The Media Industries SIG is pleased to be able to sponsor the following panels and workshops, and we hope you will consider including them in your conference plans.
Also, please mark in your calendars for our annual meeting on Thursday, March 20, from 3-4:45 p.m. in the Ballard conference room.
The SIG is hosting a happy hour from 6:30 – 8:30 p.m. on Thursday, March 20 at the Alibi Room [85 Pike St (#410) Seattle, WA 98101 (located in Post Alley below the Pike Place Market]. Please join us.
Wednesday, March 19, 2014 02:00PM-03:45PM
C12 Studying Media Event Spaces
- Chair: Avi Santo (Old Dominion University)
- Participants: Tamara Falicov (University of Kansas), Erin Hanna (University of Michigan), Tim Havens (University of Iowa), Aswin Punathambekar (University of Michigan), Kevin Sandler (Arizona State University)
Increasingly, as media industry scholars have sought out new approaches to understanding how production cultures operate, there has been an intensified focus on media events like film festivals and trade shows as important sites of access and analysis. While it is now a common refrain amongst media industry scholars that such semi-public events offer unique research opportunities (mapping transnational industrial flows and hierarchies, observing and documenting trade rituals [Havens, 2006], witnessing the exchange of trade stories [Caldwell, 2008] and industry lore [Havens, 2013], gaining insight into how partnerships form and dissolve, tracing the performative aspects of occupational habitus [Bourdieu, 1993]), it is not at all clear that media industry scholars know how to take full advantage of the opportunities such events afford. Simply put, most media scholars are not trained ethnographers and the often private spaces in which these semi-public events take place present unique challenges of access, observation, and credibility. Add to that John Caldwell¹s (2008) astute observation that every encounter with media industry professionals is subject to promotional spin, and scholarly participation in such spaces runs the risk of simply reproducing industry jingoism. As such, this workshop will address challenges in gathering “evidence” and analyzing such events, as well as strategies and methodologies for conducting research within these spaces. The participants have attended and written about a range of media events, including the Cannes film festival, the Buenos Aires Independent Film Festival, the National Association of Television Program Executives (NATPE) tradeshow, the International Licensing Industry and Merchandisers’ Association (LIMA) annual expo, the San Diego Comic-Con, MIP-TV, Bombay FICCI-FRAMES and DISCOP. The workshop offers an important pedagogical resource for media industry scholars looking to use such events as opportunities to network with industry professionals or gather evidence on institutional practices, including a discussion of “do’s” and “don’ts” and insight into ways of looking, listening, and participating in such spaces without compromising scholarly rigor.
Thursday, March 20, 2014 09:00AM-10:45PM
E9: Television Industries and the Production of Film Culture: Interventions in the UK Context
Chair: Paul McDonald
How can we understand the place of the television industry in the making and shaping of film culture? In what ways do television services intervene in and contribute to the production, dissemination and presentation of film? How do programming and scheduling choices influence the formation of a shared movie culture? More particularly, in what ways do the niche services of dedicated film channels broaden and promote ideas of cinephilic consumption, and how does television both respond to and create publicly circulated definitions of world cinema? What functions are performed by the “hidden labour” of programme planners or film buyers in the practical processes of programme decision-making for film? From the perspective of the broadcasters, what part do films and film programming play in the construction of branded channel identities? How can those branding operations be located within, and understood as a response to, the cluttered landscape of the multichannel economy? What economic and cultural value does television’s subsidizing of film production have for the growth and sustainability of national and international film cultures?
This panel takes these general questions and addresses them through attention to the specific context of the UK broadcasting landscape over the last three decades. Papers explore the multiple interventions of the BBC and Channel 4 in British film culture as producers, financiers, patrons, programmers, curators and critics of film. Through attention to these concerns, the papers examine the television/film interface by building on existing scholarship concerned with the construction of channel branding (Johnson, 2012), the complex creative work of producing the schedule (Ellis 2000), television’s expansion of a cinephilic sensibility (Klinger, 2006), the involvement of broadcasters in co-produced feature films (Fountain, 2001), and the importance of television to the formation of contemporary film policy and a sustainable film industry (Dickinson and Harvey, 2005). Drawing upon original interviews with key personnel in the UK film and television industries, together with unprecedented access to the corporate archive of Channel 4, the papers presented in this panel are uniquely placed to offer a range of fresh insights into the multiple dynamics at work in television’s production of film culture but also of the value of film to broadcasters.
Panelists:
- Laura Mayne (University of Portsmouth), “Channel 4, Film4 and the Impact of Brand Identity on the UK Film Industry”
- Rachael Keene (Creative Skillset), “Films for Television: Channel Branding, the Production of Cinephilia, and the Role of Programme Planners in the Multichannel Economy”
- Ieuan Franklin (Bournemouth University), “Building a Television Audience for World Cinema in the (Late) Era of Media Scarcity”
- Justin Smith (University of Portsmouth), “We Need to Talk About Subsidy: Television and the UK Film Industry – A 30-Year Relationship”
Thursday, March 20, 2014 05:00PM-06:45PM
I16: Digital Labor and Web Start-ups: At Work and Play on the Internet
Chair: Daniel Bernardi
This panel examines the contemporary media industries as a transitional workspace, paying particular attention to the “transmedia” industries—innovative new forms of industrial organization, emerging forms of creative work, new technologies and economic models, and creative relations between consumers, marketers, and producers. A large number of creative industries and marketing scholars are engaged in productive critiques of digital media labor practices in the new economy; however, far fewer humanities-based, critical and cultural studies scholars have engaged with these issues head-on; those who do focus on labor issues tend to emphasize the unpaid (albeit volunteer) labor of fans engaged in social media marketing campaigns rather than the more widespread invisible labor associated with the wholesale data-mining of consumer preferences that are being sold en masse to advertisers by major IT companies like Google and Facebook; the latter development represents a major shift in the strategic, commercial role of media and its social function as a leisure practice in the new economy. The methodological approach used to examine these transitional developments—both within and outside the traditional Hollywood media industry—is two-tiered: a production study of several of the new, cutting-edge transmedia companies that are engineering new creative and strategic approaches to monetizing web-based content; and textual analyses of these promotional-storytelling hybrids with the goal of unpacking the social and political implications of these new forms of entertainment. An additional topic of concern is the way these digital start-ups are challenging conventions of traditional narrative by telling stories differently/interactively.
Panelists:
- Daniel Bernardi, SFSU, “Post-structuralism for Profit: Tracking Transmediation from Simultaneously Inside and Outside the Academy”
- Catherine Johnson, Nottingham U, “From Television Presentation to ‘On-brand TV’: Red Bee Media and the Production Cultures of the Digital Transmedia Industries”
- Denise Mann, UCLA, “YouTube’s Content Partners—Monetizing the Web is Scary Business”
- Kevin Sandler, ASU, “FX then and FX Now: Reconceptualizing the FX network(s) in the Netflix Age”
Thursday, March 20, 2014 05:00PM-06:45PM
I26: “Making-of” Documentaries and “Making-of” Production Narratives
Chair: Daniel Steinhart
Promoting the making of film and television productions has long been an important strategy for marketing films and TV programs and framing the media-making process for public consumption. The “making-of” narratives that turn up in DVD extras, film and TV publicity campaigns, and insider anecdotes can not only reveal officially approved depictions of media-making methods and collaborations but also offer a way into studying the fissures between an institutional agenda and the everyday experiences of production personnel. This panel explores the making of productions as seen in both documentary form and first-hand observations in order to shed light on the ways that “making-of” narratives are mobilized by different groups and individuals, from Hollywood studios and global media producers to film school students and below-the-line workers. In an effort to historicize this discussion, the panel begins with Daniel Steinhart, who presents on Hollywood’s 1960s promotional featurettes, which serve as critical texts for understanding how production work and a changing film industry was promoted to the public during a time of industrial transition. Subsequently, Aynne Kokas explores the role that “making-of” narratives play in media events promoting Sino-U.S. co-productions and their attendant transnational collaborations. Next, Ritesh Mehta draws on rich ethnographic research to detail how the “making-of” narratives that circulate in film school inform how students make sense of their work and expose some tensions with the agendas of the students’ supporting institution. Finally, John Caldwell examines behind-the-scenes deconstructions of productions carried out by film and video workers that seek to undermine the official “making-of” narratives advanced by studios and their marketing efforts. Taken together, these papers bring to light how the production process is visualized, conceptualized, and promoted while also uncovering the conflicts and negotiations between institutional programs and the complex and unwieldy reality of production work. Furthermore, this panel contributes to the subfield of production studies by offering research methods that highlight ethnographic work and the analysis of behind-the-scene media texts to better understand the aims and identities of media industries, film educational establishments, and production workers.
Panelists:
- Daniel Steinhart (Chapman University) — Hollywood’s “Making-of” Promotional Featurettes: Selling and Visualizing Production Work in the 1960s
- Aynne Kokas (Rice University) — The Press and the Process: Sino-U.S. Media Industries and the “Making-of” Event
- Ritesh Mehta (University of Southern California) — The “Making-of” of Film School Students and Films: Agendas and Standards, Appropriation and Authorship
- John Caldwell (University of California, Los Angeles) — “Un-Making-of” Documentaries
Friday, March 21, 2014 09:00AM-10:45AM
J24: NICLed and Dimed: The Global Trajectories and Local Logics of Screen Media Labor
Chair: Michael Curtin
Since the 1980s, new distribution technologies and the erosion of national territories have enabled the growth of vast multiplatform global conglomerates. More closely attuned to the imperatives of financial markets than they are to the subtleties of creative endeavor, these corporations doggedly pursue cost economies throughout the production process, engendering a relentless search for government subsidies, cheap labor, and compliant partners. Moreover, new technologies have made it possible for leading producers to knit together transnational production teams so that workers often find themselves collaborating or competing with lower-paid counterparts in distant locales. This New International Division of Cultural Labor (NICL) has fueled competition between such cities as London, Beijing, and Dubai, each aspiring to become media capitals renowned for their creative workforces. Many offer subsidized facilities, tax incentives, and labor concessions, all of them designed to lure international producers and hopefully nurture local capacity. On the one hand, this generates new creative opportunities in diverse locales, while on the other it works to reinforce existing institutional and cultural hierarchies.
Although political economists have noted these trends, their broad-stroke analyses often overlook the specific institutional practices that are reshaping the social relations of production. In this panel, Kevin Sanson analyzes the “production services” agencies that help producers scour the globe for creative and cost advantages, knitting together spatially dispersed but thoroughly integrated creative apparatuses. At a more local level, Shanti Kumar examines the film cities of India, showing how institutions on the margins seek to lure creative talent from core creative centers in order to enhance their status in the transnational circuits of production. Both panelists show how the global division of creative labor at once advantages existing power relations but also disturbs them as well. Nevertheless this potentially disruptive tension is bounded by enduring biases and practices that resist even the most determined forms of progressive political intervention. Reflecting on Hollywood’s ongoing struggles over diversity on the screen and in the workforce, Herman Gray points to even broader implications, seeing it as emblematic of a central but often unspoken tension at work in the global refiguring of the spatial relations of production.
Panelists:
- Kevin Sanson (University of California, Santa Barbara), “Production Service Firms and the Spatial Dynamics of Global Media Production”
- Shanti Kumar (University of Texas, Austin), “Cinema, Immaterial Labor and the Production of Mass Creativity in Urban India”
- Herman Gray (University of California Santa Cruz), “Creative Industries, Marketing Diversity, and Managing Difference”
- Respondent, Miranda Banks, Emerson College
Friday, March 21, 2014 12:15PM-02:00PM
K24: The Cultural Politics of Digital Markets
Chair Patrick Vonderau
How is audience activity being shaped and structured by digital networks? How do markets for particular kinds of digital content come into being, and what are their specific properties? How do transformations in the available media delivery mechanisms privilege and/or discourage particular media texts and genres? This panel will examine emerging distribution infrastructures and related technologies that will play a part in organizing digital markets for media industries. Moving beyond websites and digital distribution platforms for film and television, this panel explores the multiple definitions of digital markets, and the mutually constitutive dimensions of digital properties and market dynamics. This necessarily incorporates interactions between the powerbase of media conglomerates and the high-tech industries (including the burgeoning data sector). In critical dialogue with a body of current research (e.g. Andrejevic 2013, Barry and Slater 2005, Jenkins et al 2013, Manovich 2012), the papers in this panel focus on issues related to the politics of digital standards; the economy of pirate video streaming; data centers and “the cloud” as a market force in media industries; and big data and its impact on media markets. In showcasing a series of linked but complementary research projects, the panel will investigate the ongoing transformations of the digital content industries while also experimenting with new critical languages for thinking about the relationship between media infrastructure, market power, and cultural experience.
