The Many Faces and Spaces of Precarity in the Moving Image
Online Zoom conference 14-15-16 December 2023
Keynotes: 14.12.2023 Prof. Guy Standing
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About
“Another world is not only possible; she is on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing.”
Arundhati Roy
The objective of this conference is to bring together academics working on the issue of precarity and its relationship with “the moving image.” Definitions of precarity are diverse and sometimes conflicting. Many of them aim to capture the dynamics and social transformations associated with the neoliberal turn and the mechanisms of the gig economy.
However, this term has assumed various meanings and appears to encompass a broader social and emotional predicament. Ecological crises indicate a precariousness of existence and “the human” itself, while the sense of individualization and fragmentation resulting from an economy based on debt/credit connects with new concerning authoritarian trends. A sense of political helplessness is often associated with these social forces that enact and perpetuate processes of marginalization, which in turn favor increasingly violent mechanisms of exploitation. However, mapping the various manifestations and contexts of precarity also offers an opportunity to recognize the multiplicity of a vulnerable world and its inhabitants, while simultaneously highlighting new forms of political subjectivity.
Therefore, this call for papers aims to consider the polysemic and ever-evolving uses of the notion of precarity, while also describing strategies to address the challenges it presents. Precarity can refer to issues and problems of representation, analyzing how subjectivities on screen are shaped and how their definitions intersect along lines of class, race, gender, and ability/disability. Precarity may also encompass new issues in film and media production and distribution, aiding in the effective evaluation of tensions between mainstream and “niche” screen culture, as well as strategies to challenge such divisions. Understanding these mechanisms is also linked to the possibility of tracing the genealogies of precarity in the diverse histories of cinema and audiovisual production, examining hegemonic and counter-hegemonic trends in their development. In this sense, the discussion and critical assessment of political and social strategies aimed at addressing (or, conversely, standardizing) the precarious status of the industry are also of great interest. On a more philosophical level, the precarious status of moving images in contemporary artistic and affective infrastructure is also a theme to be explored and carefully examined.
The underlying hope in this call for papers is that studying and analyzing the various facets of precarity (from the climate crisis to new forms of exploitation and marginalization) is not limited to sophisticated identification of the cracks and contradictions defining our era. The analytical work that we earnestly hope to undertake together is to harness the power of moving images in order to ignite the critical and passionate imagination of a new world that responds to the supposed inevitability of the current state of affairs.
programme
Welcome Remarks 9:00-9:20
1st PANEL: 9:20-10:40
Precarious Working Cultures
Catherine Gough-Brady: Precarity and Screen Creative Practice Human Research Ethics
Sophia Zhang: Producing Chinese Reality TV: Power, Precarity and Working Cultures
Emma Duester: A Longitudinal Study with Contemporary Visual Artists from Emerging to Established Career Stages
2nd PANEL: 11:00-12:20
Existentialist Visions and Precarious Relationality
Alessia Risi: ‘Can’t we give ourselves one more chance?’ Exploring Precarity in Aftersun.
Giovanni Salvagnini Zanazzo: «On fera la vie tranquille»: Duras’ Existential Precarity, Nowadays
Jochem Kleinjan: Portraying precarity by producing precarity in Yeo Siew Hua’s A Land Imagined (2018)
3rd PANEL: 12:40-14:00
Postcolonial and Decolonial Gazes
Stella Lange: The Fragmentation of the White Apparatus in Med Hondo’s Soleil Ô (1970)
Malini Guha: Precarious Images for Possible Futures: The Moving Image as Mobile Home
Aatika Singh: On Ephemerality of Emancipation-The Dalit Heroine in Karnan
Lunch Break 14:00-15:00
4th PANEL: 15:00-16:20
Welfare Crisis and Precarious Bodies
Raquel Martínez Martín: Precarity, Austerity and (Im)mobility in Spanish Crisis Cinema: Yesterday Never Ends (Isabel Coixet, 2013)’
Melissa Oliver-Powell: ‘Domestic Waste Only’: Welfare Policy and Precarious Parenting in Ken Loach’s Austerity Dramas
José Duarte: “There is nothing particular about my life”: On the Precarity of Bodies in Motion and at Rest
5th PANEL: 16:40-18:00
Neoliberal Authoritarianism
Aidan Power: Meet the New Boss, Same as the Old Boss: Authoritarian Liberalism and Precarious Witnesses in Lazzaro Felice
Elina Reitere: Better than in Europe. Precarity in Latvian film industry as will-o’-the-wisp of European values.
