A pedagogy of contagion

The life‐history method is well suited for promoting awareness about family history and facilitating intergenerational exchange. This technique enables individuals to discover and examine the people, values, experiences, and patterns that comprise their family heritage. Life‐history investigation is an inexpensive, practical, and positive approach to exploring family processes and history. The method is appropriate for a variety of situations and people, including senior citizen groups, church groups, classrooms, families, and community groups of all ages. Intergenerational exchange is promoted when younger and older people engage in self‐disclosure. Revealing personally meaningful information to an interested listener has many beneficial results. Older people review their lives with a sympathetic audience, and younger people discover facts and fictions about their families of origin. Generational stereotypes are lessened as well. Life‐history research is grounded in the oral tradition of folklore and the...

The Cinémathèque Française’s long-running Cinéma Cent Ans De Jeunesse (CCAJ) has become one of the most influential film education projects in the world today. This article reflects critically and in detail upon five years of the delivery of the project in Scotland, considering the changing pedagogical shapes of the project’s ‘curriculum’ alongside changing ecological factors (such as class size and age and lesson time) in considering how a small nation such as Scotland might best employ CCAJ as a means of addressing foundational film education.

Cinema was the most important new artistic medium of the twentieth century and modernism was the most important new aesthetic movement across the arts in the twentieth century. However, what exactly is the relationship between cinema and modernism? Cinematic Modernism and Contemporary Film explores how in the early twentieth century cinema came to be seen as one of the new technologies which epitomised modernity and how cinema itself reflected ideas, hopes and fears concerning modern life. Howard Finn examines the emergence of a new ‘international style’ of cinema, combining a poetic aesthetic of the image with genre-based fictional narrative and documentary realism. He provides concise accounts of how theorists such as André Bazin, Siegfried Kracauer, Gilles Deleuze and Jacques Rancière have discussed this cinematic aesthetic, clarifying debates over terms such as ‘realism’, ‘classical’ and ‘avant-garde’ as well as recent controversies over terms such as ‘slow cinema’ and ‘vernacular modernism’. He further argues the influence of modernism through close readings of many contemporary films, including films by Abbas Kiarostami, Béla Tarr, Jia Zhangke, and Angela Schanelec. Drawing on a broad range of examples, including Soviet montage, Italian neorealism, postwar new waves and the ‘new cinema’ of Taiwan and Iran, this book explores the cultural significance of modernism and its lasting influence over cinema.

Restitution of cultural property by the People’s Republic of China on the example of the recovery of the brown heads of animals from Yuanming Yuan Restitution of cultural goods is a very complicated issue in practice, encountering many problems on its way. Most international conventions, including the 1970 UNESCO Convention and the 1995 UNIDROIT Convention, provide for non-retroactivity of their provisions and a limited time to bring claims for reimbursement. Another problem is the still low number of ratifications of both conventions, especially the one from 1995. Also, the national legislation of many countries still does not contain regulations in this area and appropriate restitution instruments. Once the Chinese government realized the value of its cultural heritage treasures as a source of national and political identity, it began the process of restoring looted cultural assets. This is not an easy task, because a large part of the objects was stolen a long time ago, which directly prevents the application of international legal regimes resulting from conventions on the return of stolen or illegally exported goods. The case of bronze statues from the Yuanming Yuan shows another way to recover looted cultural goods. It is based primarily on the national identity of Chinese society, which treats looted artifacts as an important element of their history and culture. Thanks to private collectors and entrepreneurs who had bought such objects and then donated them to Chinese museums and institutions, it was possible to regain many of the lost cultural goods. The aim of article is to provide a general overview of the People’s Republic of China’s restitution policy, its methods and effects, using the example of the recovery of Chinese bronze heads stolen from Yuanming Yuan.

