Saskia Warren
Biographic Data
| ID | 3692670 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Saskia Warren |
| GIVEN NAMES | Saskia |
| FAMILY NAME | Warren |
| SIGNATURE | WARREN S |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Manchester |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-2530-453X |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 18 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 114 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 18 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2013 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 5 |
Diasporic Connections Revisited: Modest Fashion and Digital Fashion Activism
This invited commentary responds to the power and residues of Irene Hardill and Parvati Raghuram's 1998 Area article ‘Diasporic Connections’. It makes three interlinked points on connection/disconnection and visibility/invisibility of female labour that trace the development of British South Asian and modest fashion. First, increasing complexity in migratory patterns alongside a hardening of right‐wing and anti‐immigration politics means a turn a…
Where has Bish Vegas gone? The Auckland Project, post-secular urban restructuring and evangelical philanthrocapitalism
A strange story of urban revitalisation is unfolding in a small town in North-East England. Bishop Auckland offers a case study of small-town economic decline accelerated by austerity and a cost-of-living crisis. Often symbolic of a ‘left-behind place’, economic restructuring and political turns including a pro-Brexit majority vote are used to emphasise a post-industrial and insular urban identity. However, evangelical philanthropy by a high net …
Hostile Environments: Housing and Asylum Policies as Drivers of Energy Deprivation Among UK Refugee Communities
Although refugees in the UK are highly susceptible to the triad of factors–low income, poor housing and high energy bills–that produce vulnerability to energy deprivation, literature on this issue is rare. We therefore propose a framework towards understanding the role of “non-energy” policies as drivers of energy deprivation among UK refugees, using the conceptual lenses of deservingness, welfare chauvinism and domicide to demonstrate how the co…
Rethinking Museum Geographies: Towards Restitution and a Relational Ethics of Care in Legacies of Colonialism
This article identifies how a critical exploration of museums and restitution processes illuminates geographical thinking on relational ethics and care. In legacies of colonialism, critical approaches to museums and restorative action show a need to address colonial violence and dispossession from stolen cultural heritage. Restorative action reveals emergent, and more hopeful, practices of care across relational geographies. Research on relationa…
British Muslim Women in the Cultural and Creative Industries
Muslim women are opening up new educational and career pathways across the UK, pioneering roles in digital media, fashion design and visual art. However, their contributions to the economy and culture are rarely the focus of media and government reports. Now, Saskia Warren draws on in-depth fieldwork with British Muslim women working in these roles, taking a narrative approach to look at how they frame their own everyday labour experiences. Drawi…
Religion and faith: The missing index of inequality in culture and the arts
This short commentary – part of the special issue on ‘Craft Economies and Inequalities’ - calls for moving beyond the preferred indexes of gender and class in research on inequalities in cultural production, and considers what can be gained by including religion and belief in broader understandings of creativity. Drawing upon the co-curated exhibition ‘Beyond Faith: Muslim Women Artists Today’, it argues for centring religion and belief in debate…
Pluralising (im)mobilities: Anti-Muslim acts and the epistemic politics of mobile methods
A critical agenda towards pluralising the politics and practice of mobile methods can enable more diverse epistemologies of uneven mobility and urban knowledge. In this article a challenge is offered to normative treatments of mobile methods including walking practices that inscribe dominant ways of seeing the city in anticipation of a liberal, secular, and sovereign subject. Taking empirical examples to ground conceptual insights on ‘fields of p…
YourAverageMuslim: Ruptural geopolitics of British Muslim women's media and fashion
Muslima lifestyle media and fashion are reshaping global media, leisure and recreation, and creating new spaces of identification and belonging in predominantly Western-liberal societies. Typically educated and upwardly mobile, British Muslim women working as cultural producers in media and fashion are finding strategies for challenging stereotypes and resisting socio-economic exclusion. Bringing into dialogue discourses on gender and creative la…
Cultural Policy, Governance and Urban Diversity: Resident Perspectives from Birmingham, UK
Within a paradigm of culture‐led urban competition, discourse and debate has focused on attracting the mobile creative class, diverting attention on cultural resources for lesser privileged groups, both established and new. Policy agendas behind culture and the arts at the neighbourhood level are quietly shifting however, with increasing emphasis on social cohesion and integration. This paper investigates for the first time how co‐producing cultu…
