This article considers the relational and positional emergence of the student in two shows (markedly different narratologically and socioculturally): Colin in Black and White, which features and is based upon the life of NFL player turned activist Colin Kaepernick; and Top Boy. Both shows are concerned with the intersection of race and class and with the role of place (as particularized geographic location) and space (as cultural, ideological, discursive) in that intersection. The article considers instances in which the student emerges as such in both the presence and absence of the discursive reach (or institutional gaze) of the school. Colin in Black and White not only depicts a young Colin Kaepernick negotiating high school (a ready micr[i]ocosm for the social, cultural, and political landscape of America), but also takes its audience to school: the audience is positioned as one of the show’s students. Top Boy, by contrast, dramatizes the emergence of teacher-student relations in the absence of formal educational structure. It does so by centring people and places that are often marginalized, and marginalizing those which are often centred.

Defined as an attack against the institution itself (see Newman et al.2004), school shootings have increased in prevalence since the 1990s. In line with this, films and television shows have sought to further understandings about this type of mass violence. Reflecting real life trends about school shooters, representations in Excursion,One Tree Hill and Run, Hide, Fight have positioned disgruntled male students as the attackers. In direct contrast to this, female students have been represented as the heroes fighting backagainst school attacks in Buffy theVampire Slayer and Run, Hide, Fight. Since it has been argued that ‘any approach to understanding school shootings must take gender seriously’ (Kimmel &Mahler 2003: 1440), this paper will critically assess the portrayal of perpetrators, heroes and victims in film and television through a gendered lens.

This special episode of The Cinematologists podcast contributes to the Students on Screen project, curated by Dr Kay Calver and Dr Bethan Michael-Fox, in conjunction with a themed issue of Open Screens. Host Neil Fox revisits his doctoral research on film student portrayals in anglophone cinema, offering both a scholarly paper and this audio companion as a critical artefact. The episode features in-depth conversations with Calver, Michael-Fox, and contributors Dr Sharon Coleclough, Dr Devaleena Kundu, and Dr Oli Belas, exploring how screen representations of students reflect—and often fail to reflect—the complexities of lived experience. A reflective dialogue with co-host Dario Llinares and an extended reading of The Rewrite (2014) further enrich the episode’s critical scope.

The Netflix series The Chair (2021), created by academic Annie Julia Wyman, and actor, writer, producer Amanda Peet is set in the privileged enclave of an American liberal arts college. The anxieties portrayed in The Chair are varied, but the primary one is the students. Students in this story determine directly or indirectly who is vulnerable to firing and the shape of the curriculum; academics are terrified to be alone with a single student in case of accusations of sexual impropriety; and in the central story students exercise political power through their condemnation of an academic who gives a mock Nazi salute in a class. The Chair’s main characters are in awe of, and often contemptuous of the student body in whom, despite their protestations that they lack a voice, the power to censure and censor resides. The show invokes wider contemporary discourses about the resilience of the young, the effects of social media, the decontextualisation of events, struggles over meaning, and the elision of morality and identity. This analysis of the representation of students in The Chair reveals a complex and conflicted set of ideas about generational differences, the marketisation of Higher Education, and the nature of knowledge in the academy; it also examines the mobilisation of liberal and conservative critiques of students and reveals both to be ultimately unsustainable.

This piece is a Foreword to the Special Issue "Students on Screen".