This chapter explores the extent to which an international film education program, le Cinema cent ans de jeunesse, might support its participants’ developing cognitive skills. It uses the work of Elliott Eisner, in his book Arts and the Creation of Mind, to speculate on the kinds of thinking that filmmaking, watching, and discussion stimulate in the program. It concludes that the program provides the grounds for explicit and conceptually-based, meta-cognitive strategies, while also sharing significant affinities with the approaches of both Eisner and French film educator Alain Bergala in their conceptions of art education.

Given the 30th anniversary of Le Cinéma, cent ans de jeunesse (CCAJ) and the recent termination of its funding, the question arises as to how the legacy of this visionary film education initiative can be preserved and benefited from in the future. The persisting website can be seen as one of its many legacies. In this article I examine this online platform as a resource for film education in regular school education and to what extent it can be fruitful as a resource for teachers who are not technically trained, especially in language and literature classes. In accordance with the work of Alain Bergala, the article also questions the influence of CCAJ on various transformation processes in film mediation approaches – between theory and practice and between independent initiatives and institutionalisation.

In the first part of this article, the author reflects on her experience of making filmmaking workshops with young people in Australia, China and the UK an integral component of a research project on the representation of child migrants and refugees in world cinema. She then sets her approach to these workshops in the context of Alain Bergala's ideas about film education, of which she had initially been unaware. In discussing a couple of further workshops that she ran in the UK and Australia as part of the 'Cinéma, cent ans de jeunesse' programme, she focuses particularly on the benign or obstructive role of institutional gatekeepers, who act as intermediaries or agents determining the terms of access to children and young people for film educators, researchers and practitioners. The legal, protective and ethical dimensions of the relationship between educator, gatekeeper and participating students are discussed. The article cites cases in which the interaction worked well, and others in which it proved problematic. The functions, responsibilities and potential drawbacks of gatekeepers are compared with Bergala's conception of the pedagogic role of the passeur – a figure who also holds power in relation to young people's access to film and film-making, but one that connotes positive, even magical, properties.

This article explores the development of the Our Cinema project in Scotland: a revolving annual curriculum of film education for upper primary and lower secondary age children in state schools that, at the time of writing, is approaching a pilot phase. Discussion explores the project’s origins in France’s Cinéma Cent Ans de Jeunesse, and its relationship with the Catalan film education project Cinema en curs, before focusing in particular upon how a school-based programme of film education might seek to explore vernacular conceptions of cinema, through a focus on dialect, place and the lived experiences of participants. The article concludes by offering a detailed, concrete proposal of a film education curriculum, comprising two years (each broken up into 32 weeks) of creative learning activities.

In this article, we consider the concept and methodology of the international film education project Le cinéma, cent ans de jeunesse (CCAJ) and how this is adapted in practice. We argue that this project is based on a phenomenological approach, in that it explores film aesthetic questions that have an existential dimension and make palpable the embodiment of perception and reflection. Hence, CCAJ proposes gestures of filmmaking that are not mere technical operations, but express an embodied relation to others and to the live-world. Our argument is threefold. After a theoretical introduction to the notion of the gesture, we discuss the subjects proposed in CCAJ in the last 30 years with regard to their existential dimension. We then have a closer look at the cycle ‘Filming the Other – The Documentary Gesture’ (2023–4): first, in delineating the phenomenological conception of the subject’s central notion of alterity, and second in revisiting a series of interviews made with four tandems of teachers and filmmakers from Bulgaria, Paris and Portugal participating in the project. Based on these interviews we categorise different gestures of documentary filmmaking and discuss their specific pedagocical potential, especially in deploying a means for the pupils to engage with others. It is the process of filmmaking that triggers an interest and initiates a move towards others, they would not make otherwise.

