Locating Migrating Media

While metaphors of transportation, mobility, fluidity and change continue to serve as key concepts and frames for understanding contemporary media industries, products and processes, the essays in this book look to local spaces, neighborhoods, cultural workers and stories to ground the global—that is, to interrogate the effect of media globalization before, during and after film and television shooting and onsite production.

By locating migrating media, these chapters seek to determine the political, economic and cultural conditions that produce contemporary forms of televisual and cinematic storytelling, and how these processes affect the inhabitants, the look and the very geopolitical future of local communities, neighborhoods, cities and regions. The focus on relocated screen production highlights the act of film- and television-making, both aesthetically and economically. To locate migrating media is therefore to determine the political and cultural economies of globalized sets and stages, be they in new studios or on city streets or, perhaps most importantly, in our imaginations.