Ana Alacovska
Biographic Data
| ID | 282290 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Ana Alacovska |
| GIVEN NAMES | Ana |
| FAMILY NAME | Alacovska |
| SIGNATURE | ALACOVSKA A |
| AFFILIATIONS | Copenhagen Business School |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-6620-5429 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 30 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 220 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 30 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2015 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 9 |
The Re-enchantment of a Technologically Disenchanted World: An Affirmative Critique of Anti-surveillance Art
Focussing on anti-surveillance art, this article makes the case that the arts have the unique capacity to induce and energize hope and caring in the otherwise hopeless context of a technologically disenchanted world of surveillance capitalism, characterised by a wholesale loss of privacy due to ubiquitous data capture, and an algorithmically powered exacerbation of social inequalities and discrimination. Drawing on theories of enchantment from li…
Speculative labour: The financialized imagination of creative work and the assetization of digital art through non-fungible tokens (NFTs)
This article investigates – based on semi-structured interviews and conversations on cryptoart forums – how digital artists experience the blockchain-enabled assetization of their work through non-fungible tokens, including the transformation of digital artworks (which previously had negligible if any economic value) into assets capable of increasing in price value over time and generating future income from resale provisions. We show how this as…
Algorithmic Paranoia: Gig Workers' Affective Experience of Abusive Algorithmic Management
Amidst the rapid rise of gig economy platforms, gig workers increasingly report feelings of mistrust, anxiety, and profound fear under opaque and abusive algorithmic management. This article introduces the concept of ‘algorithmic paranoia’ to capture the negative affective experiences stemming from workers' perceptions of algorithmic management as non‐transparent, arbitrary, and retaliatory. Drawing on the concept of organisational paranoia from …
Sci-fi Capital and Humanoid Robotics: Conjuring the Speculative Value of Not-Yet-Existing Technologies
As economic value becomes ever more decoupled from material production and labour in financialized capitalism, simulation and reality become increasingly indistinguishable. I explore the largely overlooked role of science fiction in this speculative turn, developing the concept of ‘sci-fi capital’ to capture how entrepreneurs in the emerging field of humanoid robotics deploy this genre’s eutopian and dystopian narratives, imagery and modes of wor…
Multimodal identity work: The power of visual images for identity construction in the gig economy
We adopt a visual methods approach, in conjunction with an interview-based study, to investigate the identity work of creative workers who sell their services remotely as online freelancers via gig economy platforms. Based on visual self-portrayals elicited from 53 remote gig workers, including illustrators, animators and graphic designers, and their subsequent verbal reflections on these images, our study elucidates the generative power of visua…
Speculative experimentations with other worlds: How cli-fi sustains radical hope among environmental activists in Denmark
Purpose Amid ongoing and escalating ecological collapse, sustaining hope presents a major challenge for environmental activists. The purpose of this article is to investigate how speculative fiction - specifically climate fiction (cli-fi) - cultivates and sustains radical hope among Danish climate activists by enabling imaginative engagements with alternative future worlds. Methods Drawing on in-depth interviews with environmental activists in De…
Spirituality in creative work: How craft entrepreneurs in Ghana cope with precarity
We investigate how craft entrepreneurs navigate the precarious conditions widespread in Ghana’s creative industries. Drawing on data from in-depth interviews with weavers of Kente cloth and smocks in the Northern, Savannah and Ashanti regions, we focus on the role of spirituality as a significant resource for coping with the extreme challenges and uncertainties faced by craftspeople in this context. Our empirical findings reveal how deploying spi…
A Relational Work Perspective on the Gig Economy: Doing Creative Work on Digital Labour Platforms
Based on interviews with 49 visual artists, graphic designers and illustrators working on two leading global digital labour platforms, this article examines how creative workers perform relational work as a means of attenuating labour commodification, precarity, and algorithmic normativity. The article argues that creative work on online labour platforms, rather than being entirely controlled by depersonalised, anonymised and algorithm-driven lab…
Tormented Selves: The social imaginary of the tortured artist and the identity work of creative workers
