Great Walls (2020, 28min) Film Screening and Discussion
Date and time
Join us for a film screening and discussion about the research film, Great Walls.
About this event
Great Walls (2020, 28min) is a research film that examines how iconic walls – the US-Mexico barrier, the Berlin Wall, and the Great Wall of China – take on meaning and value when they are performatively walked by Trump, Reagan, and Nixon, as well as by ordinary people like you and me. It examines walls as sites of intense ideology and overwhelming experience. Walls certainly divide people as graphic examples of ideological projects that create and enforce inside/outside distinctions. The film suggests that walls can also be infrastructures of feeling that connect people in spaces of horror and wonder.
Taking place in person, location to be annouced shortly.
Chair:
Lecturer in East Asian Studies
School of East Asian Studies
The University of Sheffield
Speaker:
Professor of International Relations
Department of International Relations
The London School of Economics and Political Science
William A. Callahan is professor of International Relations at the London School of Economics and Political Science, and in 2020-21 he was Taiwan Fellow at National Taiwan University. His research examines the interplay of culture and politics, and visual global politics. Callahan’s most recent book, Sensible Politics: Visualizing International Relations (Oxford University Press, 2020), won the Best Book Award 2022, ISA-International Political Sociology section. His other work includes China: The Pessoptimist Nation (OUP, 2010) which explored nationalism in China, and the documentary film “Great Walls” (2020), which asks why we hate Trump’s wall and love the Great Wall of China
(https://sensiblepolitics.net/great-walls-journeys-from-ideology-to-experience).
