Globalizing Low Labor: A Collective Ethnography
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| Year of publication | 2014 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
| MU Faculty or unit | |
| Citation | |
| Description | The paper reconsiders theories of globalization of media production by focusing on mediation processes within global production networks. Transnational teams on "runaway" productions shot in Prague represent the highest-income end for the local production community; however, their Czech members have relatively low creative control, job security, and prospects of upward mobility. This paper is based on a project whereby more than 100 student interns--while working as assistants on film sets--were simultaneously conducting participant observation and keeping field diaries. In follow-up seminars, we worked together to identify key issues of transnational production cultures: tensions between different nationalities, knowledge transfer, distributed creativity, etc. Such collective ethnography challenges traditional concepts of fieldwork and allows for valorizing "provincial" and multi-focal articulations of the production culture. University-educated interns potentially disrupted the industrial ideology of "dues-paying" (Hill), and their observations opened a revisionist perspective on global capital's interactions with local creative labour. |
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