Location and labor: Critical crossroads in global film and television

I approached the editorial prompt as an opportunity to work through some of the concerns driving my current research on creative labor in emergent or ‘peripheral’ media hubs, centers of production activity outside established media capitals that are nevertheless increasingly integrated into a global production apparatus. It builds from my research on the role that film, television and digital media production have played in the economic and cultural strategies of Glasgow, Scotland, and extends the focus on media work to other locations, including Prague and Budapest. I am particularly drawn to the spatial dynamics at play in these locations and how local producers, writers, directors and crew negotiate a sense of place and creative identity against the flows and counter-flows of capital and culture. This means not only asking questions about the growing ensemble of people, places, firms and policies that make international productions possible, but also studying the more quotidian relationships between media workers and the locations (both near and far) where they now find work. I do not see these tasks as unrelated. On the one hand, such queries underscore how international production depends on a growing constellation of interchangeable parts and is facilitated by various actors whose agendas may or may not converge. On the other hand, these questions also betray an even more complicated dynamic, a process that is shifting the spatial orientation of both location and labor around uneven and contested scales. As local industries reimagine themselves as global players, media practitioners are caught up in a new geography of creative labor: not only are personnel finding it increasingly necessary to hop from place to place to follow the work, but also place itself is changing, as locations morph into nebulous amalgamations of tax rebates, subsidized facilities, production services and (when it still matters) natural beauty.

Mimicking breast cancer-induced bone metastasis in vivo: Current transplantation models and advanced humanized strategies

Bone metastasis is a complication that occurs in 80 % of women with advanced breast cancer. Despite the prevalence of bone metastatic disease, the avenues for its clinical management are still restricted to palliative treatment options. In fact, the underlying mechanisms of breast cancer osteotropism have not yet been fully elucidated due to a lack of suitable in vivo models that are able to recapitulate the human disease. In this work, we review the current transplantation-based models to investigate breast cancer-induced bone metastasis and delineate the strengths and limitations of the use of different grafting techniques, tissue sources, and hosts. We further show that humanized xenograft models incorporating human cells or tissue grafts at the primary tumor site or the metastatic site mimic more closely the human disease. Tissue-engineered constructs are emerging as a reproducible alternative to recapitulate functional humanized tissues in these murine models. The development of advanced humanized animal models may provide better platforms to investigate the mutual interactions between human cancer cells and their microenvironment and ultimately improve the translation of preclinical drug trials to the clinic.

Tissue engineered humanized bone supports human hematopoiesis in vivo

Advances in tissue-engineering have resulted in a versatile tool-box to specifically design a tailored microenvironment for hematopoietic stem cells (HSCs) in order to study diseases that develop within this setting. However, most current in vivo models fail to recapitulate the biological processes seen in humans. Here we describe a highly reproducible method to engineer humanized bone constructs that are able to recapitulate the morphological features and biological functions of the HSC niches. Ectopic implantation of biodegradable composite scaffolds cultured for 4 weeks with human mesenchymal progenitor cells and loaded with rhBMP-7 resulted in the development of a chimeric bone organ including a large number of human mesenchymal cells which were shown to be metabolically active and capable of establishing a humanized microenvironment supportive of the homing and maintenance of human HSCs. A syngeneic mouse-to-mouse transplantation assay was used to prove the functionality of the tissue-engineered ossicles. We predict that the ability to tissue engineer a morphologically intact and functional large-volume bone organ with a humanized bone marrow compartment will help to further elucidate physiological or pathological interactions between human HSCs and their native niches.

Precarious Creativity: Global Media, Local Labor

Precarious Creativity examines the seismic changes confronting media workers in an age of globalization and corporate conglomeration. This pathbreaking anthology peeks behind the hype and supposed glamor of screen media industries to reveal the intensifying pressures and challenges confronting actors, editors, electricians, and others. The authors take on pressing conceptual and methodological issues while also providing insightful case studies of workplace dynamics regarding creativity, collaboration, exploitation, and cultural difference. Furthermore, it examines working conditions and organizing efforts on all six continents, offering broad-ranging and comprehensive analysis of contemporary screen media labor in such places as Lagos, Prague, Hollywood, and Hyderabad. The collection also examines labor conditions across a range of job categories that includes, for example, visual effects, production services, and adult entertainment. With contributions from such leading scholars as John Caldwell, Vicki Mayer, Herman Gray, and Tejaswini Ganti, Precarious Creativity offers timely critiques of media globalization while also intervening in broader debates about labor, creativity, and precarity.

