Intended Consequences: risk management and intersectional inequality in the Canadian screen-based industries

Speaker:

Dr. Amanda Coles (Deakin, Australia)
2022-23 Visiting Professor in Canadian Studies,
Robarts Centre for Canadian Studies

Thursday, 9 February 2023  |  3pm
Senate Chamber, Glendon Campus, York University

Work in the Canadian film and television production industry is project-based, producing chronic employment and income precarity for the workforce. A large body of industry and scholarly research also unequivocally establishes systemic discrimination and intersectional inequality as defining characteristics of film and tv labour markets. Yet these two, interactive core workforce issues – namely the organisation of project-based work in film and television production, and the systemic exclusion of equity seeking groups – are commonly justified as risk management strategies in industry practice, rather than risk drivers. In this presentation. Dr. Coles establishes the interactive relationship between the social constructions of risk and the (re)production of inequalities. She argues that in order to redress the very foundations of industry practice upon which intersectional inequality is justified, we need to query and examine the multiple ways in which risk is ascribed, by whom, upon whom, and on what grounds.

Co-sponsors: Robarts Centre for Canadian Studies, Global Labour Research Centre and School of Public and International Studies at Glendon.