Academia by ear: animating global cultures

The Global Cultures MA seeks to develop in its students a variety of competencies and key skills required to navigate an increasingly “interconnected global landscape”. To meet these core aims, the programme positions the link between the global and intercultural awareness involved in the handling of “global culture dynamics” as defining values of its organisation, structure, and delivery.

But in teaching on the modules Diversity & Inclusion in Practice and Research Project Design, as well as supervising multiple dissertations within and across multiple interdisciplinary fields of Film, Literature, Digital Culture, and Politics, the course has further opened out my own thinking around what it means to communicate through and across global cultures. My own training and expertise within Film and Media Studies has not only benefited from – and been supported by – the diverse skills and intellectual backgrounds of our students, but also by the broader critical need fostered by the programme to collectively unlearn, reframe, and subvert existing ways of understanding what gets to count as knowledge and the politics of its dissemination.

Nowhere has the convergence between knowledge production and the global been more influential upon my own research than in the website, blog, and podcast Fantasy/Animation that I co-curate with Dr Alexander Sergeant from the University of Westminster. A continuation of our edited collection Fantasy/Animation: Connections Between Media, Mediums, and Genres that we put together back in 2018, Fantasy/Animation is a collaborative, interdisciplinary, and international community of academics, practitioners, artists, curators, archivists, and fans invested in the overlap between fantasy cinema and the medium of animation. The project develops my own areas of scholarly research into animation history and contemporary digital visual culture by opening out critical conversations that better frame the study of animated fantasy media, all the while shaping its identity as a leading open access educational resource that we hope provides a space for academic discussion and debate among international scholars and students, special interest groups, and fans of fantasy and/or animation.

Fantasy/Animation currently publishes a weekly blog (featuring critical editorials, media analyses, film, television and book reviews, conference reports, and video essays), and is committed to developing this component of the project as both an inclusive site and as a ‘virtual conference’-style space for Early Career Researchers. It regularly features work from students (undergraduate, MA, PhD) from across the globe, providing a visible platform whereby scholarship can be quickly published to maximise its reach and readership. Alongside the blog, a fortnightly podcast features guests from the worlds of academia, film journalism, the VFX industry, and organised fandom. We have recorded several live episodes at the British Film Institute (BFI), Cinema Museum and Anime & Gaming Convention in London, and conducted interviews with colleagues from cultural institutions like the Barbican and British Library.

This is not least due to Fantasy/Animation’s own international reach: the blog has appeared on university reading lists in the UK, US, and Australia, with the podcast entering Apple’s Top 250 “Film and TV” podcasts in Austria, Australia, Brazil, Colombia, Estonia, Germany, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Israel, Italy, Kazakhstan, Nigeria, Russia, Sweden, Slovenia, Spain, Sri Lanka, Turkey, Uruguay, and the UK. As such, we have aimed to complement this diversity in listenership with multimedia content that interrogates fantasy and animation as popular, highly influential and, crucially, distinctly international art forms. More traditional feature-length episodes, where discussions pivot around a specific media example, sit alongside special ‘Footnote’ instalments of 10 minutes that focus on key critical or theoretical concepts in a more quick-fire style. For the former type of episode, we have recorded conversations that cover the histories of Ukrainian, Chinese, and Sub-Saharan African animation in dialogue with leading academics researching in these fields. These special guests curate a screening programme of shorts films which then form the basis of our discussions, and allow listeners to watch along as we analyse the case studies’ production histories, artistic influences, and map critical and conceptual relationships to traditions in animated fantasy storytelling.

Episode 119 of the podcast offered a unique opportunity to survey twentieth-century Arab Animation with Dr Omar Sayfo, an Affiliated Researcher in the Institute for Cultural Inquiry (ICON) at Utrecht University and a researcher at the Avicenna Institute of Middle Eastern Studies. The podcast was intended as a complement to Dr Sayfo’s recent monograph Arab Animation: Images of Identity (2021) that looks at Arab animation from the 1930s to the present by studying how Arab producers and artists have used animation to “mediate national, pan-Arab, Islamic and revolutionary identities.” The conversation turned from the broader Arab political environment into which animation and fantasy have repeatedly entered towards the conditions of non-Western animation and its subsequent movement across national boundaries, and what it means when local audiences become lost in – or perhaps even replaced by – the cartoon’s transnational and international flow.

If the Global Cultures MA as a postgraduate programme is tasked with introducing students to the “factors which shape transnational cultural aspects in our increasingly globalised world,” then this episode on Arab Animation was directly shaped by these objectives.

On a more practical level, and as with any Global Cultures MA webinar, the Fantasy/Animation podcast similarly uses the act of discussion as its own possibility for dissemination. We value the simple practice of talking across boundaries and disciplines to allow us to learn from our guests, to connect across our various intellectual positions, and to be guided by each other’s cultures and practices. It is within these continuities and ruptures of experiences that, as the master's shows, the serendipitous and rich formation of knowledge with all its moments of exchange, the working through of ‘messy’ ideas, and its carving out of new intellectual pathways are to be found.

About Dr Christopher Holliday

Dr Christopher Holliday is Senior Lecturer in Liberal Arts and Visual Cultures Education in King's Department of Interdisciplinary Humanities. His research interests include popular Hollywood cinema, digital media and film technology, animation history and theory, visual effects imagery, and cultural politics of popular media.

About the Global Cultures MA

The online Master's in Global Cultures will build your interpersonal and cultural skills to help you engage effectively with colleagues, customers, clients, suppliers, and partners in today's interconnected world. Developing the key soft skills to bridge the gaps in the global industry workforce, this course sets you up for success in the modern workplace.