Work on the preservation of historical and cultural heritage and historical memory is the main goal of the Miklouho-Maclay Foundation for the Preservation of Ethnocultural Heritage. The author, a great-grandson and full namesake of the famous scientist-traveler Nikolay N. Miklukho-Maklai is the founder and the head of the Fund. In the article, the author argues the goals of the foundation and talks about its main projects in the initial period of activity (2017-2020). The materials presented in the article demonstrate how the preservation of the scientific and ideological heritage of the Russian scientist Nikolay N. Miklukho-Maklai contributes to the development of scientific, cultural, and educational projects, including international ones. During his numerous voyages to Oceania, Australia, and Southeast Asia in 1870, Miklukho-Maclay carried out extensive expeditionary work and gathered unique factual material, which allowed him to rightfully enter the history of the world science as an outstanding ethnographer, anthropologist, and naturalist of broad profile. He made significant contributions to various scientific disciplines and developed and substantiated the doctrine of equality of races and peoples. The article also discusses field expedition activities in the South Pacific today, contemporary Russian researchers, and their influence on the development of scientific projects and international scientific relations. The author talks about the expeditions of scientists of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR, who conducted research on the territory of Papua New Guinea in the 20th century and shares his experience about the expeditions in the 21st century, organized by the Miklukho-Maklai Foundation. He shares his experience of the expeditions of the 21st century organized by the Miklouho-Maclay Foundation and the use of their results in the projects of the Foundation. The author presents in the article his vision of the prospects and role of the Foundation, the main mission of which is to preserve traditions, raise respect for the values and cultures of the peoples of the world, implement educational, scientific, and cultural projects to protect the historical memory. In addition, the author analyzes the prospects of bilateral relations between the Russian Federation and the Independent State of Papua New Guinea.

A análise comparada das estratégias e experiências educativas de quatro famílias das classes médias e intermediárias da região parisiense fez surgir vários elementos de continuidade e descompasso entre a educação recebida dos pais e a educação dada aos filhos, como diferentes graus de adesão à ideologia do "familismo" e os efeitos tanto da autonomização progressiva do campo da educação como da delegação da autoridade parental. As relações estabelecidas antigamente entre a educação familiar e a educação escolar e os valores reconhecidos como tendo garantido às famílias uma mobilidade de sucesso participam da constituição das "vocações" familiares e educativas. As mudanças observadas dizem respeito, por um lado, à transformação do papel das mulheres na gestão da memória familiar, nas transmissões do patrimônio familiar e na construção das genealogias e, por outro lado, aos estilos educativos, com o declínio dos comportamentos autoritários e sua transformação em obrigações morais. Essas mudanças têm reforçado o papel das famílias na produção das fronteiras éticas do espaço social, nas trocas intergeracionais e nas perspectivas de mobilidade.

As we approach the end of the second decade of the twenty-first century—at the moment when more people live in the cities than anywhere else—there comes a time to ponder on the role and the condition of urban cultural heritage. In times of growth, urbanization and rapid development, the city may be described as a modern battlefield of cultural heritage protection, often faced with the choice between protection and conservation, or destruction and redevelopment. This article seeks to analyse the means of protection of urban cultural heritage—a common, which is local (it takes a vital part in the creation of identity) and global (it is a part of a universal heritage) at the same time—in the international law, and to look into ways of its successful management. The first part of the article looks at the concept of the urban cultural heritage, and the second part examines the two main UNESCO conventions concerning cultural heritage protection, namely, Convention Concerning the Protection of the World Cultural and Natural Heritage and Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage, to establish whether or not they are successful tools in protecting the urban cultural heritage. The third part focuses on analysing a new approach towards urban cultural heritage advocated by UNESCO, based on the 2011 recommendation on the Historic Urban Landscape (HUL), giving examples of its successful (Amsterdam, Ballarat, Cuenca) and unsuccessful application (Stockholm, Hong Kong, Macau). In the fourth part, the author suggests ways of effective governance of the urban cultural heritage in the twenty-first century, from the viewpoint of sustainable urban development, focusing on the role of cultural heritage in the city’s growth, and in the creation of identity and collective memories. The concluding part of the article seeks for an answer to the question of a need for a new UNESCO convention.

