Papers – Creative Interruptions

Top Boy: Cultural Verisimilitude and the Allure of Black Criminality for UK Public Service Broadcasting Drama

Photini Vrikki — Sun, 01 Oct 2017 07:52:24 +0000

Ben Rogaly on ‘Migration’, racisms, and the creative resistance of food sector employees

Site Administrator — Wed, 24 May 2017 15:09:50 +0000

Ben Rogaly was a plenary speaker at the ‘Approaches to migration, language and identity‘ conference, held at the University of Lausanne (Switzerland) 4-6 May 2017. The aims of the conference were to to bring together scholars working on any aspect of migration, language, and identity. This three-day conference offered a forum for researchers working in the fields of politics, geosciences, linguistics, anthropology, economics, sociology, social (economic, legal) history, literature, and more to gather together and exchange ideas. The conference was motivated by the increasing awareness of the importance of interdisciplinary approaches to the study of migration as well as its implications on language, culture, and identity.

You can read Ben’s abstract below.

Abstract:

There is a contradiction in UK political economy between a restrictive, often hostile, language regarding migration, and sectors that have historically recruited large numbers of migrant workers. This lecture will dismantle the idea of ‘migration’, showing that its apparently common sense use in popular and political discourse perpetuates divisions between people, and can thus be used to impede united action for better quality jobs and working conditions. Using a place-based study of a small English city with a long history of receiving new work-seeking residents, the lecture also draws on ‘migrant’ and ‘local’ workers’ life history narratives to explore histories of both racisms and cross-nationality, cross-ethnic solidarities and creative resistance at work. The focus is on employment in the industrialised food chain, including production, processing, packing, distribution and food service.

Rethinking cultural diversity in the UK film sector: Practices in community filmmaking

Site Administrator — Thu, 02 Mar 2017 10:35:58 +0000

Sarita Malik, Caroline Chaplain, and Roberta Comunian’s AHRC funded Connected Communities research on Community Filmmaking, has been published in the Sage journal, Organization. It forms part of a 2017 Organization Special Issue: ‘Diversifying the creative: Creative work, creative industries, creative identities.’

In their paper Rethinking cultural diversity in the UK film sector: Practices in community filmmaking, Malik, Chapain and Comunian theorise cultural diversity as itself always a mediated process. Attention to the mediation of diversity is intensified in creative work such as filmmaking, with its focus on representation of diversity on the screen, as well as on the diversity of bodies working off-screen. Drawing on the work of Stuart Hall (1990), they see filmmaking by marginalised communities as a process that can constitute new kinds of cultural subjects and therefore new ‘places from which to speak’ (pp. 236–237). They position community filmmaking as consisting of participatory production practices at the edges of the film economy. Cultural diversity is realised when communities and practices are culturally varied, reshaping the identities of media workers and the business models which emerge from this process. Malik et al. distinguish between the top-down prescriptive models of cultural diversity, which policy-makers attempt to impose on and produce from cultural programmes, and the bottom-up mobilisation of mediated cultural diversity by community filmmakers. Their qualitative study across three regions in England privileges the perspectives of filmmakers as they interpret and engage with cultural diversity in terms of representation onscreen and of their own practices. They argue that participatory community filmmaking supports the creation of new symbolic spaces where meanings of cultural diversity can be generated and where the business practices of filmmaking are repositioned to emphasise civic agency and cultural aspirations. While marginal, community filmmaking practices act as a bridge which connects to wider film communities and provides alternative models of mediated cultural diversity from the bottom up.

(Editorial, Diversifying the creative: Creative work, creative industries, creative identities, Finkel, Jones, Sang and Russell)

This paper, suggests that academic, policy and industry debates have tended to focus on the mainstream film sector when discussing cultural diversity. One of the persistent challenges for the sector, according to the authors, has been how to diversify cultural representation and participation. This article suggests that participatory modes of community filmmaking make an important contribution to cultural diversity. Drawing on an evidence base derived from qualitative research conducted in three English regions, the article shifts the spotlight away from the mainstream and onto the margins of the film sector in order to explore more ‘bottom-up’ approaches to cultural diversity. It examines how community filmmakers interpret and engage with questions of cultural diversity and how this connects to the participatory and business practices that they adopt. The findings highlight the significance of processes of practice in how mediated cultural diversity manifests itself and the value of community filmmaking in contributing to wider cultural diversity debates and practices.

Access and download the article here.

