Venturing now into a second blog, I recall Mark Carrigan's somewhat auto-ethnographic writing on Academic blogging at the London School of Economics (Carrigan, 2022]: inferring the Academic blog's irreversible obsolescence but noting its endurance. Indeed, Carrigan (2022) mentions a thriving eco-system of Academic blogs and related network of alternative publication venues /journals for Academics and independent scholars (usually short form). One such "alternative" Academic literary / arts online periodical adhering to peer review standards, but in more conceptual/methodological expression as creative multimedia - The Autoethnographer - has grown since its debut (circa lockdown) to exemplify exactly such a "thriving eco-system". Interesting, having followed the online journal since its inception, it recently accepted (for online publication / hosting / screening) the completed first part of my film (series) Being in Time. I had been thinking of approaching this potential digital journal publisher since I began making the film in 2020/1 and so was delighted at the submission acceptance, although somewhat surprised given the submitted film's politically themed content, and related accompanying blog / hyperlinked material. The journal's editor shared a similar background in EFL (in Japan) before turning to auto-ethnography and my auto-ethnographic film was oriented to my EFL pedagogic practice in China, so it was a targeted first (successful) submission: either way, the film's first part is scheduled for its US premiere on The Autoethnographer in a year. That will mark the first time any of my personal auto-ethnographic film work is publicly shown (let alone via US based and archived hosting), within an exemplary "thriving eco-system".
As Labor Day holiday sweeps across China, classroom teaching on my Inter-cultural Communication [IC] course finishes and I await the return of the take-home exams (next weekend). As was my intention, I used an extract from my film Being in Time in the IC classroom: that is, the introductory sequence (5-6 mins) and the "Filial Piety" episode (with some context). The extracts were selected for inclusion after an hour long deliberation with a Chinese EFL lecturer (a peer: we sometimes taught Masters of Translation & Interpretation [MTI] students together in experimental bilingual Communication Language Teaching [CLT] themed classes at the University I work for in Shandong). One short section was left in for the IC class only, where it would otherwise be removed (along with another brief shot: totaling about 10-15 seconds of the 34 min running time) from any normal showing in a Chinese setting. Simply because the aesthetic trope - juxtaposition - is radically disorienting for a Chinese culture not used to seeing this montagist technique deployed with certain content: it was used to model the importance of critical decision making in aesthetically communicating inter-cultural content for audience meaning-making: i.e. an introduction to semiotic discourse construction in a Chinese tertiary IC context.
As an interlude: It was nice to be in my Shanghai apartment again, after booking the last train seat available (business class) during the peak holiday travel season. I am venturing slowly into media production and related archiving there with the help of a location scout / pre-production assistant documenting daily expat life (live entertainment specifically) surrounding the local Jing An expat music and amateur performer scene (and related venues). I had made similar auto-ethnographic documentaries on disabled / LGBT+ underground performance "art" (spoken word, AV production, digital publishing) in my hometown of Adelaide, South Australia and, with a lot of remaining unused footage, hoped to counterpoint it culturally with the scene in Shanghai (including archival footage). It was at that time intriguing to be in a nexus of government-funded + "underground" performance art: the two experimental, raw counter-culture auto-ethnographic documentaries I made on this context-specific sub-cultural hybridity are in Australia's National Film & Sound Archive [NFSA] (researcher access only - they are personalized auto-ethnographic research films never intended for public dissemination beyond the participants: made using the shared resources available to government disability-arts grant receiving participants and their extended social and cultural networking). As representations of disability in Australian film was my research subject while a SAR Research Fellow at and a US publisher (of my previous two film-theory monographs - Serial Killer Cinema and Terrorism in American FIlm) approached me to update my unpublished NFSA manuscript and the subject is one that retains a personal interest; however, a return to Australia to complete such work is impractical just yet. Either way: my ongoing films are also research films - auto-ethnographic, but informed by a decade in Chinese EFL (75% government funded tertiary sector) since my formative pedagogic practice in Xinjiang in 2011/12. And: the 8 hr+ video travelogue I made there as a participant-observer - foreign EFL teacher.
I'll place this memory (and original travelogue) in context via a specific contemporary location: my apartment and the burgeoning Uygur culture around it, basking in the radiance of nearby Jing An Temple, on Wulumuqi Lu in Shanghai. Jing An Temple Metro Station was my geographic anchor when I first arrived to live and work in Shanghai: indeed, my current apartment is a short walk from this downtown landmark, not far from the Paramount Theatre. As mentioned last blog, its a significant location for me, a link between my formative experiences in Xinjiang (including trips to Urumqi) and my current late-stage career: the social harmony of modern China under Xi Jinping - the daily life in my actual location completely belies the rhetorical misinformation about "cultural genocide" propagated by Western media, especially since 2017 (when I first arrived in Shanghai and entered the private, corporate EFL education sector). Ironically, Wulumuqi Lu became somewhat notorious in this same Western media when it was the site of a precipitating event in the public protests in 2022/12 during the end of the "zero-Covid" policy in China. There were even Western MSM reports implying that Shanghai police were concealing street signs bearing the name "Wulumuqi": gazing upon a clearly visible street sign marker from outside my building made the ridiculousness of Western MSM coverage of China seem insidious: it prompted me to take video of my building's immediate exterior and neighboring venues, presented here in montaged (and scored) extract from a longer work in progress production of the second part of my Being in Time film.
