Hoping amidst precarity

Changing modes of hope in the vicissitudes of a Chinese art village

Datos Bibliográficos

ID3951248
AutoresSiyu Chen (0000-0002-9712-9796, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, Harbin Institute of Technology (Shenzhen), China, autor de correspondencia)
Año2021
Volumen69
Número6
Páginas1277-1292
Fecha de publicación2021-11-01
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessSí
TipoARTICLE
RevistaThe Sociological Review (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 0038-0261 • E-ISSN: 1467-954X
EditorialSAGE Publications Inc (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1177/00380261211018392
OpenAlexW3164274553
IdiomaEN
Citas recibidas7
Referencias citadas46

Focusing on an 'atypical' group of creative workers, viz., rural-to-urban migrant painters in China, this article takes hope as a lens to investigate an extreme case of creative work precarity. Drawing on the findings of a 42-month longitudinal ethnographic study, I demonstrate how wall painters cope with the precarious present by channelling their initial hopes for a future of freedom, original work and stability into three different, everyday practices: playing, creating and waiting. Approaching precarity from an intersectional perspective, this study explicates how the multiple dimensions of precarity interact with each other in forming wall painters' shifting modes of hope. Manifesting the fluidity and contingency of wall painters' hopes in the vicissitudes of Dafen during China's post-industrial turn, this study reconciles the debate in creative labour studies that sees hope as either a utopian fantasy or an everyday practice and further contributes to the political economy of hope in creative labour studies

Aesthetics · Art · China · Nexus (standard) · Perspective (graphical) · Political science · Politics · Precarity · Sociology · Visual arts · Cultural Industries and Urban Development · Digital Economy and Work Transformation · Gender Studies · Law · Migration, Ethnicity, and Economy