Topic: Film Review Type: Analytical Essay Subject: Geography
Academic Level: Undergraduate Style: APA Language: English (U.S)
Number of Pages: 3 (double-spaced, Times New Roman, Font 12)
3. Running head: FILM REVIEW BASED ON LABOR GEOGRAPHY 1
Topic: Film Review Type: Analytical Essay Subject: Geography
Academic Level: Undergraduate Style: APA Language: English (U.S)
Number of Pages: 3 (double-spaced, Times New Roman, Font 12)
Written by: https://writersperhour.com
Number of sources: 4
Task Details
The purpose of this review is to examine how work, workers, and
Space are related in the film. This is a 3 page, double space paper. Keep the review succinct,
analytical rather than summative, and relevant to the course. You should focus on 2-3 themes
covered in the course that help you relate the film or song to labor geography (ex.: exploitation;
post-Fordism; social reproduction; etc.) Consider how these themes are spatial (ex.: Where is the
workplace and how is it spatially organized? How is the workplace designed and how does
design shape power relations therein? What is your relationship to workers in other places?) Cite
and discuss 2 or more academic articles to reinforce your thesis and main arguments. Organize
your review as you would do for a standard academic essay, including a thesis statement,
introduction, body, and conclusion. Choose any film/song that interests you
5. FILM REVIEW BASED ON LABOR GEOGRAPHY 3
Fishing in the Sea of Greed
The fundamentals of labor geography are largely in line with the concepts of human and
social geography, especially those pertaining economic, political, and social landscapes spatial
relations. In particular, this is what brings about the conceptualization of fundamentalisms of
societal constructions, including stratification, political power, economic systems, and human
geography; ultimately bringing forth the aspects of laborers or works in creating the definition of
economic/labor geography. In this review, the focus is to reveal the economic/labor geography
aspects in relation to themes of societal constructions, as well as the human geography, for
instance exploitation, social reproduction, spatial representations and Post-Fordism among others
through reviewing the documentary film; “Fishing in the Sea of Greed.”
Fishing in the Sea of Greed is a film that focuses on how traditional fishing communities
around the globe became threatened by industrialized fishing practices during the periods of
industrialization, which witnessed colossal factory fishing ships and private capital resulting to
fish in very large quantities for the purposes of production and resource capitalization (Icarus
Films, 2013). This in turn contributed to the displacement of the traditional fishing communities
and the communities, even became poverty-stricken as it is discussed in the subsequent
paragraphs of this paper's Fishing in the Sea of Greed film review with respect to defining some
of the central themes in economic/labor geography.
From the movie, the relation of exploitation and traditional working communities is depicted
from the transformation of traditional fishing methods to industrialize and mechanize fishing
methods from the developed world. Before industrialization and fishery mechanization,
6. FILM REVIEW BASED ON LABOR GEOGRAPHY 4
traditional communities "native Indians", mainly depended on fish as food for daily consumption
and supplemented the activity with farming on the adjacent lands of the sea. When
industrialization and fishing mechanization kicked in, the traditional communities realized a new
form of exploitation, that is, fish could not only be exploited as food for daily consumption but
also for the purposes of amassing wealth and improving living standards. This was through the
influence that the traditional communities gained from the work conditions created by the
developed world that now becomes part of them, thereby bringing about the concept of roles of
place, space, and scale in comprehending labor/economic geography.
Also, as a result of fish exploitation to amass wealth, private and international fishing
agencies emerged, leading to abuse of fisheries, the traditional communities organize themselves
into government and together with the global water corporations they advanced towards
promoting regulated fishing and alternative forms of economic exploitation such as agriculture.
In this case, they now not only fought for their fishing jobs in the industries, but also for the
survival of their ecosystem and economy. This precisely explains the spatial Praxis with the
relations of social phenomena of capitalism geography that defines clearly the geographical
theories of how workers contribute to determining national development, policy/political
formations, and economic landscapes around them (Castree, 2007).
Moreover, in the conceptualization of labor geography from the review of this film, the
factor of location and shift to mechanized and industrialized fishing to some extent defines the
theme of Post-Fordism. In particular, the traditional communities fished merely for consumption
purposes with non-mechanized and inflexible fishing methods in the earlier periods. With the
shift in fishing practices, it thus represents Post-Fordism definitions which in this case refer to
7. FILM REVIEW BASED ON LABOR GEOGRAPHY 5
flexible and mechanized production processes as well as a flexible workforce with dynamic and
emergent economies through mass production to acquire wealth, the creation of policies/
regulations to curb resource overexploitation and international economic regulations.
Besides Post-Fordism, the film also primarily depicts the nature of how humans develop
their economic geographies through social reproduction. This means that in terms of location,
traditional communities that particularly depended on agriculture, rice growing, from the
adjacent lands of the sea became widely affected by the abuse of fishing due to salination of
ground water and pollution of rivers from prawn processing industry's waste disposal. As such,
rice-growing farmers became poverty stricken while fishermen continued to amass wealth and
gained higher standards of living. In fact, most of the rice-growing farmers within years had to
abandon their farming lands to involve in insecure and precarious works to sustain their lives
because large tracts of their farming lands now became unfit for agriculture due to salination of
ground water and mass pollution of rivers.
This defines the constraints produced by economic geographies through the role that
capital plays in social reproduction. It reveals the social inequalities created by human vested
interests in creating capital and space in their selfish or self-reproduction ways as depicted from
the film. Essentially, this defines labor geography, especially through how workers influence and
create geographic space in a manner that determine the social stratification and power. As such,
this brings about the fact on how capital in geographic settings creates economic landscapes
where workers (communities) strive for survival as well as self-reproduction, ultimately bringing
about economic geography of capitalism – workers in a capitalist society – transmitting social
8. FILM REVIEW BASED ON LABOR GEOGRAPHY 6
inequality from one generation to another through social reproduction posed by precarious
working experiences and uneven production patterns (Clark, Gertler & Feldman, 2003).
References
Castree, N. (2007). Labor geography: a work in progress. International Journal of Urban and
Regional Research, 31 (4), 853-862.
Clark, G. L., Gertler, M. S., & Feldman, M. P. (2003). The Oxford handbook of economic
geography. Oxford University Press.
Icarus Films. (2013). Fishing in the Sea of Greed. Accessed 4th February, 2015 from http://
icarusfilms.com/new98/seagreed.html
Lier, D. C. (2007). Places of work, scales of organizing: a review of labor geography. Geography
Compass, 1 (4), 814-833.
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