When we proposed this special issue of Feminist Media Histories on “Precarious Mobilities,” we were thinking about all the forms of precarity that engender mobility or make movement, in all forms, arduous or impossible. We were thinking about how certain forms of mobility could be precarious, risky, even dangerous. We were thinking about the long arc of precarious mobility, such as the forced enslavement of millions of Africans in the Americas. But we were especially attuned to contemporary dynamics of this state of being as it relates to what has come to be called the precariat, an intersectional class of people who lack labor security and thus have unstable sources of income, people who have “no ladders of mobility to climb,” for instance those from the traditional working or lower middle class, migrants and ethnic minorities, and youth.1 We were thinking about precarious labor in the academy and the...
Note from the Editors: Precarious Mobilities
Paula J. Massood is a professor of screen studies and chair of the Barry R. Feirstein Graduate School of Cinema at Brooklyn College, City University of New York, and on the doctoral faculty in the Theatre and Performance program at the Graduate Center, CUNY. She is the author of Black City Cinema: African American Urban Experiences in Film (Temple University Press, 2003) and Making a Promised Land: Harlem in 20th-Century Photography and Film (Rutgers University Press, 2013), editor of The Spike Lee Reader (Temple University Press, 2007), and coeditor of Media Crossroads: Intersections of Space and Identity in Screen Cultures (Duke University Press, 2021). She is currently president of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies.
Pamela Robertson Wojcik is a professor in the Department of Film, Television, and Theatre at the University of Notre Dame and a Guggenheim Fellow. She is the author of Gidget: Origins of a Teen Girl Transmedia Franchise (Routledge, 2020), Fantasies of Neglect: Imagining the Urban Child in American Film and Fiction (Rutgers University Press, 2016), The Apartment Plot: Urban Living in American Film and Popular Culture, 1945 to 1975 (Duke University Press, 2010), and Guilty Pleasures: Feminist Camp from Mae West to Madonna (Duke University Press, 1996). With Paula J. Massood and Angel Daniel Matos, she coedited the collection Media Crossroads: Intersections of Space and Identity in Screen Cultures (Duke University Press, 2021).
Paula J. Massood, Pamela Robertson Wojcik; Note from the Editors: Precarious Mobilities. Feminist Media Histories 1 July 2021; 7 (3): 1–18. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/fmh.2021.7.3.1
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