Precarious Tactics of Habitability in the French Banlieue
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Drawing on the ideas of Michel De Certeau, Isabelle McNeill discusses filmmaking practices in the banlieue as part of a wider struggle for habitability.
Roundtables
Whose Tale Gets Told? The Whitewashing of Homelessness and Mobility
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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.
Home: An Impossible Pursuit?
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Anna Viola Sborgi's introduction to the second round explores intersectionality and social mobility as it relates to home.
Envisioning Precarity in the American Midwest: RoboCop (1987) and the Horror of Vacancy
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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.
Constructing Precarity: Media and Social Housing in the French Banlieue
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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.
The Precarious Confines of Homeownership and Rights
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Caterina Sartori discusses how homeowners on the Aylesbury Estate in South East London have struggled to reclaim their property rights and the right to shape the public image of their home.
Is the Home Ever Not Precarious? The Long Arc of Genres of Precarity
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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.
Media, Precarity, and the Home: An Introduction
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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.
From Water to Home: Permeability as Social Inclusion (and Exclusion) in Contemporary London
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Anna Viola Sborgi considers how recent documentary films reconfigure porosity as permeability, and reflects on questions of social inclusion in the city under lockdown.
No Exit, or Duration in Slow Cinema: Aesthetics of Femininity, Porosity, Security
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Erin Schlumpf thinks through the spatial politics of slow cinema and orders to shelter in place.
Screens in Public Space: Questions of Aesthetics and Access in a Moment of Social Distancing
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Annie Dell’Aria discusses screen media’s potential to make both public space and private space—during times of social distancing—more porous.
Activist Media and Distributional Aesthetics in the City
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Carrie Rentschler explores urban porosity via a feminist infrastructural focus on key points of transfer and transit in the city that activists target for change using a range of aesthetic and political strategies