Using film as a pedagogical tool to integrate DEI topics in geography: co-teaching Asian and Asian American geography through cinema

In this article, we reflect our co-teaching experiences, strategies, and challenges between an urban geographer and a media studies scholar, using film as a gateway to delve into Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) topics in an Asian urban geography course. We center our discussion on geographical pedagogy around three key praxes: interdisciplinary, intercultural, and intersectional. First, we aim to bring attention to the significance of geography education in institutions without dedicated geography departments, which paradoxically prompts opportunities for cross-disciplinary collaborations between geographers and non-geographers. Second, we share our strategies of fostering intercultural knowledge and communication through comparative urbanism approach that challenges the U.S./Eurocentric perspective and disrupts the dichotomy of Us and Other in teaching regional geography. Third, we emphasize an intersectional framework that centers human experiences and narratives, fostering empathy and solidarity in geography classrooms. By sharing our pedagogical experience, we would like to call for more scholarship on anti-racism praxis within Asian and Asian American Geographies.