Crossroads in Cultural Studies Conference 14-17th December 2016 Program Index

narratives as interactively as possible. Spreading beyond their textual boundaries and drawing together both
human and nonhuman engagement, the multi-layered narrative worlds offered by Netflix”s original series
create intensely practiced material-semiotic environments of media experience. To address the metastories
of “breaking the fourth wall” and “big data creativity” attached to them, this talk reflects on the workings of
the Netflix”s narrative politics of recommendation (1) in terms of its capacity to re-enact affects tied to other
popular narratives, (2) in connection to the data-driven production dynamics merging TV with the internet,
and (3) as embedded in changing relations of increasingly global industrial operation, media practice and
cultural experience.
Matthias Wieser
On moving screens. Attachments of mobile media
Media have become small, smart and portable devices that are on the move as other people and things.
They are at the same time means that organize mobilities of people and commodities as well as part of the
moving people themselves. They are an everyday companion to communicate, represent and get in touch.
Connected to this point is the double meaning of movement as physical movement and affective
engagement. People are attached by mobile screens to get attached to other people and content. This talk
addresses the affective and material dimension of mobile screen practices in diverse settings as gaming, art
and forced migration.
2D
Inequality, work and welfare (Chair, Jeremy Valentine)
Lisa Adkins*, Mona Mannevuo & Hanna Ylöstalo*
Employment Activation as an Infrastructure of Feeling
Across OECD countries the use of employment activation programmes is intensifying. We focus on one
programme operating in Finland which aims to activate the labour of the highly credentialized unemployed
via programmes of unpaid training. Drawing on blog data from programme participants, we suggest that
while apparently offering individualized solutions to private troubles, this programme affords particular
structures of feeling regarding work and working. Specifically, it opens out a situation whereby people feel
compelled to work even as this work does not offer strategies to organize and make everyday life. This
situation should be understood as part of the new normal of contemporary capitalism in which work and
working offer not a wage or an activity that supports life but only hopefulness for such a wage and life. We
propose that activation programmes be understood as sites through which the affective registers of the new
normal are actively constituted.
Suchitra Mathur
Love’s Labour Lost: Domestic Work in Neo-Liberal India
The intersection of gender and class hierarchies in the arena of domestic work has been analysed by feminist
scholars in terms of the economic implications for women as well as the affective dimension of this labour
performed within the intimate sphere of the family. In this paper, I will explore the interpenetration of the
economic and the affective in the representation of domestic labour in two self-proclaimed Indian feminist
texts – A Life Less Ordinary (2006), acclaimed as the first Indian autobiography by a domestic worker, and
English Vinglish (2012), a film depicting a housewife’s struggle for self-respect within her family. Through this
juxtaposition of domestic worker and housewife – the two roles defined by household labour – I will analyse
the class politics underlying the valourisation of the affective as a source of value in such representations of
domestic work(ers). In the process, I will interrogate the erasure of domestic labour as a specifically
gendered material reality within the framework of the patriarchal family characteristic of urban neo-liberal
India.
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