Concentric Circles and Magnetic Currents: Moral Disarmament at the League of Nations International Institute of Educational Cinematography, 1931-34

This chapter explores spatial and temporal elements in configurations that entangle education, internationalism and empire in three articles published in the International Review of Educational Cinematography (IREC). In the first article Evelyn Wrench (1934) deploys a concentric circles spatial model that places the self at the centre and sees world-mindedness as the result of learning to negotiate ever-widening circles of relationships (family, region, nation, international/empire/world). Following Papastephanou (2016) the chapter argues that Wrench deploys a cultural-cognitive model of the enlargement and enrichment of a cosmopolitan self associated with linear temporal notions of progress and of abstract space that constitutes a style of reason thought to invoke a less parochial existence via a pedagogy in which individuals learn to negotiate distance between self and other in an imperialist frame aligned with notions of territorial expansion. Analysis of two IREC articles by Germaine Dulac (1931, 1934) draws on Barad’s (2007, 2012) theorising of relations of spacetimematter and Grosz’s (2004) analysis of Bergsonian temporalities to trace how Dulac’s thinking disrupts the concentric circles model by gesturing towards quantum notions of timespacematter that dislodge the human from the centre of analysis through little incidents, thereby creating what Serres (1991) calls a space of passage or transience where learning comes via friction in what Tsing (2011) terms zones of awkward engagement. The conclusion argues that rather than situating the articles by Wrench and Dulac across an epistemological break, their understandings of how to foster international understanding and friendship might be approached via Whitehead’s (1920, 1925, 1927, 1935) theorisation of abstraction and the Event, as spatial and temporal counterpoints that coexisted and knotted together in the fabric that constituted 1930s moral disarmament