This participatory workshop is designed for early career teachers, including graduate students and postdoctoral fellows, but all are welcome. It will be facilitated by: shea wesley martin, FQT postdoc in Trans Studies, University of Pennsylvania; Kartik Nair, Associate Professor of Film and Media Arts, Temple University; and Karen Redrobe, Professor of Cinema and Media Studies, University of Pennsylvania.

The etymology of the word "radical" invokes roots and continuity, while the phrase "radical pedagogy" suggests a desire for deep and meaningful change in the ways we teach and learn. In the first of this two-workshop series, we will explore how liberatory pedagogies might engage these two aspects of the radical, which stand in tension with each other. In preparation, we invite workshop participants to read two essays from Nair and Redrobe's forthcoming book, Course Projections: Film, Pedagogy, and Freedom from the Classroom (available open access from December 1, 2026): Ellen C. Scott's "Finding Ourselves at the Movies: Teaching Toward the Definition of Black Women's Diasporic Cinema," and Jean-Thomas Tremblay's "Unteachable Honeyland." Though these readings are situated in specific fields of study, we welcome workshop participants from all fields. Together, we will consider broad questions such as: Which regularly transmitted and sometimes treasured aspects of our disciplinary and interdisciplinary fields block or erase vital lines of thought and practice? How can we cultivate intellectual traditions that nourish the transmission of transformative pedagogical practices and enable confrontations with the ways classrooms and (inter)disciplines transmit amnesia and perpetuate what Tremblay describes as "the obscenity of learning what we already know." Through discussion and group ideation, we will consider practical applications of these ideas in our classrooms and seek out the dreams that are embedded in disruptions.