Cultural Labor Research Articles

Precarity and Why Indie Game Developers Can’t Save Us from Racism

Exploring issues of labor and inequality at the intersection of AAA and indie sectors, this article interrogates the perception of the indie sector as key to mitigating the production of racializing or racist game content. As developers are central to the industry and the larger games culture, their views reveal how indies are imagined as a privileged site free from economic pressures where racism can be ameliorated. Based on interviews with developers, I argue that the project to redress representational inequities within games is shifted on to indie developers, intensifying their emotional and cultural labor. Indie game developers are imagined as the solution, yet this perspective underestimates the precariousness of independent game production. Economic precariousness may encourage indies to repeat certain patterns of racial representation.

The Affective Labor and Performance of Live Streaming on Twitch.tv

This article explores affective and immaterial labor on the leading live-streaming platform, Twitch.tv, which boasts over one hundred million regular viewers and two million regular broadcasters. This labor involves digitally mediated outward countenance, including being friendly to viewers, soliciting donations, building parasocial intimacy with spectators, and engaging audiences through humor. We offer an examination of streamers broadcasting as a “character,” which we situate within the context of play becoming work, the labor of performance and acting, and the economic compulsions that shape cultural labor on Twitch. We draw on hundred interviews with professional and aspiring-professional game broadcasters conducted in 2016 and 2017 at gaming events across the United Kingdom, the United States, Germany, and Poland, alongside ethnographic research. This inquiry into the dynamics of digital games and labor underscores the importance of studying live streaming as part of a wider critical investigation of contemporary digital work.

Organisational aesthetics and pedagogy: Deframing the creative and cultural labour formation

The first objective of this paper is to provide an overview of the curricula offered by Polish higher education institutions aimed at future workers in the culture and creative sectors. Desk research is supplemented by a qualitative analysis of students’ needs on professional education and the perception of cultural labour in Poland, and concluding remarks attempt to provide a preliminary response to the key expectations and gaps highlighted in the reported analysis. The paper argues that to sustain the trends of growth and to support the professionalisation of managing cultural and creative initiatives, higher education institutions in Poland have to develop a more explicit balance between pure cultural studies and cultural management education approaches. The breakthrough achievements require support from a parallel breakthrough – formation tools that adapt alternative methods from organisation studies.

Picturing luxury, producing value: The cultural labour of social media brand influencers in South Africa

This article explores the cultural labour of social media influencers who market luxury brands on their Instagram profiles. Through an analysis of brand-relevant material posted by six social media ‘influencers’, this article provides insight into the aesthetic of their cultural labour. As context, a brief summary of literature on the concept of brand ambassadorship is offered alongside a discussion of critical scholarship that defines the work of social media influencers as a form of brand value creation. The article argues that there are three types of value creation evident in visuals created by the influencers: as attempts at celebritization, in telling the story of the brand, and as role of models of aspirational consumer-citizenship. It is argued that the visual work undertaken online by social media influencers contributes in significant ways to the production of the value of global brands, and that this should be contextualized within the unique socio-economic aspirations of consumers based in the global south.

Precarity and Solidarity at Neoliberalism’s Twilight: The Potentials of Transnational Production Autoethnography

This essay uses autoethnography to illuminate the shifting conditions of global creative and academic labor. By reflecting on my experiences during a 2014 research trip to Manila, the Philippines, I, as a U.S. scholar, consider the different experiences of precarity in transnational cultural production, as academic and creative labor are both shaped by neoliberal structural forces. Through production autoethnography, I argue we may build forms of solidarity between cultural studies scholars and creative workers. Attending to the broader political changes that have occurred over the last several years, I conclude that as neoliberalism has lost its hegemonic authority, cultural producers, including cultural studies scholars, have the opportunity to help forge something better.

Girl Empire Builders: Girls' Domestic and Cultural Labor and Constructions of Girlhood

Girl Empire Builders: Girls' Domestic and Cultural Labor and Constructions of Girlhood

The Missing Producer: Rethinking indie cultural production in terms of entrepreneurship, relational labour, and sustainability.

