Content Warning
A Relaxed Screening of this programme will take place simultaneously at Berwick Town Hall Council Chamber.
The programme will be accompanied by a recorded conversation betweem Jordan and Professor Rajinder Dudrah.
Rajinder Dudrah is Professor of Cultural Studies and Creative Industries at Birmingham City University. His research spans film, media, popular music, and diasporic culture, with particular focus on Bollywood cinema, Black British representation, and South Asian popular culture.
At BCU he has led the Creative Industries Research Cluster, founded the Centre for Equality, Diversity and Inclusion in the Arts (CEDIA), and served as Interim Associate Dean for Research, Innovation and Enterprise. He has recently been appointed as Deputy Chair for Sub-panel 25: Area Studies for the UK’s Research Excellence Framework – a prestigious national appointment assessing the UK’s research landscape across higher education.
Rajinder is also one of the founders and co-editors of the internationally peer reviewed journal South Asian Popular Culture with Routledge publishers. And in 2023, he was honoured by the South Asian Literary Association (USA), with the award of Distinguished Achievement in Scholarship to the Field of South Asian Studies.
An All-Around Feel Good
Tangling representations of disability, labour, and national identity, this essay film reconsiders what it means to be an audience in the wake of the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990. Moving between sites of underpaid labour—from captioning and transcription work to textile production for the U.S. military—it unmasks the discriminations underpinning feel-good narratives of access and inclusion.
Concealed and Denied
A slippery, “archival” documentary deconstructing the unlikely rise of a right-wing political strategist who began as a “leftist documentary filmmaker”. Through creative audio description, Lord re-mediates YouTube and broadcast media to probe how documentary tools become weapons in contemporary culture wars—from attacks on critical race theory, to campaigns against Black women leaders and the machinery of US mass deportation.