Precarity and Solidarity at Neoliberalism’s Twilight: The Potentials of Transnational Production Autoethnography

2019 ◽  
Vol 20 (4) ◽  
pp. 311-321
Author(s):  
Brian Dolber
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Studies ◽  
Cultural Production ◽  
The Philippines ◽  
Structural Forces ◽  
Academic Labor ◽  
Creative Workers

This essay uses autoethnography to illuminate the shifting conditions of global creative and academic labor. By reflecting on my experiences during a 2014 research trip to Manila, the Philippines, I, as a U.S. scholar, consider the different experiences of precarity in transnational cultural production, as academic and creative labor are both shaped by neoliberal structural forces. Through production autoethnography, I argue we may build forms of solidarity between cultural studies scholars and creative workers. Attending to the broader political changes that have occurred over the last several years, I conclude that as neoliberalism has lost its hegemonic authority, cultural producers, including cultural studies scholars, have the opportunity to help forge something better.

scholarly journals Re-Locating the Spaces of Television Studies

2016 ◽  
Vol 4 (3) ◽  
pp. 123-130
Author(s):  
Anna Cristina Pertierra
Keyword(s):  
North America ◽  
Cultural Studies ◽  
The Philippines ◽  
Theoretical Research ◽  
Entertainment Industry ◽  
Television Studies ◽  
Global Media ◽  
Broadcast Television

This paper will extend work originally presented in Pertierra and Turner’s <em>Locating Television </em>(2013) to argue that the reasons for which the demise of television was prematurely assumed can be understood and corrected by critically examining the geopolitics of television scholarship. The spaces from which television has been taken seriously as a topic of investigation have enabled a neglect of empirical and theoretical research that genuinely engages with the ways in which television might be understood as variously surviving, growing, innovating and even leading the current and future global media landscapes. The paper offers two ways in which television scholars might productively re-locate their spheres of concentration to understand the diversity of television worlds today: 1) empirically, it considers the case of the Philippines where broadcast television is successful in ways that could only be dreamed of by television executives in the so-called ‘world centres’ of the global entertainment industry. 2) theoretically, the paper refers to complementary attempts in sociology, literary and cultural studies to offer alternatives to Europe and North America from which scholars might locate the vanguard for modernity, globalization and innovation. It is by engaging with both of these strands in concert—empirically investigating television beyond the ‘usual places’ in such a way that responds to the call of cultural theorists to question our very assumptions about where television studies’ ‘usual places’ should be, that more nuanced understandings, and fewer premature declarations, might be made about what television is, and where it is going.

Diasporas with a Difference: Jewish and Georgian Teenagers’ Ethnic Identity in the Russian Federation

1997 ◽  
Vol 6 (3) ◽  
pp. 331-353
Author(s):  
Fran Markowitz
Keyword(s):  
Ethnic Identity ◽  
Cultural Studies ◽  
Ethnic Groups ◽  
Russian Federation ◽  
Cultural Production ◽  
Stuart Hall ◽  
The Russian Federation

Ever since the late 1960s, when Fredrik Barth urged us to move away from the idea that ethnicity is constituted by “cultural stufT and to focus instead on the boundary that demarcates groups, anthropologists (and their perhaps more radical half-siblings in cultural studies) have cast into doubt the primordial or essentialist nature of ethnic groups, to say nothing of ethnic identity. Earlier studies focused on the groups themselves—how they display and are constrained by their identity as immigrants, minorities, ethnics, “persistent peoples,” and even “marginal men” (sic)—while more recent investigations have taken up the “borderlands” where groups meet, confront each other (Rosaldo; Rouse), and become zones of hybridized cultural production (Bhabha). In a related vein, ethnicity is also explored as one of many possible intersections of power and culture, and ethnic identity becomes a crazy-quilt of namings and “being-called” (Probyn 25). Indeed, Stuart Hall informs us that “identities are never unified, and in late modem times, increasingly fragmented and fractured, never singular but multiply constructed across different, often intersecting and antagonistic discourses, practices and positions” (4, emphasis added).

scholarly journals Platformization of the Unlikely Creative Class: Kuaishou and Chinese Digital Cultural Production

2019 ◽  
Vol 5 (4) ◽  
pp. 205630511988343 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jian Lin ◽  
Jeroen de Kloet
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Production ◽  
Chinese Economy ◽  
Creative Class ◽  
Digital Culture ◽  
The Internet ◽  
Social Stability ◽  
Urban Centers ◽  
Contemporary China ◽  
Video Sharing ◽  
Creative Workers