Placing faith in creative labour: Muslim women and digital media work in Britain
Since the 2000s, a rapidly expanding Muslim marketplace has offered faith-centred digital content produced by and aimed at Muslim women. In geopolitical events post 9/11, adoption of the term ‘Muslim women’, especially by younger generations, has grown in an act of supra-national identification with the Muslima – Muslim female community – that crosses race, ethnicity, sects and class. This is reflective of a wider prioritisation of religion in th…
Pluralising the walking interview: Researching (im)mobilities with Muslim women
Within writing on walking practices, walking has often been presentedas pleasurable, relaxing, and even liberatory. Research using walkinginterviews has recognised that different kinds of bodies can beexcluded from mobile methods, impacting upon place-basedknowledge production. However, the social and cultural politics of thewalking interview remains underplayed, an omission that is acutelyapparent in a context of urban diversity. This article in…
Creative Economies, Creative Communities: Rethinking Place, Policy and Practice
Investigating how people and places are connected into the creative economy, this volume takes a holistic view of the intersections between community, policy and practice and how they are co-constituted. The role of the creative economy and broader cultural policy within community development is problematised and, in a significant addition to work in this area, the concept of ’place’ forms a key cross cutting theme. It brings together case studie…
Urban landscapes and the atmosphere of place: Exploring Subjective Experience in the Study of Urban Form
Urban landscapes are produced through the combination of material forms and subjective human experience. Drawing on the concept of atmosphere, we argue that human experience of urban spaces drives alterations to the built environment, making it critical that these are studied in tandem. Atmosphere is created through the combination of human activity, individual emotional responses and subjective perceptions of built forms. Though unique to the in…
Time, rhythm and the creative economy
Creative practice is fetishised in the policy discourse of post-industrial economies as a driver of growth and social inclusion. Conceptually, we advance Lefebvre's incomplete rhythmanalysis project by combining the ideas of dressage and arrhythmia to give novel insights into contradictions within the contemporary creative economy. Our analysis shows dressage (practices learned through repetition) being used as a means to impose unsustainable ('a…
Local governance, disadvantaged communities and cultural intermediation in the creative urban economy
The creative economy is a key arena where austerity, localism and social policy debates are being played out. This paper explores how cultural intermediation has been captured by a broader state agenda on socio-economic exclusion, examining how these processes function at the local level in Birmingham, UK. Intersections of local cultural policy with grass-roots practice are explored in the neighbourhood of Balsall Heath, through two case studies:…
Revealing and re-valuing cultural intermediaries in the ‘real’ creative city: Insights from a diary-keeping exercise
From critics and cultural commentators to professionals who mediate between production and consumption for economic gain, the term ‘cultural intermediaries’ has been variously interpreted over recent decades. Often framed as self-interested entrepreneurs seeking to maximise economic value the wider set of political, social and moral motivations of cultural workers have been often overlooked.Drawing on a diary-keeping exercise with 20 cultural wor…
I want this place to thrive’: Volunteering, co‐production and creative labour
Until now geographical research on creative labour has tended to characterise it either in terms of ‘hot’ jobs in ‘buzzing’ places or precarious, often poorly paid working conditions. This article argues for a subtler consideration of the complex combination of factors at play within the cultural ecology of art‐making. The lure of creative labour has been explained by three key rationales: intrinsic motivators of personal satisfaction and social …
Audiencing James Turrell's Skyspace: Encounters between art and audience at Yorkshire Sculpture Park
This article investigates the under-addressed topic of audiencing in relation to art in landscape, considering the ways in which this study can enliven cultural geography. Exploring how issues of interpretation and reception have been approached in the past, it tailors mixed methods to trace audience practices using the case study of James Turrell's Skyspace at Yorkshire Sculpture Park, England. Turrell's site art is installed in a remodelled dee…
Pluralising the walking interview: Researching (im)mobilities with Muslim women
Within writing on walking practices, walking has often been presentedas pleasurable, relaxing, and even liberatory. Research using walkinginterviews has recognised that different kinds of bodies can beexcluded from mobile methods, impacting upon place-basedknowledge production. However, the social and cultural politics of thewalking interview remains underplayed, an omission that is acutelyapparent in a context of urban diversity. This article in…
