Leaning into Discomfort: Engaging Film as a Reflective Surface to Encourage Deliberative Encounters

Abstract

In this chapter, Judith Terblanche and Charlene van der Walt contend that achieving social transformation in an historical context characterised by race, economic, class, gender and cultural differentiation and encountering the other for deliberation are indispensable to achieve transformation. The authors, however, hold that since encountering the other is limited by the very ideological constructions of otherness, it is imperative that the educational institutions must trigger deliberation among learners with diverse backgrounds responsibly or else the deliberation will not take place. Employing Miroslav Volf’s (Exclusion and embrace: A theological exploration of identity, otherness and reconciliation. Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 1996) idea of the drama of embrace and Yusef Waghid’s (On the educational potential of ubuntu. In E. J. Takyi-Amoako & N. T. Assié-Lumumba (Eds.), Re-visioning education in Africa: Ubuntu-inspired education for humanity. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018) ideas on ubuntu, the authors argue for the role of film in pedagogy to initiate the imperative of encounter that awakens empathy and compassion for the other. Reflecting on and discussing a film creates room for cultivation of skills that would assist the viewing students to take active but otherwise difficult steps of encountering the other. Waghid argues that the centrality of the film is that it projects the moral necessity of deliberatively going through the discomfort of imagining the situationality of the other and taking active real-life steps in ways that are discomforting, risky and vulnerable as the process may be. They thus argue that film is a medium full of potential for initiating a pedagogy of discomfort that emphasises students and teachers moving outside their zones of comfort so that, through the generated discomforting emotions, the stakeholders come to identify and challenge dominant beliefs, practices, habits and prejudices in them and in society largely regarded as unproblematic in order to achieve social transformation. In relation to decoloniality, Terblanche and Van der Walt hold that, apart from the discomforting encounters surfacing, the entrenched structural epistemic violence against other people’s forms of knowledge, pedagogical film engagement could also achieve further decoloniality by foregrounding content and theory that are local and exploring lived experiences that are institutionally regarded as irrelevant, such as indigeneity.