Mediating home in an age of austerity: The values of British property television

McElroy, Ruth

doi:10.1177/1367549417701758

Cited by 9 publications

(4 citation statements)

References 28 publications

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“…Secondly, drawing on the contributions in this special issue, we discuss cultural narratives of thrift across different TV programs, including those that proceed the 'moment' of 'austerity' or 'recessionary media' (Petro 2016;Hamad 2014;McElroy 2017) associated with the 2008 GFC. These programs contain narratives of thrift, referencing its inherent ambiguity as an economic practice that expresses…”

Section: Culture Unboundmentioning

confidence: 99%

Thrift Television: Narratives of Enduring, Saving, and Living Well. A Thematic Introduction

Faerber¹,

Podkalicka

2020

Cult. Unbound

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Concepts of thrift and dwelling are central to how societies live together. Thrift refers to a complex and morally-loaded set of economic practices that people engage with out of necessity, choice, or both. Whilst home-making or dwelling refers to social integration and self-representation. The ways in which social realms of thrift and dwelling relate to each other are historically and culturally specific, and media representations are an important intersection for reflecting and putting forward specific 'imaginaries' of thrift and dwelling. In this special issue, depictions of thrift in popular television are treated inclusively and span makeover reality TV, comedy-drama and documentaries, and target different national and international audiences. Contributions by researchers from the US, France, Germany and Australia examine how 'appropriate' ways of dwelling, involving thrift are negotiated in situations marked by material scarcity, precarity and aspirational lifestyles. These include: negotiating the harsh realities of housing in expensive cities such as New York in Insecure or Broad City (Perkins; Kanai & Dobson), make-over through decluttering and controlling debt in Tidying Up with Marie Kondo (Ouellette), Life or Debt and Raus aus den Schulden (Meyer), and are linked to specific historical and social circumstances in different national contexts. Suburban areas of postwar France are represented in 1967-1981 TV documentaries (Overney), gentrified British rural areas in Midsomer Murders (Zahlmann) and post-recessional New York City after the 2007-8 Global Financial Crisis (GFC) in Broad City. Drawing on recent thrift scholarship and analyses of televised thrift in this special issue, we demonstrate how thrift and dwelling are articulated largely as a middle-class concern and a disciplining discourse. Positive incidents of thrift are also revealed for example, in the comedy form, environmental and DIY practices and female voice in French postwar women's documentaries. In other discussions there is scepticism over the possibilities for protagonists to self-fashion themselves within the system of television series. This raises the question of whether alternative forms of imagining subjectivities and social relations in neo-liberal economies of dwelling can occur in entertainment television, or whether thrift imagined as what we call 'televised endurance' merely serves to reproduce the status quo as an irreversible condition.

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Section: Culture Unboundmentioning

confidence: 99%

Thrift Television: Narratives of Enduring, Saving, and Living Well. A Thematic Introduction

Faerber¹,

Podkalicka

2020

Cult. Unbound

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show abstract

“…Secondly, drawing on the contributions in this special issue, we discuss cultural narratives of thrift across different TV programs, including those that proceed the 'moment' of 'austerity' or 'recessionary media' (Petro 2016;McElroy 2017) associated with the 2008 GFC. These programs contain narratives of thrift, referencing its inherent ambiguity as an economic practice that expresses…”