Remixing Europe: Migrants, Media, Representation, Imagery

Site Administrator — Tue, 28 Feb 2017 12:14:49 +0000

What the ‘go home’ campaign tells us about the British media

by Sarita Malik

This Remixing Europe report is part of Remapping Europe, a programme by the Doc Next Network that investigates the tools and concepts of remixing media as a method of re-viewing, re-investigating and re-considering prevailing imageries of migrants in European societies.

In pages 52-56, Sarita Malik discusses what the ‘Go Home’ campaign tells us about the British media. She argues that ‘the brazen “go home” message signals a return to former crude models of enunciation, reminiscent of 1970s overt British racism (led by extreme Right groups such as the National Front).’ According to Sarita, the ‘Go Home’ campaign actively played on people’s fears, created divisions and sought to destroy connections between communities by emphasising the negative vectors of difference. Furthermore, her article argues that ‘such public racisms have primarily been targeted at visibly different ethnic groups and especially non-white minorities such as blacks and Asians; regardless of their legal status or, indeed, whether they are UK citizens or not.’

Sarita concludes by suggesting that ‘what is at stake is the effect on societal attitudes towards race and on the public vernacular of British racism itself. The use of populist and inflammatory language seductively touches on, releases and intensifies social fears and uncertainties related to “race”, cultural incompatibility and “otherness”; anxieties that remain highly charged.’

Read and download the report here.

Ben Rogaly and Kaveri Qureshi on ‘Diversity, urban space and the right to the provincial city’

Site Administrator — Thu, 23 Feb 2017 18:10:36 +0000

by Ben Rogaly and Kaveri Qureshi

Using three vignettes of the same physical space this article contributes to understanding of how the right to the city is contested in provincial England in the early twenty-first century. Oral history and ethnographic material gathered in Peterborough between 2010 and 2012 are drawn on to shed new light on the politics of diversity and urban space. This highlights the multiple place attachments and trans-spatial practices of all residents, including the white ethnic majority, as well as contrasting forms of active intervention in space with their different temporalities and affective intensities.

The article carries its own diversity politics, seeking to reduce the harm done by racism through chal- lenging the normalisation of the idea of a local, indigenous population, left out by multiculturalism. It simultaneously raises critical questions about capitalist regeneration strategies in terms of their impact both on class inequality and on the environment.

Read and download it here.

“Creative Diversity”: UK Public Service Broadcasting After Multiculturalism

Site Administrator — Mon, 20 Feb 2017 11:33:32 +0000

by Sarita Malik

Through a critical review of recent literature and policy concepts, this article puts together history and analysis to consider the relationship between race and UK public service broadcasting. Building on earlier work that recognizes a paradigmatic shift from multiculturalism to cultural diversity, this article identifies a third phase, “creative diversity.” Creative diversity provides a further incremental depoliticization of race in public service broadcasting contexts. Here, ideas of quality and creativity are foregrounded over (structural) questions of (in)equality or the positive recognition of social and cultural difference. The article situates the rise of creative diversity alongside parallel developments in the “crisis of multiculturalism,” UK equality legislative frameworks, and creative industries policy. It is argued that creative diversity shifts the paradigm of the multicultural problem (in public service broadcasting), enables the “marketization” of television and multiculture, and ultimately continues to safeguard the interests of public service broadcasting.

Access the article here.

Top Boy: Cultural Verisimilitude and the Allure of Black Criminality on UK Public Service Broadcasting Drama

Site Administrator — Tue, 14 Feb 2017 11:07:49 +0000

by Sarita Malik and C. Nwonka

This paper discusses the ways in which in the early 2000s, a new form of multicultural television drama began to emerge in the UK, exploring contemporary gang life within Britain’s black communities. A notable example of this ‘black urban crime’ genre is Top Boy, the two authors argue, screened by the UK’s leading multicultural public service broadcaster, Channel 4, between 2011 and 2013. This article produces an analysis, drawing on sociological and media studies perspectives, and through historicization and contextualisation, that seeks to understand the fascination of the black urban crime genre for programme-makers, broadcasters and audiences in the contemporary British mediascape. It locates Top Boy at the intersection of complex media relations and modes of production that are themselves intertwined with political, legislative and cultural agendas tied to post-multiculturalist and neoliberalist tendencies within public service broadcasting frameworks. The article suggests that black urban crime narratives do not advance understandings of the organizational structure of urban gangs or drug related crime that are so central to these texts; nor do they offer a progressive contribution to contemporary debates or representation of black criminality.

