The rise of the ‘neo-precariat’? The emerging precarious challenges for and responses of formal creative labour in advertising and public relations industries

Dr. Tommy Tse, Assistant Professor, Department of Sociology, The University of Hong Kong

Wednesday 7^th November, IAS, Millburn House, 13:00-14:30.

In view of the changing state of the creative workforce, this presentation reworks the traditional concept of precarity as a habituated (rather than contingent) state, to explore the diversity of precarisation processes in the creative sector. In doing so it critiques Standing’s (2016) theorisation of the ‘precariat’ as a ‘class-in-the-making’, based on an increasingly temporary employment status and lacking seven forms of labour-related security. The term ‘neo-precarity’ is coined to describe the emerging, normalising perceptions of insecurity among full-time creative labourers. Theoretically, this study identifies the drivers and patterns of three new forms of neo-precarious experience and their derived anxieties and dissatisfactions. Empirically, it demonstrates how technologisation, intergenerational conflicts and the disempowerment of creativity constitute various forms of perceived insecurity among creative workers, including professional status and job status insecurity. The findings illustrate how interactions of Hong Kong public relations and advertising workers with the environmental context, institutional and organisational factors, and multiple actors are reshaping their definitions of career, career success and self-actualisation. Rather than a unique hallmark for non-standard workers, I argue that precarity should be reconceptualised as inherent to—in different degrees—all labour-capital relationships.

Wednesday, 31^st October, 13:00-14:00, G50, Millburn House

Outline:

This talk examines representations of refugees, migrants and asylum seekers in some recent fiction films and documentaries, largely made by white Europeans. Austin will pay particular attention to the symbolic and ethical implications of decisions made by filmmakers, including questions of agency, benefaction, voice and individuation.

In contrast to the indifference or outright hostility with which migrants and refugees have repeatedly been treated, a well-intentioned but Eurocentric trope, evident in both fiction and documentary films, (Le Havre, Terraferma, Ode to Lesvos) follows the attempts made by ‘ordinary’ citizens to help those arriving at the continent’s borders. This celebration of benefaction often reduces the recipients of such hospitality to narrative prostheses, whose main function is to enhance the characterisation of white European characters.

By contrast, Mediterranea shuns the benefaction template to explore links between clandestine immigration and cheap undocumented labour which underpins Europe’s neoliberal economies. In addition, the documentary Les Sauteurs presents migrants’ own actions as in part a form of political resistance, while Imagining Emanuel interrogates the scrutiny and discipline endured by asylum seekers, processes that form part of the unmarked ‘objective violence’ that sustains the European system.

Biography

Thomas Austin has published widely on both popular and documentary film, including such seminal film studies texts as From Antz to Titanic: Reinventing Film Analysis (Pluto Press) and Hollywood, Hype, and Audiences: Selling and Watching Popular Film in the 1990s (Manchester University Press)

He is currently co-editing (with Angelos Koutsourakis) Cinema of Crisis: Film and Contemporary Europe (Edinburgh University Press, 2020) which traces European filmmakers’ diverse responses to interlinked upheavals and emergencies of the past three decades, including: the revolutions of 1989 and the collapse of the eastern bloc; deindustrialisation and financialisation; the 2007-8 crash and eurozone debt crisis; escalating neoliberal policies and austerity; 'post-democratic' tendencies; scapegoating, exclusionary politics and 'illiberal democracies' within the EU; 'Fortress Europe' and the current 'refugee / migrant crisis'.

Please contact Paula Watkins to RSVP (P.Watkins@warwick.ac.uk)

Professor Caroline Pauwels (Vrije Universiteit Brussels)

Professor Pauwels is a leading international expert on European and national media policy and the economy of the media sector. She is currently Rector at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel, and has received the Francqui Chair at Ghent University as well as held the Jean Monnet Chair. In 2017 she was selected as the ‘Brussels Leader of the Year’. In 2015, she organized the first World Difference Day (www.differenceday.com) discussing freedom of speech and media.

Professor Pauwels has published extensively on media policy and economics including The Palgrave Handbook of European Media Policy (2014) and Private Television in Western Europe: Content, Markets, Policies (2013).

17^th October, 13:00-14:30

IAS, Millburn House

Please email Paula Watkins (P.Watkins@warwick.ac.uk) to RSVP.