Oblique Agency: Mapping the Globalised Workflows of Television Dubbing and Their Impact on Practitioners

Abstract

This article offers a comprehensive analysis of how increasingly globalised infrastructures, marked by industry expansion, consolidation, and the impact of streamers, affect the workflows and practices within local dubbing industries. Informed by extensive, original interviews with managerial and creative dubbing practitioners, and industry fieldwork observations since 2017, the article is located within a post-Bourdieuian framework, exploring what significant change for the field and its habitus has meant for agency. Having identified a persistent lack of engagement with the dubbing of television in existing scholarship across several disciplines, the article considers how dubbing practitioners negotiate a wider industrial push towards more streamlining, standardisation, and more attendance to issues concerning equity, diversity, and inclusion. Here, the article offers the notion of oblique agency, to capture how creative agency is moved away from local creative practitioners, through more managerial oversight, prescriptive guidance and tools, and feedback cultures shaped by corporate agendas. Simultaneously, some agency is left to these practitioners, most acutely felt in the case of dubbing contemporary television (marked by narrative and tonal complexity), due to a lack of investment and recognition of dubbing as inherently creative. The article takes care to explore the complexities of these dynamics, especially a pronounced heterogeneity of views, including simultaneous criticism and enjoyment by creative practitioners, as well as a considerable gap between their perspectives and those of managerial practitioners. In this way, the article seeks to make a much-needed contribution to nuanced engagement with dubbing infrastructures and working practices.