This article examines identity work in the creative industries as a type of identity formation that has been underexplored in the literature on identity work to date. Based on interviews with performing artists in music and theatre, we show how creative workers feel compelled to perform negative (tortured and despondent) identity work in order to attain a positive (coherent, self-sustaining and self-affirming) sense of artistic self. We argue tha…
Imaginaries of platform entrepreneurship in the creative industries: Techno-optimism and subversion in Ghanaian filmmaking
This article examines imaginaries of platform entrepreneurship in film industries in Ghana. To understand how these imaginaries are spatially shaped and locally defined, we carried out in-depth qualitative research with fifty filmmakers in four regions of Ghana. Digital and platform technologies have long been optimistically celebrated as a way for marginalized creative entrepreneurs, particularly in Africa, to break into global markets and reach…
The intertwinement of speculative fictions and environmental activism: Towards a sensory sociology of climate fiction
In this article we tentatively plot the coordinates of a sensory sociology approach for empirically investigating how the popular culture genre of climate fiction operates affectively within environmental activism. We begin by theorising the genre of climate fiction as an affective potentiality capable of stimulating the imagination of hopeful climate futures and energising imaginactivism, that is the activist quest for the attainment of better c…
The show must go on!’: Hustling through the compounded precarity of Covid-19 in the creative industries
The article offers a qualitative examination of compounded precarity in creative work during the Covid-19 pandemic. Drawing on repeated in-depth interviews with twelve creative workers operating in the creative industries in Ghana, we examine one of the most prevalent practices for navigating, coping with, and managing compounded precarity: that of hustling. We empirically identify and discuss three interrelated practices of hustling in creative …
The Wageless Life of Creative Workers: Alternative Economic Practices, Commoning and Consumption Work in Cultural Labour
This article argues the importance of considering wageless life and related post-wage regimes of work in the study of creative and cultural labour. Such consideration is necessary to understand how creative workers persevere in their profession, dedicating substantial amounts of time to making art in spite of prolonged precarity and low, irregular or non-existent wages. The article revisits sociological studies of creative work and finds that alt…
Care-ful Work: An Ethics of Care Approach to Contingent Labour in the Creative Industries
Genres and inequality in the creative industries
Genres organize and facilitate cultural, creative and media production and consumption but are rarely central categories in extant research on creative industries. With this editorial article, we aim to reassert, reassess and revisit the salience of genres for understanding inequalities in the cultural and creative industries. We argue that genres, as classificatory devices, structure and order a gendered and racialized division of labour and occ…
Care in creative work: Exploring the ethics and aesthetics of care through arts-based methods
This article investigates creative work from an ex-centric perspective, bringing insights from experiences of work in the Ghanaian creative industries to bear on the understanding of creative work as a relational labour of care and caring. We argue that the ethics and aesthetics of care in creative work can best be captured and appreciated through the use of innovative arts-based methodologies that afford researchers the opportunity to explore ca…
Thriving instead of surviving’: A capability approach to geographical career transitions in the creative industries
This article examines career transitions in creative industries that involve geographical relocation from large metropolitan creative cities to small, remote and marginal urbanities. Drawing on 31 in-depth interviews with freelancers who have relocated to peripheral Southern European locales, the article explores the ways in which creative workers make sense of and justify their career transitions away from the metropolis, while reassessing refle…
The work of hope: Spiritualizing, hustling and waiting in the creative industries in Ghana
This paper examines the dynamics of hope in creative industries in the city of Accra in Ghana. Building on theoretical insights from geography, anthropology and sociology that have mobilized the concept of hope as an analytical category, we examine the economic actions and entrepreneurial behaviour of creative entrepreneurs working in "precarious geographies", i.e. locations where precarity is not a deviation from the norm but a constant and long…
Fieldwork Report: The Making of Lonely Planet Guide - On the ground research for the Encounter Guide Amsterdam, published in 2009 by Lonely Planet, and written by Zora O'Neill
A Heterodox Re-Reading of Creative Work: The Diverse Economies of Danish Visual Artists