KEYNOTE: Prof. Guy Standing 18:30 (approx. 90 min.)
DAY TWO: 15th of December 2023.
1st PANEL 9:00-10:20
The AI Question
Claudio Celis Bueno and Pei-Sze Chow: Precarious Creativity: The use of generative AI in the film industry
Matthias Kispert: Workers leaving the cloud factory: visualising the digital precariat
2nd PANEL: 10:40-12:00
Urban landscape (Capitalist Time and Space)
Gert Jan Harkema: Neighbourhood films and cultural geographies of precarity and care in Dutch documentary filmmaking
Jacopo Francesco Mascoli: Capitalist Temporalities. Post-Fordism and Industrial Present in Italian Documentary.
Sebastian Lederle: Precarious effects of spatialization of film in post cinema.
3rd PANEL: 12:20:13:40
Cognitarians, Transfuges, and Class Intruders
Daniel Fairfax: Fragments of Neoliberalism in Jean-Gabriel Périot’s Adaptation of Retour à Reims
Elisa Cuter: Screening the Cognitariat. Precarious Intellectual and Artistic Labour in Contemporary European Cinema
Joule Zheng Wang: Living on the Precarity of Intrusion: Intrusion Complex and the Cinematic Figure of Real Estate Agent
Lunch Break 13:40-14:40
4th PANEL 14:40-16:00
Environmental Anxieties
Min-Kyoo Kim: Austerity, nuclear anxiety and the archive: Thatcher’s politics of precarity in Threads (1984)”
Evdokia Stefanopoulou: Necropolitics and ontological precarity in Vesper (2022).
Cristina Ruiz-Poveda Vera: Female adolescence and animals in recession films Nevia (Nunzia De Stefano, 2017) and Colo (Teresa Villaverde, 2017)
5th PANEL: 16:20-17:40
Ambiguous Precarities
Amy Wigelsworth: ‘Sandrine Bonnaire retrouvée’: space and mobility in Sans toit ni loi and Prendre le large
Pamela Robertson Wojcik: “Adrift: Precarity, Sexuality and Hitchhiking in Cinema”
Seung-hoon Jeong: Peacefully Pervasive Precarity: Nomadland, or, No Country for Old Frontiersmen
DAY THREE: 16th of December 2023.
1st PANEL: 9:00-10:20
Activism, Spectatorship and Mobilisation
Giuseppe Previtali: Pixelated Uprisings: Politics and/of Precarity in Revolts’ videos
Fotis Bekis: Softening the trauma?
Enes Akdağ: You Wouldn’t Be Here If I Didn’t Pay You: Intersectional Look to Employee/Employer Child Actor in Honeyboy (2019)
2nd PANEL: 10:40-12:00
Lived Experiences and Gendered Inequalities
James Fenwick: Precarity and Film Festival Programmers: Screening and Voicing Experiences of Work
Anne O’Brien: Precarious Women: Inequality and Screen Production
SK Abbasuddin and Syed Murtaza Alfarid Hussain: Precarity and Screen Leisure: The Vanishing Single-Screen Theatres and the Rural Underclass in India
3rd PANEL 12:20-13:40
The Care Economy
Akriti Rastogi: Practices of Care in Precarity: Mapping Cine-Work on Social Media
Mariz Kelada: Men Behind the Scenes: The Operationalization of Care in Egypt’s Visual Media Production
Wikanda Promkhuntong: Screen labour precarity and potentiality in (post)-pandemic Thailand
Lunch Break: 13:40-14:40
4th PANEL: 14:40-16:00
Dystopias, Precarious Spaces and Ecologies
Karim Townsend: Environmental pollution, precarious bodies: Hollywood eco-cinema and social impact entertainment
Carlotta Antonelli: Citizenship of disability in the mediapolis: evolution of media representations. A precarious space? Main evidences
CONCLUDING REMARKS
The Cinematic Precarity Research Network 