This article studies the platformization of cultural production in China through the specific lens of Kuaishou, an algorithm-based video-sharing platform targeting second- and third-tier cities as well as the countryside. It enables the forming of an “unlikely” creative class in contemporary China. Kuaishou’s platform business fits into the Party State’s socio-economic agenda of “Internet+” and “Mass Entrepreneurship and Innovation,” and is also folded into the state’s demand for cultural censorship and social stability. As we will show, this state-commerce relationship largely shapes Kuaishou’s interface and its affordances as encoded in its algorithm. Nevertheless, Kuaishou enables the diverse, often marginalized, Chinese living outside the urban centers of the country to become “unlikely” creative workers, who have become self-employed creative, digital entrepreneurs. For these “grassroots individuals,” creativity, life, and individuality are constantly mobilized and calculated according to the workings of the platform. This grassroots entrepreneurship, in tandem with the institutional regulation and censorship of the Internet, contributes to the transformation of Chinese economy and the production of social stability and a digital culture permeated with contingency and negotiation.

scholarly journals Reading the Gendered Body in Filipino-Australian Diaspora Philanthropy

2012 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Shirlita Africa Espinosa
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Production ◽  
The Philippines ◽  
Mail Order ◽  
Role Of The State ◽  
Beauty Contest ◽  
Resource Transfers ◽  
Liberal Philosophy ◽  
Money Transfers ◽  
First World

Diaspora philanthropy has increasingly become a visible resource of nations from the South, next only to the more widespread money transfers from members of diasporic communities in the first world. The discourse of transnational giving is shaped by the liberal philosophy that has always accompanied solidarity through philanthropy, which sidelines questions of the unevenness of giving, political accountability, and the role of the state in regulating and transforming resource transfers into profitable investment. I argue in this paper that the problematic operations wherein benevolence rendered are manifested in covert gendered techniques. The yearly Sydney Fiesta Cultura’s Miss Philippines-Australia exemplifies the solid links between gender and the political economy of giving. What renders this otherwise ‘ordinary’ beauty contest as more contentious than other forms of generating funds for philanthropy are the specificities of Filipino-Australian migration: the transnational movement of sexual labour that hyperfeminised the community like no other in Australia. The fiesta, not unlike other expressions of cultural production that attempt to conceal this sexualised past, nonetheless raises the spectre of the ‘mail-order bride’ whose migration ‘built’ the community, an assertion that meets opposition from the middle class, professional and mestizo migrants from the Philippines. However, the processes that the fiesta puts into place in facilitating diaspora philanthropy are reliant on women’s labour, thus revealing the intersections of the community’s past and present. This overlooked facet also hints at the philanthropy engendered within diasporic formations as distinct and conditioned by the migrant history that has shaped these communities.

Resisting subalternity: Palestinian mimicry and passing in the Israeli cultural industries

2020 ◽  
Vol 42 (7-8) ◽  
pp. 1293-1308
Author(s):  
Amal Jamal ◽  
Noa Lavie
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Production ◽  
Cultural Industries ◽  
Media Industry ◽  
Full Compliance ◽  
Subaltern Agency ◽  
Common Notion ◽  
Creative Workers ◽  
The Media ◽  
The Common

This article explores the complexity of minority creative workers in the media industry. It challenges the common notion in the literature that minority creative workers are fully submissive to the dominant power structure and examines whether such workers could still be conceived as active agents by resisting submission and marginalization even when they cannot influence their own representation in hegemonic media texts. To answer this question, it explores the performances of minority creative workers in a hegemonic cultural industry. To determine whether one can speak of subaltern agency and, if possible, examine how it manifests itself in reality, it addresses the daily performances of Palestinian creative workers during the production of the second season of the Israeli television series, Fauda. Observations conducted during production demonstrate that since in such contexts minority creative workers cannot avoid being projected in negative roles in the media text, they adopt creative subversive practices of passing and transgressive mimicry, resisting full compliance with the production, without endangering their own position. By doing so, the article contributes not only to the emerging field of creative entrepreneurship in cultural production, but also enables determination of common practices of creative subversion in the cultural industries.

scholarly journals LatinX studies: Variations and velocities

2019 ◽  
Vol 31 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 3-15
Author(s):  
Claudia Milian
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Studies ◽  
Cultural Production ◽  
Art History ◽  
Cultural Anthropology ◽  
First Century ◽  
Cultural Dynamics ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
The Core ◽  
Research Communities ◽  
Twenty First Century

