CCIG/CRESC Cultural work and creative biographies

The last decade has seen a huge growth of interest in cultural labour, coinciding with increased attention to the media and other fields as 'creative industries', and underscored by technological changes that have brought into being new occupations such as web design, digital animation, electronic arts, etc. Suddenly there seems to be an acknowledgement that media and culture involve work! Following on from our successful workshop in 2008 on "The creative industries: 10 years after", in this symposium we bring together a series of invited speakers to explore the nature of cultural work today.  Research in this field points both to the passionate attachments cultural workers have to their work, and to the costs this involves in terms of precariousness, poor pay and 'bulimic' stop-go patterns of working. How do workers in fields as diverse as fashion, television, film, web design or fine art negotiate and manage working lives that are characterised by insecurity, informality, and in which 'you are only as good as your last job'?

A series of invited key speakers will address the following themes

• Are cultural workers the poster boys and girls for work in the 'new economy'?
• How different is 'cultural labour' from other forms of work? Are we all cultural workers now?
• Is the notion of 'creative industries' useful?
• How do Romantic conceptions of artists and artistic work hold up in an age of individualisation and insecurity?
• Is the notion of 'creative biographies' useful for understanding cultural workers lives as lived and experienced in conditions of precarity?
• To what extent are creative biographies inflected by inequalities relating to class, gender, 'race', age and disability?

Speakers include
Lisa Adkins (Goldsmiths), Melissa Gregg (Sydney) Helen Kennedy (Leeds), Kate Oakley (City University and independent consultant), Stephanie Taylor (Open) and Andreas Wittel (Nottingham)

Organisers
Rosalind Gill, Centre for Citizenship Identities and Governance (CCIG), The Open University
Mark Banks, Department of Sociology/CRESC, The Open University
Stephanie Taylor, Department of Psychology/CCIG, The Open University