportion for combining lectures with discussions, but vary them depending on the nature of the class. There are several things I have learnt over the course of my experience as a teacher. I believe it always helps to know your clas both as individual students and as a collective. I found out through the mismanagement of a difficult situation early in my career that controversial subjects are best approached by first questioning the collective for its dissenting views rather than by opposing individual students' opinions. Also, given that a class combines students at varying levels of understanding and interest in relation to the subject, I find that despite disparities something valuable may be got from student responses at all times when the students are encouraged to refer their comments to specific arguments in the texts, to link them to previous class discussions, or to related matters of contemporary relevance. A course is a comprehensive exposure to certain ideas and discussions, and I like to set up dominant themes at the back of the class that we may collectively return to and evaluate from time to time, based on our learning through the term. Because I consider a course to be a comprehensive unit, I always prefer to include such factors as student improvement and effort to the usually normative standards of evaluation.
Being a teacher has altered me as an individual. I find that I have trained myself to listen to people better. I am more attuned to the role of power within a small group, whether this is distributed along the lines of gender, race, class or seniority of rank. Ideally, my role as a teacher would be an extension of that which I hope to embody as a person: clarity of thinking without a dullness of routine and the predictable, and an ability to inform and critique while avoiding dogmatic thought or humorlessness.

Sample Abstract

Below you will find a copy of the sample abstract Priya distributed in class.

Visualizing Architectures of Insurgency

A few aspects of the anti-colonial Indian uprising of 1857 are immediately evident when we turn to records of the event. It attracted international attention for its magnitude of violence against the occupiers, interpreted through various political lenses including the vision of Karl Marx, who treated it as an exposure of the "barbarism of bourgeois (European) civilization" in his articles for the New-York Daily Tribune. The event produced a definitive rupture in the form of global empire, as the British government assumed authority over the corporate East India Company, beginning an era of colonial administrative rationalities worldwide. Equally significant, the uprising marked photography's widespread use in managing the resistant colonial body, inaugurating photography as a political tool.
While attention has been paid to Britain's photographic staging of dead colonial bodies to commemorate the terrible vengeance wreaked upon those who would be insurgents, shots of ruined cities central to the insurgency are treated as incidental backdrop. Arguing that ruins bearing the shock of recent violence constitute a rupture in the picturesque aesthetic of British "follies" (monuments deliberately constructed to appear whittled by time, to cultivate a contemplative spectator), I study the production of space and spectatorship in a photographic album of Lucknow's architecture in 1859, published shortly after the city was demolished for playing a key part in the insurgency. During the early to mid nineteenth century, when diverse objects were referred to as "albums" (including scrap books of Victorian gentlewomen and Englishmen's private collections of public images), the Lucknow album is distinct in offering a pre-cinematic narrative, structured like an early travelogue in auto-ethnographic mode, addressing a modern viewer by using a kinetic sense of movement across pitted buildings with deep historical residues. A dual hermeneutic operates as the "anti-aesthetic" of destruction annihilates the classic contemplative viewer, and the image of a ruin--Lucknow in this instance, but proleptically also Ayodhya, the World Trade Center, Faluja--mobilizes a voyeuristic tourist while enacting the phantom presence of a menacing mob, a key figure of phobia for modern technological mediation worldwide. Placing the Lucknow album in relation to two films with the same locational referent--the Edison silent Relief of Lucknow (USA, 1912) and the Urdu Chaudhvin ka Chand (India, 1960), both of which move location from an "unconscious optic" to a foregrounded terrain--I describe how opposing spatial concretizations of insurgency lead to differing but comparable modes for consuming a violent history and politics through the visual.

Bibliography:

1. Bruno, Guiliana. ATLAS OF EMOTION: JOURNEYS IN ART, ARCHITECTURE, AND FILM. New York: Verso, 2002.
2. Chakravarty, Gautam. INDIAN MUTINY AND THE BRITISH IMAGINATION. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2005.
3. Chaudhary, Zahid. "Phantasmagoric Aethetics: Colonial Violence and the Management of Perception." CULTURAL CRITIQUE 59 (Winter 2005):63-119.
4. Eisenstein, Sergei. "Montage and Architecture," (c.1937), ASSEMBLAGE 10 (1989):111-31.
4. Oldernburg, Veena Talwar. THE MAKING OF COLONIAL LUCKNOW, 1856-1877. NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984.
5. Lloyd, David. "Ruination, Partition, and the Expectation of Violence (on Allan deSouza's Irish Photography)," SOCIAL IDENTITIES 9, no.4 (December 2003): 475-509.
6. Sturken, Marita. TOURISTS OF HISTORY: MEMORY, KITSCH AND CONSUMERISM FROM OKLAHOMA CITY TO GROUND ZERO. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007.

Biography:
Priya Jaikumar is Associate Professor at the School of Cinematic Arts, University of Southern California. She has published articles on colonial and postcolonial cinemas, questions of state power, feminism, and transnational cultural formations. Her book CINEMA AT THE END OF EMPIRE details the intertwined histories of British and Indian cinema during the late colonial period.

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Shorter Version

Title: Visualizing Architecures of Insurgency

The anti-colonial Indian uprising of 1857 produced a definitive rupture in the form of global empire, beginning an era of colonial administrative rationalities worldwide. Equally significant, it marked photography's widespread use in managing the resistant colonial body, inauguating photography as a political tool. While attention has been paid to Britain's photographic staging of dead colonial bodies to commemorate imperial vengeance, shots of ruined cities central to the insurgency are treated as incidental backdrop. Arguing that ruins bearing the shock of recent violence constitute a rupture in the picturesque aesthetic, I study the production of space and spectatorship in a photographic album of Lucknow's architecture, published shortly after the city was demolished for playing a key part in the insurgency. With "albums" referring to diverse objects (including scrap books of Victorian gentlewomen), THE LUCKNOW ALBUM is distinct in its pre-cinematic narrative, structured like an early travelogue in auto-ethnographic mode, addressing a modern viewer in a public space, paced kinetically across pitted buildings with deep historical residue. A dual hermeneutic operates as the image of a ruin--Lucknow in this instance, but proleptically also Ayodhya and Faluja--mobilizes a voyeuristic consumer while enacting the phantom presence of a menacing mob, a figure of phobia for modern technologized mediation worldwide. Placing THE LUCKNOW ALBUM in relation to two films with the same locational referent--Edison's RELIEF OF LUCKNOW (USA, 1912) and the Urdu CHAUDHVIN KA CHAND (India, 1960)--I describe how the circulation of opposing spatial concretizations of insurgency produce a violent history through the architectural visual.

Journals

Below you will find a list of journals (and links) that have been compiled from the Fall 2006 and Fall 2007 sections of CTCS 506. Refer to the list distributed in class for even more journals to check out.

Animation: An Interdisciplinary Journal
Animation Journal
Art Bulletin
Camera Obscura: Feminism, Culture and Media Studies
Cinema Journal
Feminist Review
Film & History: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Film and Television
Film History: An International Journal
Film Quarterly
Genders
GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies
Grey Room
Images: The Journal of Film and Popular Culture
Journal of Popular Culture
Journal of Popular Film and Television
Journal of Visual Culture
Journal of Women and Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory
Jump Cut: A Review of Contemporary Media
Modern Asian Studies
New Media and Society
positions: east asia cultures critique
Race & Class
Scope
Screen
Sight & Sound
Spectator
The Velvet Light Trap

Syllabus/Course Design

The Center for Excellence in Teaching contains helpful hints for how to create a syllabus/design a course, including a syllabus template from the USC Office of Curriculum. The Curriculum Handbook breaks down the syllabus into several sections:

Heading and Administrative Matters
Introduction and Purposes
Course Requirements and Grades
Course Readings/Class Sessions
Statement for Students with Disabilities
Statement on Academic Integrity

More detailed information can be found in the above link.