This article investigates the diverse and heterodox array of labour practices and economic activities in artistic work. Existing studies contend that artistic income is highly skewed, with the majority of artists living in poverty, and that artistic work is intermittent, project-by-project based and precarious, with artists juggling multiple jobs. However, these prevalent perspectives typically foreground only formal contractual employment while …
From Passion to Compassion: A Caring Inquiry into Creative Work as Socially Engaged Art
This article considers the analytical potential of a concept of care that foregrounds human interdependencies, relational ties and the needs of others as the basis for action in analysing work, such as creative work, which is neither directly nor obviously associated with care provision. Work in the creative industries has recently become a central concern in sociology. Much of this scholarship reproduces or extends the idea of creative work as a…
De-westernizing creative labour studies: The informality of creative work from an ex-centric perspective
Creative labour studies focus almost exclusively on Euro-American metropolitan ‘creative hubs’ and hence the creative worker they theorize is typically white, middle-class, urban and overwhelmingly male. This article outlines the contours of a de-Westernizing project in creative labour studies while introducing a special journal issue that examines the lived dynamics of creative work outside the West. The article advocates an ‘ex-centric perspect…
Keep hoping, keep going: Towards a hopeful sociology of creative work
This article explores the relationship between future-oriented temporality and precarity in creative work. Existing sociological studies implicitly assume an unproblematic causal link between creative workers' future-orientation and their precarity, subjugation and exploitation. This article problematizes this link and offers a more nuanced reassessment of creative work's futurity by arguing for the analytical potential of the notion of hope in g…
Hope Labour Revisited: Post-socialist Creative Workers and Their Methods of Hope
Informal creative labour practices: A relational work perspective
The informal nature of creative work is routinely acknowledged in the studies of creative labour. However, informality of creative work has been so far treated dualistically: firstly, as the informal governance of creative labour markets and secondly, as the ever-increasing informalization of creative workplaces. In contrast, this article argues for the importance of focusing on informal labour practices as infused in relational contexts so as to…
Informal creative labour practices: A relational work perspective
The informal nature of creative work is routinely acknowledged in the studies of creative labour. However, informality of creative work has been so far treated dualistically: firstly, as the informal governance of creative labour markets and secondly, as the ever-increasing informalization of creative workplaces. In contrast, this article argues for the importance of focusing on informal labour practices as infused in relational contexts so as to…
Keep hoping, keep going: Towards a hopeful sociology of creative work
This article explores the relationship between future-oriented temporality and precarity in creative work. Existing sociological studies implicitly assume an unproblematic causal link between creative workers' future-orientation and their precarity, subjugation and exploitation. This article problematizes this link and offers a more nuanced reassessment of creative work's futurity by arguing for the analytical potential of the notion of hope in g…
A Relational Work Perspective on the Gig Economy: Doing Creative Work on Digital Labour Platforms
Based on interviews with 49 visual artists, graphic designers and illustrators working on two leading global digital labour platforms, this article examines how creative workers perform relational work as a means of attenuating labour commodification, precarity, and algorithmic normativity. The article argues that creative work on online labour platforms, rather than being entirely controlled by depersonalised, anonymised and algorithm-driven lab…
De-westernizing creative labour studies: The informality of creative work from an ex-centric perspective
Creative labour studies focus almost exclusively on Euro-American metropolitan ‘creative hubs’ and hence the creative worker they theorize is typically white, middle-class, urban and overwhelmingly male. This article outlines the contours of a de-Westernizing project in creative labour studies while introducing a special journal issue that examines the lived dynamics of creative work outside the West. The article advocates an ‘ex-centric perspect…
A Heterodox Re-Reading of Creative Work: The Diverse Economies of Danish Visual Artists
This article investigates the diverse and heterodox array of labour practices and economic activities in artistic work. Existing studies contend that artistic income is highly skewed, with the majority of artists living in poverty, and that artistic work is intermittent, project-by-project based and precarious, with artists juggling multiple jobs. However, these prevalent perspectives typically foreground only formal contractual employment while …