At the core of this Cultural Dynamics special issue on “LatinX Studies: Variations and Velocities” are new conceptual approaches, epistemological workings, “keywords,” and modes of inquiry that enable us to theorize LatinX Studies and global LatinXness for the twenty-first century. Bringing together different research communities from art, art history, cultural anthropology, cultural studies, geography, history, journalism, and literature, this exploratory undertaking offers a working language on present-day LatinX preoccupations to seize what is happening contemporaneously in light of the field’s “X” and to disseminate it in a usable format like this journal. The volume’s contributors—Jill Anderson, Gloria Elizabeth Chacón, Nicholas De Genova, María DeGuzmán, Rene Galvan, Hilda Lloréns and Maritza Stanchich, Mark Overmyer-Velázquez, and Fredo Rivera—put forward new formulations and models for Latino/a Studies in considering LatinX geographies beyond the Americas; indigenous migrations and cultural production; Miami’s oceanic borderlands; environmental planetary problems and environmental knowledges; LatinX medical subjects; and deported exiles. The breadth of foci herein invites further problematization and dialogue with implications and relevance to other fields.

scholarly journals Communication, Culture and Community: Towards A Cultural Analysis of Community Media

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kevin Howley
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Studies ◽  
Cultural Production ◽  
Information Technologies ◽  
Blind Spot ◽  
Cultural Analysis ◽  
Cultural Significance ◽  
Global Media ◽  
Community Media ◽  
Interdisciplinary Approaches ◽  
A Site

This paper promotes a research agenda committed to a sustained, multiperspectival cultural analysis of community-based media. In doing so, the essay takes up two interrelated arguments. First, it is suggested that community media represent a conspicuous blind spot in cultural approaches to communication studies: a situation that is at odds with the hallmarks of cultural studies scholarship, especially its affirmation of popular forms of resistance and its celebration of and keen appreciation for local cultural production. Second, the author maintains that as a site of intense struggle over cultural production, distribution, and consumption within and through communication and information technologies, community media demand the rigorous, interdisciplinary approaches and interventionist strategies associated with the finest traditions of cultural studies scholarship. The author concludes that this research program is essential for appreciating the social, political, and cultural significance of locally oriented, participatory media in an increasingly privatized, global media environment.

scholarly journals Encyclopaedic Fiction, Cultural Value, and the Discourse of the Great Divide

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Simon Cooke
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Studies ◽  
Cultural Production ◽  
Mass Culture ◽  
Cultural Theory ◽  
Cultural Value ◽  
Cultural Elements ◽  
Objective Quality ◽  
Great Divide ◽  
The Status ◽  
Low Culture

<p>Recent postmodern work on cultural evaluation, such as Barbara Smith's Contingencies of Value (1989), argues that cultural value cannot be treated as an inherent or objective quality of cultural products. Instead, cultural value must be understood as "value for": relative, that is, to the identities and interests of particular cultural consumers and producers. Theorists (for instance, John Frow in his 1995 study Cultural Studies and Cultural Value) have employed similar relativist logic in their analyses of the putative "structures" or institutions that supposedly give shape to Western culture-as-a-whole: "high" culture, "popular" culture, "mass" culture and so on. This "postaxiological" strain of cultural theory undermines the real-world integrity of those categories by suggesting that they (the categories) are merely contingent effects of critical / evaluative discourse. Other archetypically "postmodern" arguments in literary and cultural studies have focused on charting or advocating both the demise of the modernist "great divide" between "high" and "low" culture, and its replacement, in cultural production and criticism, with more permissive and socially egalitarian modes of interplay between "high" and "low" culture. Some critics and critically aware cultural producers have treated these two projects as though they are complementary facets of a general "postmodern" turn. Yet contesting or reversing obsolete hierarchies of cultural value does not necessarily lead critics to contemplate the status of "high"/"low" categories themselves. A meaningful refusal of the logic of the modernist "great divide" would obligate critics and producers to reflect on the contingency of those categories and their own interests with respect to those categories. Juxtaposing an "encyclopaedic" modernist text renowned for its interspersion of "high" and "low" cultural elements (James Joyce's Ulysses) with a postmodern text that seems knowingly to do the same (David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest), two case studies illustrate the inseparability of readings or narratives that are couched in "high"/"low" terms from the particular interests of cultural producers and consumers.</p>

Peripheral Visions, Global Positions

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
José Colmeiro
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Studies ◽  
Cultural Production ◽  
Theoretical Perspective ◽  
Global Environment ◽  
Transatlantic Studies ◽  
Transnational Mobility ◽  
Challenges And Opportunities ◽  
The Creation ◽  
Multiple Interactions

Chapter 1 aims for a perspectival shift in the approach to remapping contemporary Galician culture and the challenges and opportunities it faces in a global environment. The chapter follows a postnational, non-canonical, and multi/interdisciplinary cultural studies approach, reflecting issues of transnational mobility, migration and transatlantic studies, more in sync with the hybrid complexities of contemporary cultural production. My theoretical perspective is particularly sensitive to the multiple interactions between the local and the global, and the creation of “glocal” realities in complex relations of interdependence and interpenetration.

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