Encounters with belief in the global city: Urban humanities filmmaking pedagogy from los angeles to Shanghai

Abstract

The short films en-Counter Chinatown (2014) and 1933: The Shanghai Projector (2015) were created by an interdisciplinary team of university students as part of the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA)s Urban Humanities Initiative (UHI), a Mellon-funded graduate certificate program that investigates the intersections between global cities across the Asia-Pacific Rim. Themes of migration, the transnational flow of cultural identity, and how old belief systems are established in new places emerge, building a moving portrait of a neighborhood in flux—between generations, traditions, and forces of gentrification—within the global city. This setting created an intersection between universities, belief systems, culture, and film. The film displays the student’s interests—cities, planning, Buddhism, migration, narrative, Chinese diaspora, and poetry—synthesizing them into a new form of representation. As it was unfamiliar to most of the students, the medium of film served this leveling function, acting as a pedagogical tool for connecting and equalizing ideas, pushing each participant into unfamiliar territory. This chapter uses the example of the films to examine the transdisciplinary pedagogy that is a foundation of the Urban Humanities, focusing on how it allows for a multileveled investigation of the diverse and transnational epistemologies that are present in global cities like Los Angeles. The chapter explores both the students’ encounter with temple’s neighborhood and between their respective disciplines. The global city, as it contains a myriad of experiences beyond the academic, is what stimulates such a learning situation, facilitating multileveled communication that is more than just interdisciplinary and, thus, allowing for the possibility to integrate other systems of belief into the normal higher education discourse. The chapter engages with the volume topic as an example of a higher education program encountering issues of religious and belief systems in a way that is more than just as a traditional academic object, instead of representing such knowledge in alternate ways to more diverse audiences while also creating a unique space of learning.