Time, rhythm and the creative economy
Creative practice is fetishised in the policy discourse of post-industrial economies as a driver of growth and social inclusion. Conceptually, we advance Lefebvre's incomplete rhythmanalysis project by combining the ideas of dressage and arrhythmia to give novel insights into contradictions within the contemporary creative economy. Our analysis shows dressage (practices learned through repetition) being used as a means to impose unsustainable ('a…
Revealing and re-valuing cultural intermediaries in the ‘real’ creative city: Insights from a diary-keeping exercise
From critics and cultural commentators to professionals who mediate between production and consumption for economic gain, the term ‘cultural intermediaries’ has been variously interpreted over recent decades. Often framed as self-interested entrepreneurs seeking to maximise economic value the wider set of political, social and moral motivations of cultural workers have been often overlooked.Drawing on a diary-keeping exercise with 20 cultural wor…
Audiencing James Turrell's Skyspace: Encounters between art and audience at Yorkshire Sculpture Park
This article investigates the under-addressed topic of audiencing in relation to art in landscape, considering the ways in which this study can enliven cultural geography. Exploring how issues of interpretation and reception have been approached in the past, it tailors mixed methods to trace audience practices using the case study of James Turrell's Skyspace at Yorkshire Sculpture Park, England. Turrell's site art is installed in a remodelled dee…
I want this place to thrive’: Volunteering, co‐production and creative labour
Until now geographical research on creative labour has tended to characterise it either in terms of ‘hot’ jobs in ‘buzzing’ places or precarious, often poorly paid working conditions. This article argues for a subtler consideration of the complex combination of factors at play within the cultural ecology of art‐making. The lure of creative labour has been explained by three key rationales: intrinsic motivators of personal satisfaction and social …
Placing faith in creative labour: Muslim women and digital media work in Britain
Since the 2000s, a rapidly expanding Muslim marketplace has offered faith-centred digital content produced by and aimed at Muslim women. In geopolitical events post 9/11, adoption of the term ‘Muslim women’, especially by younger generations, has grown in an act of supra-national identification with the Muslima – Muslim female community – that crosses race, ethnicity, sects and class. This is reflective of a wider prioritisation of religion in th…
YourAverageMuslim: Ruptural geopolitics of British Muslim women's media and fashion
Muslima lifestyle media and fashion are reshaping global media, leisure and recreation, and creating new spaces of identification and belonging in predominantly Western-liberal societies. Typically educated and upwardly mobile, British Muslim women working as cultural producers in media and fashion are finding strategies for challenging stereotypes and resisting socio-economic exclusion. Bringing into dialogue discourses on gender and creative la…
Hostile Environments: Housing and Asylum Policies as Drivers of Energy Deprivation Among UK Refugee Communities
Although refugees in the UK are highly susceptible to the triad of factors–low income, poor housing and high energy bills–that produce vulnerability to energy deprivation, literature on this issue is rare. We therefore propose a framework towards understanding the role of “non-energy” policies as drivers of energy deprivation among UK refugees, using the conceptual lenses of deservingness, welfare chauvinism and domicide to demonstrate how the co…
Pluralising (im)mobilities: Anti-Muslim acts and the epistemic politics of mobile methods
A critical agenda towards pluralising the politics and practice of mobile methods can enable more diverse epistemologies of uneven mobility and urban knowledge. In this article a challenge is offered to normative treatments of mobile methods including walking practices that inscribe dominant ways of seeing the city in anticipation of a liberal, secular, and sovereign subject. Taking empirical examples to ground conceptual insights on ‘fields of p…
Religion and faith: The missing index of inequality in culture and the arts
This short commentary – part of the special issue on ‘Craft Economies and Inequalities’ - calls for moving beyond the preferred indexes of gender and class in research on inequalities in cultural production, and considers what can be gained by including religion and belief in broader understandings of creativity. Drawing upon the co-curated exhibition ‘Beyond Faith: Muslim Women Artists Today’, it argues for centring religion and belief in debate…
Cultural Policy, Governance and Urban Diversity: Resident Perspectives from Birmingham, UK
Within a paradigm of culture‐led urban competition, discourse and debate has focused on attracting the mobile creative class, diverting attention on cultural resources for lesser privileged groups, both established and new. Policy agendas behind culture and the arts at the neighbourhood level are quietly shifting however, with increasing emphasis on social cohesion and integration. This paper investigates for the first time how co‐producing cultu…
