Invisible in This Visual World? Work and Working Conditions of Female Photographers in the Global South

Straddlers not spiralists: Critical questions for research on fixers, local-foreign news work, and cross-border journalism

“…Scholarly inquiry attentive to race and gender is adept at demonstrating not only how a particular subject position is permeated by hybridity and transformation but, as well, how such a position might cultivate its own forms of knowledge-making, forms able to contest or bypass more dominant orders (Al-Ghazzi, 2021;Blacksin, 2022;Mitra et al, 2021). At the same time, gendered and racial identities can delimit the type of news that fixers and other localforeign news workers are tasked to produce (Palmer and Melki, 2018;Mitra et al, 2022).…”

“…Furthermore, investigating the social and cultural capitals leveraged by fixers and local journalists within cross border journalism can deepen our critical inquiries into the inequities that are both structural to, and constitutive of, the field of journalistic practice within which such news-work operates. More than one recent study of local-foreign news work has used sociological analysis of social and cultural capitals at play within the professional field of journalism to investigate this particular form of cultural labor (e.g., Murrell, 2015;Moon, 2019;Mitra et al, 2022). 7 Moon has demonstrated how fixers' labor "can be thought of as belonging to two fields of journalism: they physically inhabit a journalism field in geographic space, while at the same time producing content that meets the expectations of a field located elsewhere" (2019: 1717).…”

“…Scholarly inquiry attentive to race and gender is adept at demonstrating not only how a particular subject position is permeated by hybridity and transformation but, as well, how such a position might cultivate its own forms of knowledge-making, forms able to contest or bypass more dominant orders (Al-Ghazzi, 2021; Blacksin, 2022; Mitra et al, 2021). At the same time, gendered and racial identities can delimit the type of news that fixers and other local-foreign news workers are tasked to produce (Palmer and Melki, 2018; Mitra et al, 2022). In its conceptual potential and its practical implications, consideration of race and gender provides a basis for questioning and thereby undermining naturalized divisions and accepted essentialisms, and for discovering the affordances offered by particular subjectivities for contending with the inequalities such essentialisms inscribe.…”

“…Accounting for the hierarchies of local-foreign news work means grappling with structures of identity as they articulate, and are articulated by, the “scattered hegemonies” of international news production (Grewal and Kaplan, 1994). Some initial groundwork has been laid in the study local-foreign news work for analyses of race (e.g., Banks, 2017) and gender (e.g., Palmer, 2019: 102-4), as well their consequential intersectionality (e.g., Mitra et al, 2022), and the studies conducted thus far do demonstrate that inequalities in local-foreign news-working arrangements are often refracted through the intersecting rubrics of race and gender. Scholarship attuned to the dynamics and effects of embodied forms of identity thus offer an important resource for understanding the material and epistemic conditions of local labor in cross-border news production.…”

“…9 This ability is both intrinsic (i.e., it is often part of the “habitus” of the local individual employed in cross-border journalism) as well as a skill honed professionally by individual workers in the cognitive, evaluative, and performative aspects of their day-to-day news work (Hellmueller, 2017; Khan, M., 2020; Murrell, 2015; Mitra, 2017; Palmer, 2019). Taken together, the various forms of cultural and social capital – both embodied and symbolic – seen as essential for local-foreign news works can be theorized as cosmopolitan capital, a “resource that individuals draw upon in order to gain or maintain their social positions” in the profession of cross-border journalism (Lindell and Danielsson, 2017: 54; see also Mitra et al, 2022; Hellmueller and Berglez, 2022: 10-11).…”