Against Expertise: The Current Case for Breadth over Depth

Cinema studies scholars have long existed in a mode of defending our expertise and policing the borders of our discipline on the lookout for presumptuous nonexperts. In teaching, for example, film is a go-to pedagogical tool used across disciplines that consistently draws student interest. But as many of us have asserted in our institutions, it is also a medium with a complex history, situated in specific industrial and cultural contexts, deeply influenced by the evolutions of technology, and characterized by a rich array of aesthetic conventions. In other words, film isn't simple. It shouldn't be casually appropriated by untrained faculty in attempts to engage students or boost enrollments in atrophying majors.

For all our resentment of these practices, though, we must remember that cinema studies was founded by "nonexperts"—as all disciplines must be. The very type of film-centered English classes that some of us dismiss, for example, taught by instructors without formal cinema studies training were once gestation points for the mature discipline we are today. Examining the history of cinema studies, most of our departments, programs, and majors were created and nurtured in "traditional" departments at our institutions—often in the years before their faculty had or could possibly have had a PhD in cinema studies. And even today, we should acknowledge that there may be a lens that language and literature disciplines can apply to the study of film that we "pure" cinema studies scholars cannot—a reason to teach films in these classes, too, that we miss when we enshrine ourselves as the exclusive authorities on this medium.

In considering the questions posed by Lucas Hilderbrand for this In Focus, I begin here with the legacy of the outsider nonexpert because I would like to advocate for the value of the insider nonexpert within cinema and media studies, a field that is widening at a breakneck pace. In this piece, I seek to challenge the enshrined, seemingly innate value of expertise itself, putting it into the context of our current disciplinary moment and exposing what is lost when we doggedly and automatically pursue expertise. As an alternative to its deep-drilling mode, I argue for the timely importance of breadth over depth in an age of rapid technological expansion and the unprecedented convergence of media. My call is timely, I maintain, even when the value of expertise is being crudely and dangerously dismissed on the political stage; I am firmly opposed to those dismissals and hope to present here a specific and nuanced perspective on cinema and media studies expertise, and one that upholds the value of higher education. The commitment to breadth that I am promoting is particularly essential in our pedagogy, as exemplified by existing models in small liberal arts colleges and in comparative media studies.¹

In the years since SCS added "and Media" to become SCMS in 2002, our discipline has undergone a tremendously fast expansion with few precedents in other fields. Consider how many media forms—not just media texts—have come into popular use during that period, including mobile apps, social media, streaming video, animated GIFs, and contemporary virtual reality platforms.² For a demonstration of our remarkable scope, look no further than the first time slot of the 2017 SCMS conference as a representative sample. In those twenty panels and workshops, presenters spoke about Orson Welles's use of music, VHS fandom, Google Earth software, festival programming for Arab cinema, 1960s television advertising, Twitch livestreaming of video-game play, climate visualizations, Elvis fan magazines, midcentury Chinese opera films, environmental cinema, Scalar-based analysis of 1950s Cinemascope, sociological filmmaking in the silent era, colonialist impulses in the Pokémon Go mobile game, and media production in Chicago.³ The implications of our field's increasing range are apparent in the very different kinds of knowledge and skills a scholar would need in order to work on any of these topics. How much expertise would the presenter on Scalar-based analysis of Cinemascope have in common with the presenter on festival programming for Arab cinema? Or the presenter on sociological filmmaking in...