Thriving instead of surviving’: A capability approach to geographical career transitions in the creative industries
This article examines career transitions in creative industries that involve geographical relocation from large metropolitan creative cities to small, remote and marginal urbanities. Drawing on 31 in-depth interviews with freelancers who have relocated to peripheral Southern European locales, the article explores the ways in which creative workers make sense of and justify their career transitions away from the metropolis, while reassessing refle…
From Passion to Compassion: A Caring Inquiry into Creative Work as Socially Engaged Art
This article considers the analytical potential of a concept of care that foregrounds human interdependencies, relational ties and the needs of others as the basis for action in analysing work, such as creative work, which is neither directly nor obviously associated with care provision. Work in the creative industries has recently become a central concern in sociology. Much of this scholarship reproduces or extends the idea of creative work as a…
The show must go on!’: Hustling through the compounded precarity of Covid-19 in the creative industries
The article offers a qualitative examination of compounded precarity in creative work during the Covid-19 pandemic. Drawing on repeated in-depth interviews with twelve creative workers operating in the creative industries in Ghana, we examine one of the most prevalent practices for navigating, coping with, and managing compounded precarity: that of hustling. We empirically identify and discuss three interrelated practices of hustling in creative …
Genres and inequality in the creative industries
Genres organize and facilitate cultural, creative and media production and consumption but are rarely central categories in extant research on creative industries. With this editorial article, we aim to reassert, reassess and revisit the salience of genres for understanding inequalities in the cultural and creative industries. We argue that genres, as classificatory devices, structure and order a gendered and racialized division of labour and occ…
The work of hope: Spiritualizing, hustling and waiting in the creative industries in Ghana
This paper examines the dynamics of hope in creative industries in the city of Accra in Ghana. Building on theoretical insights from geography, anthropology and sociology that have mobilized the concept of hope as an analytical category, we examine the economic actions and entrepreneurial behaviour of creative entrepreneurs working in "precarious geographies", i.e. locations where precarity is not a deviation from the norm but a constant and long…
The Wageless Life of Creative Workers: Alternative Economic Practices, Commoning and Consumption Work in Cultural Labour
This article argues the importance of considering wageless life and related post-wage regimes of work in the study of creative and cultural labour. Such consideration is necessary to understand how creative workers persevere in their profession, dedicating substantial amounts of time to making art in spite of prolonged precarity and low, irregular or non-existent wages. The article revisits sociological studies of creative work and finds that alt…
The intertwinement of speculative fictions and environmental activism: Towards a sensory sociology of climate fiction
In this article we tentatively plot the coordinates of a sensory sociology approach for empirically investigating how the popular culture genre of climate fiction operates affectively within environmental activism. We begin by theorising the genre of climate fiction as an affective potentiality capable of stimulating the imagination of hopeful climate futures and energising imaginactivism, that is the activist quest for the attainment of better c…
Genre Anxiety: Women Travel Writers' Experience of Work
This article explores how the concept of genre can enrich our understanding of gender inequality in media industries. All media work takes place within genre-specific production worlds, which seem to be gender-segregated. By examining the gendered and gendering ideology of genres, an outcome of genre-gender discursive, historical and cultural crossover, we obtain a holistic view of the complexities of the psycho-biographical gender dynamics of me…
Care in creative work: Exploring the ethics and aesthetics of care through arts-based methods
This article investigates creative work from an ex-centric perspective, bringing insights from experiences of work in the Ghanaian creative industries to bear on the understanding of creative work as a relational labour of care and caring. We argue that the ethics and aesthetics of care in creative work can best be captured and appreciated through the use of innovative arts-based methodologies that afford researchers the opportunity to explore ca…
Algorithmic Paranoia: Gig Workers' Affective Experience of Abusive Algorithmic Management
Amidst the rapid rise of gig economy platforms, gig workers increasingly report feelings of mistrust, anxiety, and profound fear under opaque and abusive algorithmic management. This article introduces the concept of ‘algorithmic paranoia’ to capture the negative affective experiences stemming from workers' perceptions of algorithmic management as non‐transparent, arbitrary, and retaliatory. Drawing on the concept of organisational paranoia from …
