Harvard Fellow Shireen Hamza's Reflections on the 2019 Flaherty Seminar — Flaherty

Harvard Fellow Shireen Hamza's Reflections on the 2019 Flaherty Seminar

Shireen Hamza, 2019 Harvard Flaherty Fellow, shared her reflections on the Seminar on the Critical Media Practice (CMP) blog. Shireen is a PhD student in Harvard’s History of Science department. Her work focuses on the history of science and medicine in the medieval Islamicate world (Islamicate here refers to the multi-confessional world within the borders of Islamic polities).

I wasn’t really sure what the Flaherty seminar was, beyond a large group of people gathering to watch and discuss films, three times a day for seven days. I knew about the principle of non-predisposition, that I would be walking into each day’s three programs without knowing what I would be watching beforehand. But before arriving and speaking with some of the participants who had attended previous seminars, I did not know of the many significant changes that the organizers of Flaherty have made over the last few years. Though the seminar has a long history of being a place for international film, the organizers have of-late been choosing programmers who could uniquely center communities of artists whose work is marginalized in, and not widely accessible in, the US.

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