Urban landscapes and the atmosphere of place: Exploring Subjective Experience in the Study of Urban Form
Urban landscapes are produced through the combination of material forms and subjective human experience. Drawing on the concept of atmosphere, we argue that human experience of urban spaces drives alterations to the built environment, making it critical that these are studied in tandem. Atmosphere is created through the combination of human activity, individual emotional responses and subjective perceptions of built forms. Though unique to the in…
Audiencing James Turrell's Skyspace: Encounters between art and audience at Yorkshire Sculpture Park
This article investigates the under-addressed topic of audiencing in relation to art in landscape, considering the ways in which this study can enliven cultural geography. Exploring how issues of interpretation and reception have been approached in the past, it tailors mixed methods to trace audience practices using the case study of James Turrell's Skyspace at Yorkshire Sculpture Park, England. Turrell's site art is installed in a remodelled dee…
I want this place to thrive’: Volunteering, co‐production and creative labour
Until now geographical research on creative labour has tended to characterise it either in terms of ‘hot’ jobs in ‘buzzing’ places or precarious, often poorly paid working conditions. This article argues for a subtler consideration of the complex combination of factors at play within the cultural ecology of art‐making. The lure of creative labour has been explained by three key rationales: intrinsic motivators of personal satisfaction and social …
Local governance, disadvantaged communities and cultural intermediation in the creative urban economy
The creative economy is a key arena where austerity, localism and social policy debates are being played out. This paper explores how cultural intermediation has been captured by a broader state agenda on socio-economic exclusion, examining how these processes function at the local level in Birmingham, UK. Intersections of local cultural policy with grass-roots practice are explored in the neighbourhood of Balsall Heath, through two case studies:…
Revealing and re-valuing cultural intermediaries in the ‘real’ creative city: Insights from a diary-keeping exercise
From critics and cultural commentators to professionals who mediate between production and consumption for economic gain, the term ‘cultural intermediaries’ has been variously interpreted over recent decades. Often framed as self-interested entrepreneurs seeking to maximise economic value the wider set of political, social and moral motivations of cultural workers have been often overlooked.Drawing on a diary-keeping exercise with 20 cultural wor…
Creative Economies, Creative Communities: Rethinking Place, Policy and Practice
Investigating how people and places are connected into the creative economy, this volume takes a holistic view of the intersections between community, policy and practice and how they are co-constituted. The role of the creative economy and broader cultural policy within community development is problematised and, in a significant addition to work in this area, the concept of ’place’ forms a key cross cutting theme. It brings together case studie…
Urban landscapes and the atmosphere of place: Exploring Subjective Experience in the Study of Urban Form
Urban landscapes are produced through the combination of material forms and subjective human experience. Drawing on the concept of atmosphere, we argue that human experience of urban spaces drives alterations to the built environment, making it critical that these are studied in tandem. Atmosphere is created through the combination of human activity, individual emotional responses and subjective perceptions of built forms. Though unique to the in…
Time, rhythm and the creative economy
Creative practice is fetishised in the policy discourse of post-industrial economies as a driver of growth and social inclusion. Conceptually, we advance Lefebvre's incomplete rhythmanalysis project by combining the ideas of dressage and arrhythmia to give novel insights into contradictions within the contemporary creative economy. Our analysis shows dressage (practices learned through repetition) being used as a means to impose unsustainable ('a…
Pluralising the walking interview: Researching (im)mobilities with Muslim women
Within writing on walking practices, walking has often been presentedas pleasurable, relaxing, and even liberatory. Research using walkinginterviews has recognised that different kinds of bodies can beexcluded from mobile methods, impacting upon place-basedknowledge production. However, the social and cultural politics of thewalking interview remains underplayed, an omission that is acutelyapparent in a context of urban diversity. This article in…
Cultural Policy, Governance and Urban Diversity: Resident Perspectives from Birmingham, UK
