TY - JOUR
T1 - (Im)mobile precarity in the Asia-Pacific
AU - Martin, Fran
AU - ERNI, John N.
AU - Yue, Audrey
N1 - Funding Information:
Fran Martin is Associate Professor and Reader in Cultural Studies at the University of Melbourne and an Australian Research Council Future Fellow. Her best-known research focuses on television, film, literature, social media and other forms of cultural production in the contemporary transnational Chinese cultural sphere, with a specialization in representations and cultures of gender and queer sexuality. She has published 9 scholarly books, 5 journal special issues, and over 50 refereed journal articles and book chapters. Her recent books include Telemodernities: Television and Transforming Lives in Asia (with Tania Lewis and Wanning Sun Duke U.P., 2016), and Lifestyle Media in Asia: Consumption, Aspiration and Identity (co-edited with Tania Lewis, Routledge, 2016). She is currently working on a 5-year Fellowship project funded by the Australian Research Council that uses longitudinal ethnography to research the social and subjective experiences of young women from China studying and living in Australia.
Funding Information:
Audrey Yue is Professor of Media, Culture and Critical Theory in the Department of Communications and New Media at the National University of Singapore. Before returning to Singapore and joining NUS in 2017, she lived in Australia for 30 years and last held the positions of Professor in Cultural Studies and Director of the Research Unit in Public Cultures at the University of Melbourne. She researches in the fields of Sinophone media cultures, cultural policy and development, and queer Asian studies. She has published 7 scholarly books and more than 80 refereed journal articles and research book chapters including Sinophone Cinemas (2014, co-edited with O.Khoo); Transnational Australian Cinema (2013, co-authored with O.Khoo and B. Smaill); Queer Singapore (2012, co-edited with J.Zubillaga-Pow) and Ann Hui’s Song of the Exile (2010). She has received more than AUD$6m in competitive research grants, and is currently Chief/Partner Investigator in three Australian Research Council funded projects on arts participation in the smart city; young people and multiculturalism, and; Asian media flows in Australia.
PY - 2019/11/2
Y1 - 2019/11/2
N2 - If on a global scale, our late-modern era is marked by intensifying mobilities of many kinds, then Asia as a geo-cultural region exemplifies this trend in particularly forceful ways, with large mobile populations including permanent migrants, refugees, international students, labour migrants, young travelers, as well as well-developed cross-border networks of mobile media technologies, products, talents, and finances. Our starting point in this article is the idea that these intensified mobilities sketched are transforming people’s experiences of everyday life and subjectivity in Asia and beyond. The increased regionwide ‘mobilisation’ of economic, social and cultural life seems likely to transform people’s senses of place and movement; experiences of labour; everyday affective and embodied sense of self; gendered, sexed, raced and classed subjectivities; visual and media cultures; youth cultures; cultures of consumption, and more. This raises a plethora of theoretical and empirical questions for a regionally focussed cultural studies. How frictionless are these intensifying flows: which borders and blockages mould the new, transnational experiential geographies that are taking shape? Which populations are advantaged by increased mobility, and which minoritised? What new inequalities emerge as a result of intensifying mobilities–and how do people live with, resist, and creatively negotiate these inequalities at the micro-level of everyday practice? And what will ‘Asia’ come to mean in the emergent reconfigurations of place, geography and identity being wrought by intensifying mobilities? In order to lay the conceptual groundwork for the special issue, this article begins by tracing the interconnections between three of our key terms–(im)mobilities, precarities, and borders–in conversation with the relevant theoretical scholarship on these concepts across a range of disciplinary fields. This leads to the theorisation of a new concept that articulates these connections: (im)mobile precarity.
AB - If on a global scale, our late-modern era is marked by intensifying mobilities of many kinds, then Asia as a geo-cultural region exemplifies this trend in particularly forceful ways, with large mobile populations including permanent migrants, refugees, international students, labour migrants, young travelers, as well as well-developed cross-border networks of mobile media technologies, products, talents, and finances. Our starting point in this article is the idea that these intensified mobilities sketched are transforming people’s experiences of everyday life and subjectivity in Asia and beyond. The increased regionwide ‘mobilisation’ of economic, social and cultural life seems likely to transform people’s senses of place and movement; experiences of labour; everyday affective and embodied sense of self; gendered, sexed, raced and classed subjectivities; visual and media cultures; youth cultures; cultures of consumption, and more. This raises a plethora of theoretical and empirical questions for a regionally focussed cultural studies. How frictionless are these intensifying flows: which borders and blockages mould the new, transnational experiential geographies that are taking shape? Which populations are advantaged by increased mobility, and which minoritised? What new inequalities emerge as a result of intensifying mobilities–and how do people live with, resist, and creatively negotiate these inequalities at the micro-level of everyday practice? And what will ‘Asia’ come to mean in the emergent reconfigurations of place, geography and identity being wrought by intensifying mobilities? In order to lay the conceptual groundwork for the special issue, this article begins by tracing the interconnections between three of our key terms–(im)mobilities, precarities, and borders–in conversation with the relevant theoretical scholarship on these concepts across a range of disciplinary fields. This leads to the theorisation of a new concept that articulates these connections: (im)mobile precarity.
KW - Asia-Pacific
KW - borders
KW - capital
KW - media
KW - mobility
KW - Precarity
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85073247525&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1080/09502386.2019.1660690
DO - 10.1080/09502386.2019.1660690
M3 - Journal article
AN - SCOPUS:85073247525
SN - 0950-2386
VL - 33
SP - 895
EP - 914
JO - Cultural Studies
JF - Cultural Studies
IS - 6
ER -