Panelists:
- Patrick Vonderau (Stockholm University), “The Politics of Content Aggregation”
- Jennifer Holt (University of California, Santa Barbara), “The Cloud, Mobile Media, and New Economies of Competition”
- Ramon Lobato (Swinburne University of Technology), “The Informal Entrepreneurs of Video Streaming”
- Amelia Arsenault (Georgia State University), “Big Data and the Media Industries”
Friday, March 21, 2014 02:15PM-04:00PM
L3: Industry Studies and/as Audience Studies
Chair: Alicia Kozma
The past several years have seen a resurgence of Industry or Production Studies work like Havens et al (2009) and Mayer et al (2009) (with a second volume in the works). Particularly unexpected has been the “industrial turn” in fan and audience studies (for example, Jenkins 2006, Jenkins et al 2013), given the historically strict separation of these two fields as they each sought to understand the structures and cultures of their respective topics of focus. This panel thinks through not just the Industrial Turn in Audience Studies, but a potential Audience Turn in Industry/Production Studies, considering how these two modes of inquiry can increasingly inform each other and how they could continue to enrich one another. It examines how industry practices and identities are produced through ideas about the audience and how concepts of and orientations toward audience practices and identities are produced through industry action.
The various contributions explore complementary aspects of this Industry-Audience nexus, from historical looks to contemporary ones, empirical arguments to methodological or theoretical ones. Mel Stanfill makes a case for examining industry discourses about fans for how they produce a cultural common sense around the category “fan” that impacts both industry and fans themselves. Suzanne Scott uses a case study of AMC series “The Walking Dead” to argue that the production and performance of industrially sanctioned forms of fan engagement have the capacity to impact how Fan studies approaches the subject of the fan. Derek Johnson considers the convergence in question from a different angle, arguing that studies of industry and production might make their own “audience turn” to usefully consider what meanings, identities, and claims to legitimacy in industry production cultures are articulated through and in relation to the audience. Michael Kackman uses historical case studies of early- to mid-20th century children’s entertainment to consider challenges in drawing conceptual boundaries between the audience as imagined by the industry (the industry’s audience) and the audience as it imagines itself (the audience’s audience).
This panel is particularly useful for its timeliness, describing this very current convergence or conversation between these previously separated fields. We also seek to help shape the direction that these two fields, which should now be recognized as related, move forward from this juncture.
Panelists:
- Mel Stanfill: “The Fan” as/in Industry Discourse
- Suzanne Scott: Talking the Walk: Enunciative Fandom and Fan Studies’ Industrial Turn
- Derek Johnson: The Audience Turn? Toward a More Integrated Production Studies
- Michael Kackman: Reaching the Historical Audience: From Industry to Agency
Saturday, March 22, 2014 09:00AM-10:45AM
M15: Generating Professional Identities: Defining Creative Work within Hollywood Production Cultures
Chair: John Caldwell
It is a common belief within media industry sectors that industrial reconfigurations and technological changes are challenging not only established job descriptions and skill sets long deemed essential for membership within discrete subfields like cinematography, character licensing, screenwriting, or comic books, but are also transforming the very occupational dispositions (Bourdieu, 1993) of members; how they make sense of their roles within converging cultural, industrial and technological landscapes. Of course, not all members of a given field accept shifts to their occupational purview and status and, as John Caldwell (2008) suggests, turf marking characterizes both inter-and-intragroup relationships among media workers. As such, efforts to define occupational identities within media subfields are typically characterized by negotiation and struggle over definitional authority, often framed as a generational conflict between an entrenched old guard and an emerging new one. This panel investigates how shifts in occupational identity within media sectors are negotiated among members, with a particular focus on institutional tactics developed to achieve group affinity. Miranda Banks tracks the role of the American film and television writer-producer—otherwise known has the hyphenate—examining how this dual role has complicated the meaning of employment, prestige, and authorial power across different media and across generations. Avi Santo analyzes the educational platforms developed to train future licensing professionals under the auspices of LIMA University, which not only teaches participants about emerging tactics but also is designed to cultivate a shared occupational ethos. Alisa Perren focuses on generational tensions and the varied ways professional identities have been cultivated in the comic book industry. In particular, she analyzes the schisms between those that see comics as a profession in its own right versus those who see it as a means of producing IP that can be optioned for film and TV. Chris Lucas considers how craft-level workers like cinematographers negotiate the enigmatic place of creativity and aesthetic contribution within their specialized roles and how professionalization and technique become the grounds on which media workers struggle to “bake in” their contribution to particular texts.
Panelists:
- Alisa Perren – University of Texas at Austin (Drawing Lines: Creative Agency in the Contemporary Comics Industry)
- Miranda Banks – Emerson College (Of Hyphenates and Showrunners: Mapping the Uneasy History of the Writer-Producer)
- Avi Santo – Old Dominion University (License to License: Cultivating Professional Identity in the Contemporary Character Licensing Industry)
- Christopher Lucas – Independent Scholar (Wizards New and Old: Negotiating Creative Claims in Craft Occupations)
