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Stand-Ins and Extras: Exploiting Migration’s Precarity
24 January 2025 - 24 January 2025
3:00PM - 4:00PM
Room TLC101, Teaching and Learning Centre, South Road, Durham, DH1 3LS
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Free to attend
Join us for this seminar with Dr Kay Dickinson (University of Glasgow). Kay's work reveals how displaced persons fleeing from nations were it can be tricky or dangerous to shoot film productions, e.g. Pakistan, or Iraq, are often drawn into working as underpaid extras and 'local' crew on big budget film productions in their destination locations, which are being used as a substitute for these migrants' home country. Hosted by the Durham Centre for Visual Arts and Culture (CVAC).
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Stand-Ins and Extras: Exploiting Migration’s Precarity
At the end of 2023, the UNHCR (United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees) registered in excess of a hundred million forcibly displaced persons across the globe. The agency’s statistics do not incorporate countless other people who have had to leave home on account of what Saskia Sassen terms expulsion: unliveable conditions created by land appropriation, privatisation, financialisation, the decimation of welfare systems and climate catastrophe (Sassen, 2014). When migrants like these arrive in new places, they rarely gain full citizen rights, securities or equitable salaries. This status leaves them vulnerable to a labour extractivism that can frequently operate from a cruelly parallel position of un-sitedness and transnationalism. The creative industries, like so many other sectors, routinely takes advantage of how migration policy engineers differently privileged workforces.
As one example, the United Arab Emirates has hosted hundreds of big budget multi-location film productions to date. The country habitually markets itself to these incoming projects as a somewhere that can stand in for any number of locations where it can be tricky or dangerous to shoot, be that Pakistan or Iraq. Off screen, migrants from these self-same nations populate the “local” crew; on decidedly depressed wages, they build sets, freight, drive and cook for these productions.
On screen, their neighbourhoods and their bodies lend visual plausibility to fictional recreations of places from which they have been displaced by war or economic privation. When they take part as extras (walk-ons and background performers), non-citizen inhabitants must simultaneously substitute for a home where maybe they cannot currently dwell and embody a social diversity in and for a territory that opportunistically refuses to fully absorb them as anything much other than economic agents proffered short-term contracts. The UAE’s unremitting denial of pathways to citizenship intensifies these workers’ statuses as “extras,” their temporary tenure in the UAE lending a further “disposability” that benefits the lean, casualising regimes of labour in the globalized media industries.
Kay Dickinson is a Reader in Film and Television Studies and convenes the MA Creative Arts and Industries at the University of Glasgow, UK. She is the author of Supply Chain Cinema: Producing Global Film Workers (BFI, 2024), Arab Film and Video Manifestos: Forty-Five Years of the Moving Image Amid Revolution (Palgrave, 2018), and Arab Cinema Travels: Transnational Syria, Palestine, Dubai and Beyond (BFI, 2016).
Join us for this exciting talk and discussion!
- 3pm on Friday 24th January, 2025
- TLC101, Teaching and Learning Centre, South Road, Durham, DH1 3LS
- Opportunity for socialising and continuing discussions afterwards!
All welcome to attend.
We look forward to you joining us on 24th January!
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