Section: Culture Unboundmentioning

confidence: 99%

Untitled

2020

Cult. Unbound

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often exemplified through the authors' own children and grandchildren, specific heat waves, hurricanes, droughts, and floods are used as examples of the disastrous effects of climate change. In this thematic section of Culture Unbound, we therefore explore the uses of examples as an approach to examining how the cultural meaning of climate change is produced and maintained. Exemplifying examples Chapter 3 in the already mentioned IPCC Special Report on the 1.5 degree target adds textboxes containing a number of examples of how a warmer climate will affect different regions of the world to the highly synthesized body text (Hoegh-Guldberg et al. 2018). The textboxes on the consequences of rising temperature in sub-Saharan Africa, increased vulnerability of water supplies for small island states, decline of warm water coral reefs, and the impact of climate change on the global economy all tell the same story: A global temperature rise of 2 degrees at the end of this century will have huge impacts on nature and society, while the impacts of a 1.5-degree rise will be more moderate. The information presented in the textboxes does not differ substantially from the descriptions in the body text of the report. The difference is that the figures and numbers are substituted by examples. One of the textboxes is entitled "Droughts in the Mediterranean Basin and the Middle East". It presents the area as "an example of a region with high vulnerability where various adaption responses have emerged" (Hoegh-Guldberg et al. 2018: 200). The textbox continues: Exemplifying Climate Change 300 Culture Unbound Journal of Current Cultural Research zations collapsed, and rural settlements re-emerged with agro-pastoral activities and limited long-distance trade. This illustrates how some vulnerable regions are forced to pursue drastic adaptive responses, including migration and societal structure changes. (Hoegh-Guldberg et al. 2018: 200) The textbox concludes that "[r]isks of drying in the Mediterranean region could be substantially reduced if global warming is limited to 1.5 degree compared to 2 degrees or higher levels of warming […]. Higher warming levels may induce high levels of vulnerability exacerbated by large changes in demography" (Hoegh-Guldberg et al. 2018: 201). Thus, the collection of examples of drought in the eastern Mediterranean brings a threefold lesson: The change in precipitation from 1960 and onwards illustrates a global climatic tendency, the description of the drought between 2007 and 2010 as the "longest and most intense" in 900 years indicates the size of this tendency, and the reference to the drought 3,200 years ago shows the possible consequences for civilization. The historical description of droughts in the Middle East constitutes the background for future predictions on drought in the region, as well as for the societal consequences of such droughts. One reason why these examples work so efficiently is that they are presented as facts. The drought between 2007 and 2010 is indisputable. It was observed and m...

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“…Ruth McElroy has shown how Kirsty Allsopp, a UK presenter indelibly associated with UK property television, utilized a recourse to craft as a means of navigating the abrupt shift into austerity during the post-2008 global recession. This gendered rendering of austere domesticity “becomes a salve to modernity’s excess, a virtuous corrective to ‘throw-away’ culture” (McElroy 2017, 539). Similarly, the domestic handicraft as a visual motif throughout Cheap Irish Homes , as well as its purported investment in conservation of historical structures provides a moral sheen obfuscating the expulsive logic of 21st century capitalism (Sassen 2014) that encourages the drastic relocations celebrated here.…”

Section: Cheap Irish Homes: Craft Entrepreneurialism Urban Expulsionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Home Truths: Property TV, Financialization, and the Housing Crisis in Contemporary Ireland

McIntyre

2020

Television & New Media

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This article examines how a specific form of lifestyle programming indexes both national concerns and transnational financial trends as well as diffuse social fissures in Irish life. Emerging in the late 1990s amid a construction boom, Irish property television adapted and thrived through the subsequent post-2008 crash, the concomitant implementation of austerity policies and an ensuing housing crisis. This boom-to-bust cycle was precipitated by the financialization of property within Ireland, a process whereby housing and commercial property became embedded in transnational financial market cycles. Through an analysis of three key examples of the genre, this article argues that for the most part, Irish property television seeks to hold at bay anxieties generated by a growing wealth and income disparity in the state. While this programming displays an ideological commitment to the “investor subjects” of home-ownership, increasingly the concerns of those excluded from this version of the good life are evident.

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Mediating home in an age of austerity: The values of British property television

Cited by 9 publications

References 28 publications

Thrift Television: Narratives of Enduring, Saving, and Living Well. A Thematic Introduction

Thrift Television: Narratives of Enduring, Saving, and Living Well. A Thematic Introduction

Untitled

Home Truths: Property TV, Financialization, and the Housing Crisis in Contemporary Ireland

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