Multimodal identity work: The power of visual images for identity construction in the gig economy
We adopt a visual methods approach, in conjunction with an interview-based study, to investigate the identity work of creative workers who sell their services remotely as online freelancers via gig economy platforms. Based on visual self-portrayals elicited from 53 remote gig workers, including illustrators, animators and graphic designers, and their subsequent verbal reflections on these images, our study elucidates the generative power of visua…
The history of participatory practices: Rethinking Media Genres in the History of User-Generated Content in 19th-Century Travel Guidebooks
This article charts the historical stability and continuity of participatory and crowdsourcing practices. Theoretically, it suggests that the blurring of the boundaries between audiences and producers, with the ensuing result of user-generated content, is by no means solely the upshot of new media technological affordances but largely a function of relatively stabilized, genre-specific formal and functional properties, or ‘genre affordances’. Cer…
Legitimacy, self-interpretation and genre in media industries: A paratextual analysis of travel guidebook publishing
This article presents a paratextual analysis of a genre-specific case of the book publishing industry, namely that of travel guidebook publishing. Paratexts refer to all the ‘accompanying’ textual instances that gravitate around, but never completely pertain to, the ‘primary’, authorial text. In contrast to prevalent theorisations of paratexts as simultaneous hermeneutic and marketing frameworks that regulate a reader’s interpretive practices (re…
Speculative experimentations with other worlds: How cli-fi sustains radical hope among environmental activists in Denmark
Purpose Amid ongoing and escalating ecological collapse, sustaining hope presents a major challenge for environmental activists. The purpose of this article is to investigate how speculative fiction - specifically climate fiction (cli-fi) - cultivates and sustains radical hope among Danish climate activists by enabling imaginative engagements with alternative future worlds. Methods Drawing on in-depth interviews with environmental activists in De…
Spirituality in creative work: How craft entrepreneurs in Ghana cope with precarity
We investigate how craft entrepreneurs navigate the precarious conditions widespread in Ghana’s creative industries. Drawing on data from in-depth interviews with weavers of Kente cloth and smocks in the Northern, Savannah and Ashanti regions, we focus on the role of spirituality as a significant resource for coping with the extreme challenges and uncertainties faced by craftspeople in this context. Our empirical findings reveal how deploying spi…
Legitimacy, self-interpretation and genre in media industries: A paratextual analysis of travel guidebook publishing
This article presents a paratextual analysis of a genre-specific case of the book publishing industry, namely that of travel guidebook publishing. Paratexts refer to all the ‘accompanying’ textual instances that gravitate around, but never completely pertain to, the ‘primary’, authorial text. In contrast to prevalent theorisations of paratexts as simultaneous hermeneutic and marketing frameworks that regulate a reader’s interpretive practices (re…
Genre Anxiety: Women Travel Writers' Experience of Work
This article explores how the concept of genre can enrich our understanding of gender inequality in media industries. All media work takes place within genre-specific production worlds, which seem to be gender-segregated. By examining the gendered and gendering ideology of genres, an outcome of genre-gender discursive, historical and cultural crossover, we obtain a holistic view of the complexities of the psycho-biographical gender dynamics of me…
From ‘Poetics’ to ‘Production’: Genres as Active Ingredients in Media Production
All media production happens within ‘genre-specific worlds’ (Tunstall, 1993: 201). Most of the discourses that float in and around production worlds—whether aesthetic and ethical or economic and managerial—in fact belong to genres (Bruun, 2011, 2010; Dornfeld, 1998: 91). Genres are thus an emic conceptual force with which production studies must reckon. Most current sociological studies, however, either completely disregard genres or treat them c…
The history of participatory practices: Rethinking Media Genres in the History of User-Generated Content in 19th-Century Travel Guidebooks
This article charts the historical stability and continuity of participatory and crowdsourcing practices. Theoretically, it suggests that the blurring of the boundaries between audiences and producers, with the ensuing result of user-generated content, is by no means solely the upshot of new media technological affordances but largely a function of relatively stabilized, genre-specific formal and functional properties, or ‘genre affordances’. Cer…