VIDEO 4: Labor Day 2023 (04/30 - 04/02) Travelogue - extract from the second part (in production) to my film Being in Time - evoking my perception of / establishing the thriving Uygur cultural hub outside my Shanghai apartment building on Wulumuqi Lu, and subsequent Hongqiao Station based return journey. NOTE: The original, ongoing edit contains an evolving text-based narration timed to the music - this text has been removed from much of the extract.
This location was briefly also shown in the extract from the first part of Being in Time used in my IC class exam. Relatedly, as an assessment task on the professionalism of foreign teaching in China (from an IC analytic perspective), I set the student (sophomore English majors), as a short journal entry style text, a description of my own pedagogic practice with Han, Uygur and Kazakh students in Xinjiang, and set them a reflective case-study analysis / assessment of the strengths and weaknesses in the context-based pedagogic practice of my own formative EFL experience in China. As the commencement of my personal "cultural story" in China, it integrated an auto-ethnographic methodology into the classroom (Chi, Zhang & Kulich, 2022). With additional case-study discourse analysis in the IC exam - on the use of metaphorical language (with Chinese characteristics) in international political speech and its subsequent (mis-)interpretation by non-Chinese / Western audiences - the final task was set as a prototypical collaborative (evocative) auto-ethnography.
For this, I 1) screened the John Lydon video for Hawaii; 2) contextualized the historical and cultural context to Lydon and UK "punk" (using the anarchist staple "God Save the Queen" as an authentic AV material); 3) sketched Lydon's career to date (using the Leftfield Lydon "Open Up" as authentic AV material), and 4) anecdotally mentioned my long-standing interest in Lydon's music making this particular song much more personally evocative due to my own familial connection to Alzheimer's (my mother's passing) and the communication circumstances in such, further showing them a brief Lydon interview about his role as Alzheimer's carer. Consequently, I showed them 1) an article abstract on the influence of a traditional cultural value (filial piety) on aged/dementia care in China and South East Asia, followed by 2) an evocative Chinese video (fictional narrative: 3-4min AV artifact sourced during Internet browsing) on just this cultural context - filial piety. It was intended as a cultural comparison to the evocation of aged care and dementia in PiL's Hawaii: the compare and contrast directed IC framed discourse analysis singling out the specifics of collectivist and individualist approaches to caring for the elderly within families. I've included it below as the second cultural artifact encountered while Internet browsing and used in ongoing pedagogic practice.
VIDEO 5: Artefact (Chinese short video) - "Filial Piety" | In style, intent and evocation a suitable inter-cultural counterpoint to the earlier selection of PiL's "Hawaii", enough that with facilitated scaffolding, student compare and contrast analysis could be expressed creatively and analytically, within the multimedia text + exegesis genre requirements of literary / arts journal based ethnographic writing.
The second extract I showed from the first part of Being in Time was the sequence titled "Filial Piety", with my related "cultural story" (rooted in autobiographical experience) of being in China and unable to return to my home country of Australia to personally care for my father in what were his dying months / weeks. It was preceded, however, by the first extract's deliberate inclusion of a juxtaposition effect which, when screened, elicited aural surprise and bewilderment, even with prior explanation of the literal meaning of the term "juxtaposition" and visual examples of such. As I mentioned, my prior discussions with a Chinese peer had isolated the specific iconographic content within this split-screen juxtaposition (several seconds in duration) as liable to confuse and even shock Chinese students. The few seconds were not excised precisely for 1) the "culture shock" affect on Chinese EFL students of experiencing this content-based aesthetic trope in original AV context (in a Chinese tertiary education exam setting), with 2) my explanatory exegesis of the critical IC analysis applied in creative decision-making in deliberate iconographic selection criteria as inter-cultural discourse construction. Their final task was a group video on the same theme - filial piety in aged care - to which they had to creatively and evocatively deploy aesthetic tropes, to be submitted with a group statement comprising exegesis of their creative intentions in doing the film (for an audience outside of China) as they did, and their individual contributions to the final group submission.
With an explanatory booklet handed out, cumulatively covering the preceding thematic content formulated by the students during group presentation tasks jointly formulated in a constructivist classroom environment, the exam set their understanding of their basic IC theoretical and analytical principles within both authentic "cultural story" (integrating auto-ethnography as an action research methodology) from personal case study to discourse analysis to IC-themed discursive content-creation. It will be interesting to read their examination papers and see their group videos / exegesis. Either way: the notification of my film's acceptance for publication / exhibition via The AutoEthnographer posits the intriguing possibility of a more detailed methodological account of this particular case study in IC pedagogic practice for potential submission elsewhere. However, that remains to be seen, particularly in relation to the potential future involvement in the production of the second part to Being in Time of further Chinese peer consultancy. With now a second blog entry, however, I am tempted to quote one of my favorite movies -- Walter Hill's The Warriors (1979): "stay tuned boppers, stay tuned."
VIDEO 6: Artefact (film extract) - The Warriors (1979) | scene from the classic US cult film in which news of an ongoing gang battle is transmitted in sporting references across the airwaves.
FURTHER READING: