Film & Audiovisual Studies Lectures Playlist

I recently embarked on a personal project I've been meaning to undertake for a while now, and that is to reboot my archived lectures from years of teaching fellowships here and fixed-term lectureships there and distribute them online. Back in 2017 I started this with screencasts of my conference papers uploaded to YouTube and intended to do the same with lectures. 

A number of reasons led to avoidance. One is that only the older ones that (I feel from experience) are less robust have full notes while the stronger, more recent ones have scant notes, because that's where I had got with knowledge and retention at the time. I also got really into audio and wanted to have a go at making the podcast, which I've been doing for three years now. Another reason was simply that it dredges up memories, many of them painful, from my times at different universities in different cities. There were tough experiences everywhere I taught, but also incredible friendships, communities and activities that I miss. If the course of CBT I did in the Autumn taught me anything it is that avoidance, if possible, should itself be avoided, and when you feel able it is better in the long run to face down the memories and make power out of them. 

Not only is the process of making the videos cathartic, I'm re-learning from my younger self. Late-twenties me has things to teach mid-thirties me, which I'm enjoying. The material is far from perfect, such were the conditions of hammering the lectures together under a strenuous workload, constant application writing, clamouring to maintain research and dealing with dodgy landlords, noisy neighbours, bullies, injuries (so many bad falls), loneliness, homesickness and a feeling of displacement accompanied by guilt due to the enormity of the refugee crisis. So, yes, this collection of work is more than its surface for me. But I hope, for all their problems and incompleteness, they are of use to anyone who stumbles upon them. 

I know I probably ought to have begun at the start and put the intro/survey modules first, but I began on impulse one day and went with what I saw first in the alphabetical file order on my external hard drive, that is, >Aberdeen>Cin&AmAg, the Cinema & the American Avant-garde specialist course I designed and led at University of Aberdeen in 2013. Was that really eight years ago?

Before those start to come through on the feed, though, I've launched the playlist with something more recent that I also released as audio on Audiovisual Cultures this week. It was a guest lecture/seminar session for an MA module on language in film and television at the Universite de Lausanne, Switzerland, for my most excellent friend Jenn Thorburn. It takes a walk in a different direction with the research I'd been doing on No, and the students asked some really fab questions that got us thinking about subtitle translations and indigenous languages. However, the recording is of my run-through a few days before, which I hope still provides food for thought. 

The lectures will release every other Wednesday in the podcast's between weeks. They feel like unfinished business, and I hope seeing this through will help release me enough to properly move on to other things. More so, I do hope they can lend a hand with access to education. Please do share with your networks.

Audio versions of the lectures will be available for Buy Me a Tea + patrons on their private RSS feeds. See patreon.com/avcultures to find out more and sign-up.