Sima Kokotović, Ph.D.

Sima Kokotović’s research investigates intersections between media circulation and leftist political cultures, with a focus on how political commitments incite film and media workers to re-employ available cultural resources and infrastructures in order to contribute to broader political fronts.

Sima Kokotović received his Ph.D. in film and media studies from Concordia University in Tiohtià:ke/ Montréal. In his work, he uses a transnational lens to shed light on screen cultures’ roles in the movement of progressive ideas, sentiments, and alliances across borders and throughout the world. His book project entitled Cinematic Solidarities: Cinema Amidst Global Vistas of Struggle builds on his dissertation research, where he theorizes the category of cinematic solidarities to describe how filmmakers and film cultural workers devised new modes of political engagement and institutional arrangements in response to a wave of global uprisings during the 2010s. In addition, he argues how cinematic solidarities offer an analytic lens that draws attention to and maps cinema’s capacities to partake in networked grassroots politics from below specifically.

For his second research project, he reconstructs a complex network of alliances that gave rise to the Non-Aligned Movement’s media initiatives in the 1970s and 1980s (e.g., Broadcasting Agency of Non-Aligned Countries; Non-Aligned News Agencies Pool). In return to this forgotten moment in media history, the project attends to and teases out different registers and scales of transnational exchanges (transcontinental, regional, state, “from below”) lying at the heart of an effort to decolonize and radically transform hierarchical international structures.

He also contributed to co-organizing several initiatives (“Cinema in the Midst of Struggle,” “Politics of Alternative Media,” “The Non-Aligned and Cultural Connections,” Media Labour Conference) that center and examine the importance of film and media practices as vehicles for facilitating cultural exchange, building power, and fostering a sense of community.