The gendering power of genres: How female Scandinavian crime fiction writers experience professional authorship
This article introduces the notion of genre as an analytical category for the study of gender inequality in creative work. Research on gender and creative labour typically identifies external, systemic and structural causes for gender inequality in media industries. In contrast, I argue that genres, by virtue of their internal, structural and discursive patterning, play a constitutive role in regulating media producers’ gendered professional iden…
Hope Labour Revisited: Post-socialist Creative Workers and Their Methods of Hope
Informal creative labour practices: A relational work perspective
The informal nature of creative work is routinely acknowledged in the studies of creative labour. However, informality of creative work has been so far treated dualistically: firstly, as the informal governance of creative labour markets and secondly, as the ever-increasing informalization of creative workplaces. In contrast, this article argues for the importance of focusing on informal labour practices as infused in relational contexts so as to…
De-westernizing creative labour studies: The informality of creative work from an ex-centric perspective
Creative labour studies focus almost exclusively on Euro-American metropolitan ‘creative hubs’ and hence the creative worker they theorize is typically white, middle-class, urban and overwhelmingly male. This article outlines the contours of a de-Westernizing project in creative labour studies while introducing a special journal issue that examines the lived dynamics of creative work outside the West. The article advocates an ‘ex-centric perspect…
Keep hoping, keep going: Towards a hopeful sociology of creative work
This article explores the relationship between future-oriented temporality and precarity in creative work. Existing sociological studies implicitly assume an unproblematic causal link between creative workers' future-orientation and their precarity, subjugation and exploitation. This article problematizes this link and offers a more nuanced reassessment of creative work's futurity by arguing for the analytical potential of the notion of hope in g…
From Passion to Compassion: A Caring Inquiry into Creative Work as Socially Engaged Art
This article considers the analytical potential of a concept of care that foregrounds human interdependencies, relational ties and the needs of others as the basis for action in analysing work, such as creative work, which is neither directly nor obviously associated with care provision. Work in the creative industries has recently become a central concern in sociology. Much of this scholarship reproduces or extends the idea of creative work as a…
Care-ful Work: An Ethics of Care Approach to Contingent Labour in the Creative Industries
Genres and inequality in the creative industries
Genres organize and facilitate cultural, creative and media production and consumption but are rarely central categories in extant research on creative industries. With this editorial article, we aim to reassert, reassess and revisit the salience of genres for understanding inequalities in the cultural and creative industries. We argue that genres, as classificatory devices, structure and order a gendered and racialized division of labour and occ…
Care in creative work: Exploring the ethics and aesthetics of care through arts-based methods
This article investigates creative work from an ex-centric perspective, bringing insights from experiences of work in the Ghanaian creative industries to bear on the understanding of creative work as a relational labour of care and caring. We argue that the ethics and aesthetics of care in creative work can best be captured and appreciated through the use of innovative arts-based methodologies that afford researchers the opportunity to explore ca…
Thriving instead of surviving’: A capability approach to geographical career transitions in the creative industries
This article examines career transitions in creative industries that involve geographical relocation from large metropolitan creative cities to small, remote and marginal urbanities. Drawing on 31 in-depth interviews with freelancers who have relocated to peripheral Southern European locales, the article explores the ways in which creative workers make sense of and justify their career transitions away from the metropolis, while reassessing refle…
The work of hope: Spiritualizing, hustling and waiting in the creative industries in Ghana
This paper examines the dynamics of hope in creative industries in the city of Accra in Ghana. Building on theoretical insights from geography, anthropology and sociology that have mobilized the concept of hope as an analytical category, we examine the economic actions and entrepreneurial behaviour of creative entrepreneurs working in "precarious geographies", i.e. locations where precarity is not a deviation from the norm but a constant and long…
Fieldwork Report: The Making of Lonely Planet Guide - On the ground research for the Encounter Guide Amsterdam, published in 2009 by Lonely Planet, and written by Zora O'Neill
A Heterodox Re-Reading of Creative Work: The Diverse Economies of Danish Visual Artists
