Kay Dickinson, lecturer in the Department of Media and Communications at Goldsmiths, University of London, will give a public talk at McGill. This event is a public event to be held on 21 October, at 4:00 in Arts W5, and part of Media@McGill member Will Straw's class COMS 675.
Destination or Transit?: The Shopping Mall, the Free Zone and the Dubai International Film Festival
Abstract: The United Arab Emirate of Dubai has long been a transit hub, a centre for re-exportation around the globe. In more recent years, its mission to secure a healthy post-oil economy has pushed hard to develop a tourist industry. Straddling both characteristics of the city is the Dubai International Film Festival, whose key sponsors hail not just from the expected media sectors, but also from hotel chains, shopping malls and property developers. Yet the festival is also situated within Media City, a (post-)industrial free zone whose legislative loopholes concerning taxation and employment rights work more closely within the logics of the re-exportation economy. With this complex positioning in mind, how does DIFF aim to situate a globalised trade in cinema, one of the main objectives of its "film market"? How, within all this, are we to think politically about migrant labour, which constitutes an estimated 89.8% of the Emirate's workforce including most of the festival's staff and creative contributor-guests?
Bio: Kay Dickinson's work to date has been intrigued by moments of interaction between different media industries, particularly those of music, film and television. It is concerned with the how the boundaries between these forms are drawn up and how the traditions governing production, representation, dissemination and consumption of each differentiated or amalgamated sphere are generated. This research has culminated on a book-length dialectical study of music on screen from soundtracks and recorded musical performances, to biopics and musicians-turned-actors entitled Off Key: When Film and Music Won't Work Together (Oxford University Press, 2008). Concentrating primarily on instances of conflict and political exchange between media industries, this monograph is dedicated to an analysis of labour rights in the United States and Britain within the so-called post-industrial period. Its investigations pivot upon the centrality of the cultural and media economies to those countries from the 1950s until the present day.
More recently, Kay's research has turned towards media from the Arab world, particularly Egyptian, Palestinian and Syrian film production, as well as the networks consolidated by Arab world film festivals. Her aim is to understand all this from amidst the politics and practices of travel, be that anything from migration and forced exile to tourism. She has published articles on these topics in various anthologies, as well as in the journals Screen and Camera Obscura, and has also collaborated on two film festivals held in the West Bank, Palestine. At present, she is working on a second monograph, Arab Cinema Travels, and is co-editing an anthology called The Arab Avant-Garde: Musical Innovation in the Middle East.