The study of ethnic background and gender reveals differences and similarities in the lives of women and men from group to group.[1] However, it is commonly thought that different ethnic groups vary in their conceptions of masculinity and femininity. A major assumption in the sociology of gender is that race or culture is a primary determinant of differences in gender role identity. The gender identity of both black men and women and Hispanic men and women is commonly explained in terms of their historical and cultural heritage. Black men and women are frequently described as less sex typed than white men and women, and Hispanics are more strongly sex typed. These descriptions are based on implicit assumptions about the ethnic and cultural differences in the development of gender. Because research on gender and ethnicity is in its infancy, the assumption that there are substantial ethnic differences in gender has not been tested with comparative data.[2] It is striking that in the burgeoning literature on both gender and ethnicity, little attention is devoted specifically to the acquisition of identity on the part of Chicanas and Chicanos. Nor, for that matter, is identity as a specific topic considered in the recently published full-length works on Chicanas.[3] Intuitively, it makes sense to say that what it means to be a woman would vary according to whether one is Chicana, black, or white. However, the assumptions underlying this common sense notion have not been examined, nor has it been conceptually specified. Expressions of Chicano ethnic identity have characterized the past decade of the Chicano experience, and many of these expressions have been articulated by the women of La Raza. We know a great deal about our ethnic heritage, about our ethnic presence in America, but we know very little either about how our ethnicity contributes to our conceptions of ourselves as women and men or about how our conceptions of women and men contribute to our ethnic identity. An advanced society such as ours contains many crisscrossing and often conflicting interests, and what complicates the situation is that we as individuals have multiple memberships.[4] It is possible that one source of identity will dominate the others. Questions can be asked concerning a person's primary identification from among group memberships. What will he or she say in answer to the question, Who are you? man or woman, Chicano, Mexicano, Latino? The purpose of this paper is to examine conceptual and empirical issues surrounding the social identity of Chicanas. The basic question being addressed is how ethnicity and gender are reflected in the social identity of Chicanas, and for comparative purposes, Chicanos. The intent is not to test, but to clarify both data and theory by examining major perspectives on gender and ethnic identity and their application to Chicanos, by indicating the limitations of prevailing approaches, and by suggesting alternative directions for research. The term Chicano will be used in both a generic manner (referring to both women and men of Mexican heritage) and in reference specifically to men when contrasted to Chicanas.

This study is to explore the relations between the urban and rural in terms of their social as well as cultural significance. Referring to the idea of David Lowenthal (1985:39-52) who has pointed out that the connection between the past and present rests on the fact that the past has been the source of familiarity, guidance, identity, enrichment and escapethe central idea of the paper is to suggest that this notion of a familiar past is a fundamental aspect of the culture of contemporary urbanised Central Javanese, who, during the Lebaran holiday, revisit their ancestral roots to retain a degree of autonomy against modernity or to return to their disappearing past as tourists, so to speak. The cultural practice of mudik becomes the interaction zone (Leaf, 2008) that provides opportunities for city dwellers to keep ties with their village of origin. Finally, the paper suggests that the continuing intimate interplay between the village and town proves that neither pastpresent nor ruralurban dichotomies are in categorically opposed realms; metaphorically speaking, they are not in different countries.

The culture of Malay has its own unique and distinctive identity and is the largest ethnic group that account for more than half of the Malaysia population. Performing arts is one of the creative forms of culture expressions that had been classified under the intangible cultural heritage by UNESCO. Dance is one of the domains within the performing arts that symbolised each unique ethnic group culture identity. Malay folk dances can be identified within certain regions or spiritual practices, often performed in festive celebrations such as wedding parties or religious ceremonies that include the dance movements, music and costumes. The preservation and enhancement of intangible cultural heritage through digital technology are becoming extremely important as to safeguard this irreplaceable source of social identity from fading away especially to the younger generation. Sustaining the continuity and integrity of cultural identity through folk dance would provide a local sense of unity and belonging, thus the transmission of intangible cultural heritage through digital technology is imperative as to ensure its wider recognition and dissemination. This paper is a part of research in laying foundation for digitising Malay folk dances comprises of movements, music and costumes. It focuses on the role of digital technology on enhancing cultural experience by exploring principal components with regards to their similarities and differences.