Representing ethnicity in contemporary French visual culture

With the increasing digitisation of almost every facet of human endeavour, concerns persist about ‘deskilling’ and precarious employment. The publishing industry has turned its energy to online and electronic media, and jobs continue to disappear from printing, publishing and journalism. The replacement of human labour with computerised technologies is not merely a contemporary issue; it has an established history dating from the mid-twentieth century. What is often missing from this record is an understanding of how the world of work is tightly interwoven with the tangible and affective worlds of material culture and design, even in ‘clean’ computerised environments. Workplace culture is not only made up of socio-political relationships and dynamics. It is also bound up with a world of things, with and through which the social and gendered processes of workplace life are enacted and experienced. Understanding how we interact with and interpret design is crucial for appreciating the complexities of the labour experience, particularly at times of technological disruption. Hot Metal reveals integral labour-design relationships through an examination of three decades in the printing industry, between the 1960s and 1980s. This was the period when hot-metal typesetting and letterpress was in decline; the early years of the ‘digital switch’. Using oral histories from an intriguing case-study – a doggedly traditional Government Printing Office in Australia – this book provides an evocative rendering of design culture and embodied practice in a context that was, like many workplaces, not quite ‘up-to-date’ with technology. Hot Metal is also history of how digital technologies ruptured and transformed working life in manufacturing. Rather than focusing solely on ‘official’ labour, this book will introduce the reader to workers’ clandestine creative practices; the making of things ‘on the side’.

This book is a study of documentary series such as Michael Apted's world-famous Seven Up films that set out to trace the life-journeys of individuals from their earliest schooldays till they are fully grown adults. In addition to Seven Up, the book provides extended accounts of the two other best known longitudinal series to have been produced in the last three or four decades. It includes Winifred and Barbara Junge's The Children of Golzow and Swedish director Rainer Hartleb's The Children of Jordbro. The book first examines some of the principal generic features of long docs and considers the highly significant role that particular institutions have had on their production, promotion and dissemination. It then explores a study of how the individual works originated, with a special emphasis on the nurturing role of particular institutions. The book also explores the affinities that long docs have with soap opera texts, which have similar aspirations to neverendingness. Both long docs and soaps rely on an episodic mode of delivery and both seek to persuade their audience that they are attempting to chronicle real-time developments. Finally, the book explores the variety of ways in which long doc filmmakers contrive to bring their work to a satisfactory conclusion.

A vital issue in discussing distinctive group shows has been to explore how 'Northern Irish art' has emerged in dialogue with international art during the post-Troubles period. This book concentrates on the social and political developments pertinent to a study of post-Troubles art. It makes an effort to weave together fundamental background details on the peace process and the Good Friday Agreement with questions regarding the political and theoretical framing of this process of negotiation. Diverse local outcomes of the Agreement are nonetheless acknowledged: from ongoing political problems caused by the ambiguities and inconsistencies of the accord, to material manifestations of 'peace' in the built environment. The book presents thoughts on how 'Northern Irish art' of the post-Troubles era might be critically approached and appraised in light of broader contemporary conditions. It takes the 2005 exhibition of art from Northern Ireland at the Venice Biennale as the departure point for an extended examination of how the representation of 'local' concerns is shaped in relation to wider cultural and economic forces. Much of the book concentrates more directly on the manifold forms of 'ghost-hunting' undertaken by artists during the post-Troubles period. Several significant works by Willie Doherty are singled out for close-reading: photographic series and film narratives that are powerfully undecidable and uncanny in their oblique, unnerving evocations of the landscapes of Belfast and Derry. The book also discusses the haunted spaces of Doherty's practice by reflecting on artists' approaches to time and history.