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3 books match the query 'Precarious employment'
Below the Stars
How the Labor of Working Actors and Extras Shapes Media ProductionBy Kate Fortmueller
University of Texas Press, 2021
Longlisted for the 2022 Kraszna-Krausz Book Award, Moving Image Category
Despite their considerable presence in Hollywood, extras and working actors have received scant attention within film and media studies as significant contributors to the history of the industry. Looking not to the stars but to these supporting players in film, television, and, recently, streaming programming, Below the Stars highlights such actors as precarious laborers whose work as freelancers has critically shaped the entertainment industry throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. By addressing ordinary actors as a labor force, Kate Fortmueller proposes a media industry history that positions underrepresented and quotidian experiences as the structural elements of the culture and business of Hollywood.
Resisting a top-down assessment, Fortmueller explores the wrangling of labor unions and guilds that advocated for collective action for everyday actors and helped shape professional norms. She pulls from archival research, in-person interviews, and firsthand observation to examine a history that cuts across industry boundaries and situates actors as a labor group at the center of industrial and technological upheavals, with lasting implications for race, gender, and labor relations in Hollywood.
Making Precarity Work
Life on the Edge of Venice BeachLaura A. Orrico
University of Chicago Press, 2025
In Making Precarity Work, sociologist Laura A. Orrico shows how Los Angeles’s Venice Beach boardwalk, which is a magnet for tourists, is also a workplace, one that wouldn’t exist without the motley crew of people selling art, drinking, performing, using drugs, and working odd jobs who gather daily to engage in varied activities, from selling crafts to minding each other’s wares and asking for spare change.
Throughout the book, Orrico lifts up this workplace as a collective accomplishment, demonstrating how it can be a safety net to manage insecurity and inequality for those opting into its flexible and precarious structure, as well as how the LA government’s efforts to stabilize this work often disrupt the success of this collaborative and creative ecosystem. She also presents the ways this work can exacerbate those very inequalities. Sharing the personal stories of boardwalk workers, Orrico considers these juxtaposed realities and asks her audience to question how we can and should respond to a society whose best option for the disadvantaged is precarity.
Precarious Rhetorics
Edited by Wendy S. Hesford, Adela C. Licona, and Christa Teston
The Ohio State University Press, 2018
This collection features cross-disciplinary contributions from leading scholars, including the editors of the volume as well as James J. Brown Jr., Gale Coskan-Johnson, Ronald Greene, Lavinia Hirsu, Arabella Lyon, Louis Maraj, Sara McKinnon, Alexandra Schultheis Moore, Kimberlee Pérez, Margaret Price, Amy Shuman, Kristin Swenson, Becca Tarsa, and Belinda Walzer. Chapters emphasize a materialist-rhetorical approach while also drawing on feminist studies, women of color feminisms, affect studies, critical disability studies, critical race and ethnic studies, medical humanities, sexuality studies, queer migration studies, and human rights and humanitarian studies. While theoretically rich, this volume intentionally features chapters that explore precarious rhetorics as they operate in practice—whether in borderlands, politics, public policy, or the quotidian spaces of human activity, such as school, work, social media, and medicine.