A Sense of Place: Repairing, Maintaining and Reimagining Social Housing on Film

Caterina Sartori

no. 5, Roundtables, vol. 6December 14, 2021<December 14, 2021

A Sense of Place: Repairing, Maintaining and Reimagining Social Housing on Film

by Caterina Sartori

Challenging views of social housing as dysfunctional and dystopian, Caterina Sartori examines films that reimagine everyday social space through practices of care, repair and maintenance.

no. 5, Roundtables, vol. 6December 13, 2021<December 15, 2021

Permanent Precarity: Transient Spaces and Horrific Indebtedness in the Midwest

by Adam Ochonicky

Adam Ochonicky explores the relationship between mobility and precarity in the Midwestern spaces of It Follows.

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

Precarious Tactics of Habitability in the French Banlieue

by Isabelle McNeill

Drawing on the ideas of Michel De Certeau, Isabelle McNeill discusses filmmaking practices in the banlieue as part of a wider struggle for habitability.

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. 6December 6, 2021<December 6, 2021

Home: An Impossible Pursuit?

by Anna Viola Sborgi

Anna Viola Sborgi's introduction to the second round explores intersectionality and social mobility as it relates to home.

no. 5, Roundtables, vol. 6November 22, 2021<November 22, 2021

Envisioning Precarity in the American Midwest: RoboCop (1987) and the Horror of Vacancy

by Adam Ochonicky

Tracing the history of uninhabitable homes in the horror genre, Adam Ochonicky connects RoboCop's narrative of precarious housing to media images of the Midwest as a blank or vacant space.

no. 5, Roundtables, vol. 6November 18, 2021<November 18, 2021

Constructing Precarity: Media and Social Housing in the French Banlieue

by Isabelle McNeill

Can cinema generate alternative visions of precarious life in the banlieue? Isabelle McNeill investigates scenes of domestic interiors that challenge the dominant media imagery of French social housing and its high rise architecture.

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.

no. 5, Roundtables, vol. 6November 10, 2021<November 11, 2021

Media, Precarity, and the Home: An Introduction

by Anna Viola Sborgi

Anna Viola Sborgi introduces the roundtable with some reflections on the meanings of housing precarity in urban centers and the recent proliferation of images of housing inequality in popular culture.

no. 4, Q & A, vol. 6September 16, 2021<September 16, 2021

The Mediapolis Q&A: Mara Ferreri’s The Permanence of Temporary Urbanism and Ella Harris’s Rebranding Precarity

by Mara Ferreri

Mara Ferreri and Ella Harris discuss their books The Permanence of Temporary Urbanism: Normalising Precarity in Austerity London and Rebranding Precarity: Pop-Up Culture as the Seductive New Normal.

no. 3, Threads, vol. 4October 17, 2019<January 28, 2023

The Gamification and Domestication of Slum Voyeurism: From Poverty Porn to Aesthetics of Precarity

by Elmo Gonzaga

In the second part of our Slum series, Elmo Gonzaga probes the ethics of journalistic, cinematic, and gamified images of informal settlements in Southeast Asia and Hong Kong.