Book Review: Deirdre O'Neill, Film as a Radical Pedagogic Tool

Book review of Deirdre O’Neill’s Film as a Radical Pedagogic Tool . Intro:

Deirdre O’Neill’s Film as a Radical Pedagogic Tool offers a timely and provocative intervention into the relationship between class and culture, as well as the broader field of film education. Both areas have seen an upsurge in interest and academic publication in recent years, as attested by the success of the Film Education Journal, established by Jamie Chambers of Edinburgh College of Art in 2018, the recent establishment of the journal Class and Culture, by O’Neill herself, and the growth of the Working Class Academics conference (https://workingclass-academics.co.uk/) and the publication of Teresa Crew’s (2020) invaluable Higher Education and Working-Class Academics: Precarity and Diversity in Academia. What makes O’Neill’s work so invigorating is its insistence on the relationship between theory and practice, something that is continually seen as prohibitive, or not well articulated and actuated, in terms of more ‘professionalised’ film education courses, such as those found in film schools (Stoneman, 2013).