This article investigates the diverse and heterodox array of labour practices and economic activities in artistic work. Existing studies contend that artistic income is highly skewed, with the majority of artists living in poverty, and that artistic work is intermittent, project-by-project based and precarious, with artists juggling multiple jobs. However, these prevalent perspectives typically foreground only formal contractual employment while …
The show must go on!’: Hustling through the compounded precarity of Covid-19 in the creative industries
The article offers a qualitative examination of compounded precarity in creative work during the Covid-19 pandemic. Drawing on repeated in-depth interviews with twelve creative workers operating in the creative industries in Ghana, we examine one of the most prevalent practices for navigating, coping with, and managing compounded precarity: that of hustling. We empirically identify and discuss three interrelated practices of hustling in creative …
The Wageless Life of Creative Workers: Alternative Economic Practices, Commoning and Consumption Work in Cultural Labour
This article argues the importance of considering wageless life and related post-wage regimes of work in the study of creative and cultural labour. Such consideration is necessary to understand how creative workers persevere in their profession, dedicating substantial amounts of time to making art in spite of prolonged precarity and low, irregular or non-existent wages. The article revisits sociological studies of creative work and finds that alt…
Tormented Selves: The social imaginary of the tortured artist and the identity work of creative workers
This article examines identity work in the creative industries as a type of identity formation that has been underexplored in the literature on identity work to date. Based on interviews with performing artists in music and theatre, we show how creative workers feel compelled to perform negative (tortured and despondent) identity work in order to attain a positive (coherent, self-sustaining and self-affirming) sense of artistic self. We argue tha…
Imaginaries of platform entrepreneurship in the creative industries: Techno-optimism and subversion in Ghanaian filmmaking
This article examines imaginaries of platform entrepreneurship in film industries in Ghana. To understand how these imaginaries are spatially shaped and locally defined, we carried out in-depth qualitative research with fifty filmmakers in four regions of Ghana. Digital and platform technologies have long been optimistically celebrated as a way for marginalized creative entrepreneurs, particularly in Africa, to break into global markets and reach…
The intertwinement of speculative fictions and environmental activism: Towards a sensory sociology of climate fiction
In this article we tentatively plot the coordinates of a sensory sociology approach for empirically investigating how the popular culture genre of climate fiction operates affectively within environmental activism. We begin by theorising the genre of climate fiction as an affective potentiality capable of stimulating the imagination of hopeful climate futures and energising imaginactivism, that is the activist quest for the attainment of better c…
Spirituality in creative work: How craft entrepreneurs in Ghana cope with precarity
We investigate how craft entrepreneurs navigate the precarious conditions widespread in Ghana’s creative industries. Drawing on data from in-depth interviews with weavers of Kente cloth and smocks in the Northern, Savannah and Ashanti regions, we focus on the role of spirituality as a significant resource for coping with the extreme challenges and uncertainties faced by craftspeople in this context. Our empirical findings reveal how deploying spi…
A Relational Work Perspective on the Gig Economy: Doing Creative Work on Digital Labour Platforms
Based on interviews with 49 visual artists, graphic designers and illustrators working on two leading global digital labour platforms, this article examines how creative workers perform relational work as a means of attenuating labour commodification, precarity, and algorithmic normativity. The article argues that creative work on online labour platforms, rather than being entirely controlled by depersonalised, anonymised and algorithm-driven lab…
The Re-enchantment of a Technologically Disenchanted World: An Affirmative Critique of Anti-surveillance Art
Focussing on anti-surveillance art, this article makes the case that the arts have the unique capacity to induce and energize hope and caring in the otherwise hopeless context of a technologically disenchanted world of surveillance capitalism, characterised by a wholesale loss of privacy due to ubiquitous data capture, and an algorithmically powered exacerbation of social inequalities and discrimination. Drawing on theories of enchantment from li…
Sociology (28 works) · Political science (20 works) · Cultural Industries and Urban Development (17 works) · Aesthetics (14 works) · Law (14 works) · Art (11 works) · Creative work (11 works) · Digital Economy and Work Transformation (11 works) · Gender Studies (11 works) · Creative industries (10 works)