To Örebro University

In this article we discuss discourses of white mobility in reality television, a genre whose problematic post-racial and neoliberal discourses have long been exposed. Moving beyond the widely researched Anglophone media landscapes, we interrogate the discursive construction of white mobilities in the Swedish romance reality show Bonde Söker Fru – Jorden Runt (TV4, 2019-2020) [Farmer Seeks Wife – Around the World] where Swedish North-to-South migrants working as farmers abroad seek a partner from Sweden through the assistance of reality TV. By focusing on the discursive and visual strategies through which the show perpetuates racial hierarchies, we discuss the colonial imaginaries, the absence of border policies (such as residency, employment, or integration), and the significance of individual migratory preferences in the mobility discourses. We identify three forms of white mobility – the tourist, the adventurer, and the philanthropist – and show that migration is depicted as something reversible, an adventure, and a possibility for self-development, rather than a life-long decision with high stakes.

This chapter examines the globally peripheral case study of Greek media industry studies for the twofold aim of locating the relevant research trajectory in and about the country and arguing for the significance of localizing media industries research within the context of Media Industry Studies. Media Industry Studies (MIS) emerged in Anglo-American scholarship in the late 2000s as an umbrella term that aims to bring together the study of diverse and historically distinct media industries through a variety of disciplinary and methodological traditions, embracing aspects of both the humanities and social sciences. In celebrating plurality, however, MIS has faced difficulty in establishing common ground with certain media-related disciplines whose research agenda was incompatible with others. Central to this has been the prioritization or not of issues related to culture, and the concomitant methodological implications of such a choice. In retrospectively locating MIS in and about Greece, this chapter traces a similar trajectory, with political economy-driven social sciences research dominating media industries research and with hardly any dialogue between such an approach and less dominant approaches emerging from arts, humanities, and cultural studies. Recently, however, there has been a significant shift toward a more methodologically mixed and qualitatively orientated humanities-inspired agenda that also reflects the expansion of the objects of research from an almost exclusive focus on such issues as the print press, television news, or online journalism, to film, television fiction, or video games. The chapter demonstrates that such a shift has been taking place because of changes in the sociopolitical, economic, and cultural environment in which Greek media industries operate, and therefore argues for the significance of localizing MIS rather than unconditionally adopting its agendas as these emerged in Western media contexts.

This introductory article to the Special Issue ‘Greek Screen Industries’ of the Journal of Greek Media and Culture offers a critical overview of the recently emerging field of Media Industry Studies and situates existing work on Greek screen industries in its context. It argues that the current fragmentation and lack of dialogue between social sciences and arts and humanities approaches on the topic is particularly marked in the Greek context, a fact that can be explained by institutional and historical reasons. It calls for an expansion of the agendas privileged by political economy approaches to screen media towards the more pluralistic, empirical and culture-orientated perspectives facilitated by Media Industry Studies.

This article draws from interviews with creators of television fiction (directors and screenwriters) with professional experience in Greek private television and examines how and why fiction programmes are produced in a commercial context. By focusing on the first decade of private television in Greece, an era popularly remembered as the ‘golden age of Greek television’, this study makes use of accounts from ‘exclusive informants’ in order to complicate facile assumptions about the relationship between commercialization, ideology and entertainment. As such, this article aspires to update the (limited) scholarship on Greek television production culture and to contribute to the recent research focusing specifically on private television in Greece.