Greening the Cultural and Media Industries

Greening the Cultural and Media Industries by Professor Toby Miller

Today’s cultural and media industries are green, aren’t they? Their residues are code, rather than carbon—and they do not contribute to climate change. Hence their adoption by the latterday idea of creative industries, which has been accepted so fulsomely from Chile to China. The idea is that a new, post-coal economy can emerge, turning rustbelt cities in the US into heritage trails and manufacturing labour in China into consumers. Creative cities will purportedly be full of same-sex couples, PhDs, and smart phones: the metrication of the creative industries values such signs as measures of tolerance, talent, and technology. But is this true?

The prevailing discourse on these industries misses out crucial facts. For culture and media generate massive pollution, serious occupational health-and-safety issues, and an exploitative labour process. These problems are all too material, and reminiscent of precisely the extractive and manufacturing sectors they are supposedly ready to displace.

This talk will endeavour to illustrate that history and offer an alternative future, one that can be cleaner, greener, and fairer.

You can access the session’s slides here, kindly provided by Professor Toby Miller: GRENINGCULTMED

Professor Toby Miller

Toby Miller is Stuart Hall Professor of Cultural Studies, Universidad Autónoma de México—Cuajimalpa; Research Professor of the Graduate Division, University of California, Riverside; and Professor in the Institute for Media and Creative Industries, Loughborough University London (20%). The author and editor of over forty books, his work has been translated into Spanish, Chinese, Portuguese, Japanese, Turkish, German, Italian, Farsi, and Swedish. His most recent volumes are El Trabajo Cultural (2018), Greenwashing Culture (2018), Greenwashing Sport (2018), The Routledge Companion to Global Cultural Policy (edited with Victoria Durrer and Dave O’Brien, 2018), Global Media Studies (with Marwan M Kraidy, 2016), The Sage Companion to Television Studies (edited with Manuel Alvarado, Milly Buonanno, and Herman Gray, 2015), The Routledge Companion to Global Popular Culture (edited, 2015), Greening the Media (with Richard Maxwell, 2012) and Blow Up the Humanities (2012). How Green is Your Cell Phone? (with Richard Maxwell) and The Persistence of Violence are in press. He is President of the Cultural Studies Association (US).

Toby can be contacted at tobym69@icloud.com and much of his work is available at www.tobymiller.org.