Screen Industries in the Global Era: Accumulation, Creation, and Socio-Cultural Variation
University of Sydney, 29 June
QUT, 5 July
ABSTRACT
Until recently, film and television studies tended to focus on media production practices as contained within the regulatory, cultural, and economic environs of a nation-state. International media studies maintained similar respect for state sovereignty by primarily attending to the exchange of cultural products between nations or producing comparative studies of national cinemas and media systems. More recently, however, scholars are relinquishing the metaphor of national containers, choosing instead to theorize the ways in which contemporary media are transcending frontiers and disrupting conventional structures of domination. Moreover, previous studies that emphasized a one-way flow of U.S. programming to the periphery of the world system are being reassessed in light of increasing multi-directional flows of media imagery. Indeed, flow is the dominant metaphor in much of the recent scholarly literature regarding such phenomena, suggesting a protean media environment that poses difficult challenges for producers and distributors.
Michael Curtin is Professor of Media and Cultural Studies in the Department of Communication Arts at the University of Wisconsin - Madison and director of the UW Global Studies program. Previously, he was a faculty member at Indiana University and a visiting Professor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong (1997) as well as a research fellow at Academia Sinica, Taipei (2000) and the Centre for the Humanities, Wesleyan University (1992). His books include Redeeming the Wasteland: Television Documentary and Cold War Politics (Rutgers, 1995), Playing to the World’s Biggest Audience: The Globalization of Chinese Film and TV (University of California Press, in press), Making and Selling Culture (co-editor; Wesleyan, 1996) and The Revolution Wasn’t Televised: Sixties Television and Social Conflict (co-editor; Routledge, 1997). He is currently working on two book projects: Media Capital: The Cultural Geography of Global Media (Blackwell) and The American Television Industry (BFI). With Paul McDonald, he is co-editor of the “International Screen Industries” book series for the British Film Institute.
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