- Convenors:
-
Lana Askari
(University of Manchester)
Jose Luis Fajardo-Escoffie (University of Sheffield)
Paloma Yáñez Serrano (Universitat Oberta de Catalunya)
Send message to Convenors
- Format:
- Panel Discussion
- Start time:
- 27 March, 2021 at
Time zone: Europe/London
- Session slots:
- 1
Short Abstract:
This panel will explore workers' resistance by discussing how audio-visual methods and representations seek to communicate their precarious experiences and protests. We welcome current and past reflections on worker's rights and resistances, encouraging feminist and political ecological approaches.
Long Abstract:
How can we understand, analyse and support workers' resistance through audio-visual methods? This panel seeks abstracts that explore the marginalized actors within labour structures, as the active agents of localized intersubjective knowledge, rather than mere resources of a capitalist commodity chain (Haraway, 1988). In the past century worker's rights have been advanced through popular (collective) resistance. However, workers' precarity remains a current issue affected by neoliberal policies and recent COVID-19 regulations as seen in continuing global protests, from factory workers to white collar flex jobs. We are interested in the construction of these resistances through 'sonic images'; "the set of postures, body movements, expressions, gestures" that expose the workers' social and political context through their affective relations, modes of performance and everyday forms of survival (D'Amico, 2015:2). These include localized audio-visual production among workers, which serve to disrupt "comfortable [visual] boundaries and encouraging transgression of rules" (Mitchell 1992: 223), create empathy in shared feelings of social immobility and entrapment, or other acts of resistance or forms collective or collaborative activism. The focus on audio-visual representation questions how existing forms of visualization of localised labour build a ubiquitous form of knowledge across the chain. It aims to draw attention to how the visualization of embodied forms of labour experience can help us understand the social issues and environmental sustainability within different industries. We encourage feminist and political ecological approaches that consider workers as active members of their environments who work to reshape dominant economic and gender norms.
Accepted papers:
Session 1Paper short abstract:
The paper details a photovoice project that emerged organically among three separate groups of Bangladeshi, Indian, and Pakistani undocumented men in Greece. Disposability as racialised migrant workers made them take images and videos of their work and living conditions as an act of resistance.
Paper long abstract:
“This will let the people learn how we live our lives here.” These words from an undocumented Bangladeshi migrant man working in Greece sum up the impetus behind a participatory multi-media social justice photovoice project in Greece. Photovoice allows the power of the image to speak for and communicate the lived experience of community members who are otherwise silenced Over a twelve-month period, ten undocumented Bangladeshi, Indian, and Pakistani migrant men each have used their cell phones to take photographs, record videos, and narrate their stories centred on four themes, namely, work, living conditions, leisure and family, and masculinity and manhood. They sent these images to me by using a free phone app, WhatsApp. The paper discusses the strengths and challenges of this collaborative social justice project. I outline the organic nature of its emergence as a method for the men to document their daily life as undocumented migrant workers and their masculine identity that is shaped by the intersections of their immigrant status, race, ethnicity, religion, age, and marital status with xenophobia and racism.
Through this project, images and videos allowed for a dialogue to emerge from the men’s side. The visual material also gave a unique entry point to have deeper conversations about the men’s intimate desires, concerns, and worries as much as giving a glimpse into their daily lives. Importantly, the set of images and video narratives broke commonly held stereotypes and assumptions in Greece about South Asian migrant men as misogynists, sexual deviants, and potential terrorists.
Paper short abstract:
The paper offers an account of the nine-months long weekly acting-improv workshop conducted in Hong Kong with a group of Indonesian women migrant domestic workers. Re-enacting scenes of domestic violence suffered in Hong Kong by the participants, the group eventually scripted and produced a film.
Paper long abstract:
The precarious life conditions of women migrant domestic workers in Hong Kong, which account for 10% of the local workforce, are being increasingly scrutinised and criticised as tantamount to modern slavery.
This paper describes an ethnofiction film laboratory conducted between 2018 to 2020 on the conditions of Indonesian female foreign domestic workers in Hong Kong. The project included a nine-months long acting-improv workshop conducted by a visual anthropology team and a group of thirty Indonesian women migrant domestic workers.
Re-enacting the scenes of domestic violence perpetrated by the local Hong Kong employers of the participants, the group eventually assembled a selection of scenes into the life-story of a fictional character, merging many episodes into one single script. After minimal funds were acquired from a local ngo, the group chose an Indonesian actress to play the title role, produced and starred in a low-budget feature film. The movie was directed at the mainstream Hong Kong market, to create awareness on the issue among local citizens.
The project offers an ethnographic account of the audiovisual resistance practices and activities of the group.
Film trailer: https://bit.ly/323Gd9R
Paper short abstract:
In this paper, I explore what role audio and visual media played in the 2020 UC Santa Cruz wildcat strike. I argue that media helped solidify the collective voice strikers developed during the labor action.
Paper long abstract:
Since Fall 2019, University of California Santa Cruz (UCSC) graduate student workers have been demanding a Cost of Living Adjustment (COLA) to cope with the skyrocketing cost of living and cost of rent in Santa Cruz. In December, UCSC graduate students went on a grading strike and in February on a teaching strike while maintaining a hard picket line at the entrance to the University. Much changed with the COVID-19 outbreak that obliterated in person organizing and yet, the strike continued: remote teaching translated into remote striking; the picket line went digital; and disruptions became mediated.
In this paper, I explore what role audio and visual media played in the 2020 UC Santa Cruz wildcat strike. I argue that media helped solidify the collective voice strikers developed during the labor action. Media produced by and about the strikers highlighted the mass nature of the movement rather than identifying individual organizers. The media sphere was taken as a site of struggle and contestation. It did not replace but rather it complemented the struggle on the ground. The COLA campaign produced a complex intermingling of virtual and actual mobilization of bodies and voices that revealed and disrupted the working of the Neoliberal university.
Paper short abstract:
#PrecarityStory is a documentary about the working life of Isabel, a cleaner, researcher, and teacher at the same British university. This paper explores the process in which a filmmaker and an empowered subject challenge the current academic labour market and the collaborative mode of production.
Paper long abstract:
In 2019, precarious academics Lorena Cervera and Isabel Seguí decided to make a film to expose the increasing precarisation of academic labour at universities through the work story of Isabel who, at that time, was a cleaner, researcher, and teacher at the same British elite institution. This idea became a collaborative short documentary filmed during the higher education strikes organised by the University and College Union (2018-2020). #PrecarityStory (2020), is a (self-consciously) performative documentary (Bruzzi, 2006) inspired methodologically by the transmediatic form of Latin American testimonio. This means that the represented individual subject stands for a community (the academic precariat), and the film—although based in real stories— is an activist product in which ‘reality’ is managed creatively to further the political agenda of the filmmakers.
Collaborative modes of authorship and production in documentary have been addressed by several scholars and named with different labels. This paper explores the complexities of this approach in which a filmmaker and an empowered film subject —who share an immigrant status— join forces not only to challenge the exploitative nature of the current academic labour market but also to showcase and interrogate the mode of production of collaborative cinema. In this presentation, co-creators Lorena and Isabel reflect on: how the theoretical underpinnings of their shared research interests and perspectives (feminist, decolonial) have influenced their documentary practice; the complexities and negotiations in the co-creation process (Auguiste et al, 2020), including its utopian horizon and boundaries; the limits of representation; and the audience as co-creator.