Chapter 1: Precarious creativity: Global media, local labor

In most parts of the world, screen media workers—actors, directors, gaffers, and makeup artists—consider Hollywood to be glamorous and aspirational. If given the opportunity to work on a major studio lot, many would make the move, believing the standards of professionalism are high and the history of accomplishment is renowned. Moreover, as a global leader, Hollywood offers the chance to rub shoulders with talented counterparts and network with an elite labor force that earns top-tier pay and benefits. Yet despite this reputation, veterans say the view from inside isn’t so rosy, that working conditions have been deteriorating since the 1990s if not earlier. This grim outlook is supported by industry statistics that show the number of good jobs has been shrinking as studios outsource production to Atlanta, London, and Budapest, among others...

Concise review: Humanized models of tumor immunology in the 21st century: Convergence of cancer research and tissue engineering

Despite positive testing in animal studies, more than 80% of novel drug candidates fail to proof their efficacy when tested in humans. This is primarily due to the use of preclinical models that are not able to recapitulate the physiological or pathological processes in humans. Hence, one of the key challenges in the field of translational medicine is to “make the model organism mouse more human.” To get answers to questions that would be prognostic of outcomes in human medicine, the mouse's genome can be altered in order to create a more permissive host that allows the engraftment of human cell systems. It has been shown in the past that these strategies can improve our understanding of tumor immunology. However, the translational benefits of these platforms have still to be proven. In the 21st century, several research groups and consortia around the world take up the challenge to improve our understanding of how to humanize the animal's genetic code, its cells and, based on tissue engineering principles, its extracellular microenvironment, its tissues, or entire organs with the ultimate goal to foster the translation of new therapeutic strategies from bench to bedside. This article provides an overview of the state of the art of humanized models of tumor immunology and highlights future developments in the field such as the application of tissue engineering and regenerative medicine strategies to further enhance humanized murine model systems.

Workers are doing it for themselves? Local labor solidarity in precarious times

Historically, organized labor has played a fundamental role in guaranteeing basic rights and privileges for screen media workers and defending union and guild members (however unevenly) from egregious abuses of power. Yet, despite the recent turn to labor in media and cultural studies, organized labor today has received only scant attention, even less so in locations outside Hollywood. This presentation thus intervenes in two significant ways: first, it acknowledges the ongoing global ‘undoing’ of organized labor as a consequence of footloose production and conglomeration within the screen industries, and second, it examines a case example of worker solidarity and political praxis taking shape outside formal labor institutions in response to those structural shifts. Accordingly, it links an empirical study of individual agency to broader debates associated with the spatial dynamics of screen media production, including local capacity, regional competition, and precariousness. Drawing from ethnographic interviews with local film and television workers in Glasgow, Scotland, I consider the political alliance among three nascent labor organizations in the city: one for below-the-line crew, one for facility operators, and (oddly enough) one for producers. Collectively, the groups share a desire to transform Glasgow into a global production hub, following the infrastructure developments in nearby cities like Belfast, Prague, and Budapest. They furthermore frame their objectives in political terms: establishing global scale is considered a necessary maneuver to improve local working conditions like workplace safety, income disparity, skills training, and job access. Ultimately, I argue these groups are a product of an inadequate union structure and outdated policy vision for the screen sector , once-supportive institutions currently out of sync with the global realities of media production. Furthermore, the groups’ advocacy efforts reveal the extent to which workers themselves (in additional to capital) can seek “spatial fixes” to suture their prospects to specific political and economic goals. Of course, such activities manifest under conditions outside of the workers’ control but nevertheless point to an important tension within capitalist social relations, namely that the agency to reshape the spatial relationships in their own lives recasts the geography of labor in terms that aren’t inherent or exclusive to the interests of global capital.

Creative Labor in Cinema and Media Industries

Introduction The rapidly burgeoning popularity of cinema at the beginning of the 20th century favored industrialized modes of creativity organized around large production studios that could churn out a steady stream of narrative feature films. By the mid-1910s, a handful of Hollywood studios became leaders in the production, distribution, and exhibition of popular commercial movies. In order to serve incessant demand for new titles, the studios relied on a set of conventions that allowed them to regularize production and realize workplace efficiencies. This entailed a socialized mode of creativity that would later be adopted by radio and television broadcasters. It would also become a model for cinema and media production around the world, both for commercial and state-supported institutions. Even today the core tenets of industrialized creativity prevail in most large media enterprises. During the 1980s and 1990s, however, media industries began to change radically, driven by forces of neoliberalism, corporate conglomeration, globalization, and technological innovation. Today, screen media are created both by large-scale production units and by networked ensembles of talent and skilled labor. Moreover, digital media production may take place in small shops or via the collective labor of media users or fans who have attracted attention due to their hyphenated status as both producers and users of media (i.e., “prosumers”). Studies of screen media labor fall into five conceptual and methodological categories: historical studies of labor relations, ethnographically inspired investigations of workplace dynamics, critical analyses of the spatial and social organization of labor, and normative assessments of industrialized creativity.