Whose Tale Gets Told? The Whitewashing of Homelessness and Mobility

Pamela Robertson Wojcik

no. 5, Roundtables, vol. 6December 7, 2021<December 9, 2021

Whose Tale Gets Told? The Whitewashing of Homelessness and Mobility

by Pamela Robertson Wojcik

Arguing that mobility has to be understood intersectionally, Pamela Robertson Wojcik shows how Hollywood genres about tramps, hitchhikers, and "street people" overwhelmingly privilege white characters even as film and television have started to pay more attention to female homelessness.

no. 5, Roundtables, vol. 6November 12, 2021<November 14, 2021

Is the Home Ever Not Precarious? The Long Arc of Genres of Precarity

by Pamela Robertson Wojcik

Tracing the historical roots of the current cinema of precarity via the image of the tramp, Pamela Robertson Wojcik argues that narratives about the unhomed have always been central to American film.

Commentary, no. 2, vol. 6April 12, 2021<April 29, 2021

“It’s not your loss. It’s San Francisco’s”: Black Movement, Displacement, Home/lessness, and Gentrification in The Last Black Man in San Francisco (2019)

by Jacqueline Pinkowitz

Joe Talbot’s The Last Black Man in San Francisco is an elegy to the displacement of minority communities from the gentrifying city. Jacqueline Pinkowitz discusses the film’s images of movement, dislocation, and loss and the legacy of racial inequality in the Bay Area.

no. 2, Reviewed, vol. 6April 6, 2021<April 7, 2021

Mobility, race, citizenship and Driving While Black

by Steve Macek

Steve Macek reviews the PBS documentary Driving While Black: Race, Space and Mobility in America and discusses the history of race and mobility in the United States.

Mediapolis on Coronavirus, no. 2, vol. 5June 22, 2020<June 23, 2020

COVID-19, Labor Mobility, and Care Work in China

by Yang Zhan

Yang Zhan examines the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on labor mobility, particularly for service workers, in China's growing economy.

no. 1, Roundtables, vol. 5February 27, 2020<February 27, 2020

Feminist Protocols: Auditing Urban Infrastructures and Reporting Gender Violence in the City

by Carrie Rentschler

Carrie Rentschler on feminist and anti-racist practices in the porous urban spaces and surfaces of chalking, graffiti, and postering

no. 2, Roundtables, vol. 2June 19, 2017<June 19, 2017

Sense and the City: Liam Young’s Speculative Cinema, Part II

by Holly Willis

In this second round of responses in the Experimental Media in the City roundtable, Holly Willis encourages us to consider how mediated cities and mediated selves provoke an ethics of the computational and the ethically mediated self, as opposed to an ethics of the visual.