Chapter 12
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A Pedagogy of Craft: Teaching Kulturanalys with machinima |
Authors
Abstract
This chapter argues machinima production as craft. As craft, machinima continues a tradition of amateur and folk making, which today offer critical and practical skill sets in learning. Using the example of a course called Culture Analysis taught at Umeå University, Sweden, the critical approach we outline in this chapter argues machinima is a form of digital making that can educate in ways not possible for traditional theory-based humanities teaching. Furthermore, machinima offers techniques for learning production in film, music video, theatre, design, architecture and performance, in relatively cheap, accessible and efficient ways. We propose that by codifying the practice of machinima as craft it can take on collective and egalitarian pedagogical values that suit its present networked and non-commercial nature. These qualities contribute to machinima both occupying a significant dimension in popular culture for rhetoric, art, and dramatic and conceptual visual content and in it being useful for pedagogy.