Within a paradigm of culture‐led urban competition, discourse and debate has focused on attracting the mobile creative class, diverting attention on cultural resources for lesser privileged groups, both established and new. Policy agendas behind culture and the arts at the neighbourhood level are quietly shifting however, with increasing emphasis on social cohesion and integration. This paper investigates for the first time how co‐producing cultu…
Placing faith in creative labour: Muslim women and digital media work in Britain
Since the 2000s, a rapidly expanding Muslim marketplace has offered faith-centred digital content produced by and aimed at Muslim women. In geopolitical events post 9/11, adoption of the term ‘Muslim women’, especially by younger generations, has grown in an act of supra-national identification with the Muslima – Muslim female community – that crosses race, ethnicity, sects and class. This is reflective of a wider prioritisation of religion in th…
YourAverageMuslim: Ruptural geopolitics of British Muslim women's media and fashion
Muslima lifestyle media and fashion are reshaping global media, leisure and recreation, and creating new spaces of identification and belonging in predominantly Western-liberal societies. Typically educated and upwardly mobile, British Muslim women working as cultural producers in media and fashion are finding strategies for challenging stereotypes and resisting socio-economic exclusion. Bringing into dialogue discourses on gender and creative la…
Pluralising (im)mobilities: Anti-Muslim acts and the epistemic politics of mobile methods
A critical agenda towards pluralising the politics and practice of mobile methods can enable more diverse epistemologies of uneven mobility and urban knowledge. In this article a challenge is offered to normative treatments of mobile methods including walking practices that inscribe dominant ways of seeing the city in anticipation of a liberal, secular, and sovereign subject. Taking empirical examples to ground conceptual insights on ‘fields of p…
British Muslim Women in the Cultural and Creative Industries
Muslim women are opening up new educational and career pathways across the UK, pioneering roles in digital media, fashion design and visual art. However, their contributions to the economy and culture are rarely the focus of media and government reports. Now, Saskia Warren draws on in-depth fieldwork with British Muslim women working in these roles, taking a narrative approach to look at how they frame their own everyday labour experiences. Drawi…
Religion and faith: The missing index of inequality in culture and the arts
This short commentary – part of the special issue on ‘Craft Economies and Inequalities’ - calls for moving beyond the preferred indexes of gender and class in research on inequalities in cultural production, and considers what can be gained by including religion and belief in broader understandings of creativity. Drawing upon the co-curated exhibition ‘Beyond Faith: Muslim Women Artists Today’, it argues for centring religion and belief in debate…
Hostile Environments: Housing and Asylum Policies as Drivers of Energy Deprivation Among UK Refugee Communities
Although refugees in the UK are highly susceptible to the triad of factors–low income, poor housing and high energy bills–that produce vulnerability to energy deprivation, literature on this issue is rare. We therefore propose a framework towards understanding the role of “non-energy” policies as drivers of energy deprivation among UK refugees, using the conceptual lenses of deservingness, welfare chauvinism and domicide to demonstrate how the co…
Rethinking Museum Geographies: Towards Restitution and a Relational Ethics of Care in Legacies of Colonialism
This article identifies how a critical exploration of museums and restitution processes illuminates geographical thinking on relational ethics and care. In legacies of colonialism, critical approaches to museums and restorative action show a need to address colonial violence and dispossession from stolen cultural heritage. Restorative action reveals emergent, and more hopeful, practices of care across relational geographies. Research on relationa…
Diasporic Connections Revisited: Modest Fashion and Digital Fashion Activism
This invited commentary responds to the power and residues of Irene Hardill and Parvati Raghuram's 1998 Area article ‘Diasporic Connections’. It makes three interlinked points on connection/disconnection and visibility/invisibility of female labour that trace the development of British South Asian and modest fashion. First, increasing complexity in migratory patterns alongside a hardening of right‐wing and anti‐immigration politics means a turn a…
Where has Bish Vegas gone? The Auckland Project, post-secular urban restructuring and evangelical philanthrocapitalism
A strange story of urban revitalisation is unfolding in a small town in North-East England. Bishop Auckland offers a case study of small-town economic decline accelerated by austerity and a cost-of-living crisis. Often symbolic of a ‘left-behind place’, economic restructuring and political turns including a pro-Brexit majority vote are used to emphasise a post-industrial and insular urban identity. However, evangelical philanthropy by a high net …
Political science (14 works) · Sociology (14 works) · Law (11 works) · Politics (8 works) · Social science (8 works) · Cultural Industries and Urban Development (7 works) · Gender Studies (7 works) · Aesthetics (6 works) · Art (5 works) · Creativity (5 works)