Access the paper here.

‘That’s where my perception of it all was shattered’: Oral histories and moral geographies of food sector workers in an English city region

Site Administrator — Fri, 27 Jan 2017 17:39:29 +0000

by Ben Rogaly and Kaveri Qureshi

This paper argues that geographers and oral historians continue to have much to learn from each other. In it, Ben Rogaly and Kaveri Qureshi demonstrate how the subfield of labour geography in particular can enrich its understanding of workers’ lived experiences, both in employment and beyond the workplace, through greater use of interpretative, collaborative oral history methodologies. Attentive to the temporal specificity and inter-subjectivity of people’s narratives, the article argues that oral history reveals how workers’ moral geographies emerge and change.

The authors document the spatio-temporalities and institutions of food sector employment in Peterborough, England, a city-region from which urban-based workers are bussed out daily to rural jobs. The analysis draws on four extended case studies of people who migrated to the UK and worked in the sector in the 2000s, building on recent research that has highlighted harsh employment conditions in the food production, packing and processing sector. It complements this work by viewing narrative itself as an agentic act and listening to how research participants crafted their life stories. These stories revealed diverse, complex and context-specific moral geographies, with participants variously placing value on small acts of rebellion or refusal, dignity and the time to speak with others at work. The article advocates greater engagement by labour geographers with the subjective experiences of workers, and with individual as well as collective agency.

Read and download the paper here.

Labour geographies on the move: Migration, migrant status and work in the 21st century

Site Administrator — Mon, 16 Jan 2017 15:27:02 +0000

Geoforum’s Editorial paper, titled Labour geographies on the move: Migration, migrant status and work in the 21st century, by Michelle Buckley, Siobhán McPhee, and Ben Rogaly introduces a themed issue on migrant work and employment which originates from three events held at the Annual Association of American Geographer’s conference in Tampa, Florida in 2014. The first were two sessions the writers organized, each filled with rich contributions that probed the intersections between migration scholarship, theory on migrant work and employment, and the subfield of labour geography. These sessions and this themed issue have emerged at a time in which flows of migration arising from a diverse array of factors – from individual choices, labour market change, climate destabilization, ethnic, religious and racial persecution or war – are fundamentally reshaping labour markets across the global north and south.

Together, the papers in this themed issue offer insight into the role of national and local state authorities in producing precarious employment conditions for migrant workers across the global north and south, point to some of the methodological limits of current labour geography and their impacts on the theorization of agency, suggest new understandings of the temporality of both employer and worker agency, and illuminate the political constraints produced through the intersection of precarious residency, aspirations for various forms of citizenship and unjust employment conditions. Perhaps just as importantly, however, part of the value of these papers lies in what they do not address directly, but towards which they (alongside other salient migration research) broadly point labour geography as a subfield.

Read and download the editorial here.

* This themed issue was dedicated to the memory of the late Dr Kerry Preibisch, who contributed so much to understanding and advocating the cause of low-paid migrant workers in Canadian agriculture (see, for example, Preibisch, 2010). Kerry’s tragically early death has robbed the field of a major scholarly voice – both critical and compassionate.

Disrupting migration stories: reading life histories through the lens of mobility and fixity

Site Administrator — Sat, 14 Jan 2017 14:36:38 +0000

by Ben Rogaly

It has been argued that the ‘mobility turn’ is overcelebratory regarding human movement across space. Yet, critical studies of mobilities have emerged that refute this, demonstrating how various forms and aspects of mobility are bound up with unequal power relations. This paper, by Ben Rogaly, engages with debates over migration and mobility through an in-depth analysis of three life history interviews recorded in England in 2011. The subjects of the interviews are all men in their fifties and sixties of South Asian heritage, who moved to England as minors, and who, as adults, worked in factories for at least three years. The stories in all their affectivity and sensuousness disrupt standard tropes regarding migration and contribute to our understanding of the relations between mobility, fixity, ‘race’, and class.

The built-in historical perspective shows how, looking back, someone who may once have migrated across international borders does not necessarily see that as the most significant moment in their life; how someone’s past moves within a nation- state may have greater significance to them than their moves into it; how people who move at one point can also be stuck, reluctantly immobile, at another; and how both the representations and materiality of mobility and fixity are imbued with, and reproduce, class inequality and racisms.

Read and download the paper here.