This article draws on over 60 interviews and 120 surveys with indie game developers to illustrate relational labour and entrepreneurship practices in cultural industries and their relationship to ‘good work’. We first outline the changing organization of games work, the shift towards so-called indie production, and the associated rejection of creatively constrained, hierarchically managed production models. In the move towards small-scale games making, indies jettisoned producers because producers represented industry modes of work, values and creative constraints. But indies are now struggling to manage production processes without producers. We use developer narratives to highlight how this ‘missing producer’ work is redistributed in the form of cultural entrepreneurship, cultural intermediation and relational labour. This relational labour simultaneously supports and undermines sustainable production practices, as developers take on impossible workloads associated with networking and connecting with others. We next illustrate how the inherent valorization of growth and expansion in cultural entrepreneurship discourses may force developers to mimic industry practices and organization in order to find funding, but these practices inherently conflict with their desire to focus on making games as small, sustainable and creatively autonomous teams. Ultimately, we want to demonstrate how interviews and time spent with indie developers help us account for otherwise invisible and ambiguous cultural labour practices and discourses, thus allowing us to make sense of the larger context of cultural production and its possible futures.

‘She don’t need no help’

New Orleans bounce music is a dance-oriented hip-hop form that has emerged as a notably non-normative genre, in which queer Black bounce artists destabilise binary cultural paradigms and emphasise queerness as inclusive and relational. We explore how five artists' lyrics and public personae actively refute the consolidated, naturalised nexus of gender, sex, and sexuality by disentangling each of the three strands from one another. In order to explore how this is accomplished, we created a corpus of bounce lyrics. We analysed lexical indices of gender; self-positioning as feminine subjects; sexual subject-object positioning; normalisation of sex between men; retention of masculine subjectivities; and rejection of gender binarism. Further, the artists repeatedly expose the ubiquitous nature of sex between men in their lyrics, working to assert its existence and normalcy in the popular imagination. The bounce artists we analyse expose and articulate forms of deviance, expressing a blackness and queerness that insists on making visible the humanity and sexuality of Black people and queer people. Bounce music, made by queer people of colour, for an audience of predominantly poor, heterosexual women of colour, is a communitarian cultural labour.

Children’s market researchers as moral brokers

ABSTRACTDrawing on interviews with children’s market researchers, brand managers and other market actors in North America, the UK and Europe, this study analyzes and positions children’s market professionals as knowledge brokers and moral interlocutors who transact between and among clients, colleagues and, at times, parents. The transactions – as understood by practitioners – extend beyond simply seeking to elicit ‘preferences’ for this or that product or experience and suggesting ‘market solutions’ to the immediate business problem at hand. Rather, the cultural labor exerted here resembles a continual sorting process in pursuit of the distinction between the child as a dependent economic actor from the child as a moral being worthy of recognition and commercial deference. They thereby strive to enable the continuity – i.e. erase the boundary – between markets and culture by enacting sympathy, sentiment and even intimacy in the conceptualization and execution of research. Investigating how these market professionals understand, construct and act upon children as economic actors, while situated amidst public, moral discourses to the contrary, opens possibilities to examine how value arises in the cultural practice of making social persons and how social personhood in some ways modulates and informs market exigencies.

Dreaming Transnationally in America

Abstract Transnational circuits, as social practices, are not immaterial or virtual, but they do not depend on traditional understandings of one territorial location. Rather than fully and singularly determining the lives of its inhabitants, these local spaces belong now to a transterritory established by the physical, cultural, and imaginative labor of migrants connecting two such spaces, beyond the boundaries of one nation-state. Transnationalism, as a field of studies, has focused on these dynamics. Here they are used to address the question of a possible transnational politics inside the United States, connecting the lives of those who have the most and those who have the least, whether they are US nationals or foreign immigrants.

Humor and Satire on Contemporary Television: Animation and the American Joke

Humor and Satire on Contemporary Television: Animation and the American Joke

The Work of Postcolonial Game Studies in the Play of Culture

This article considers larger methodological questions of what political work is undertaken when scholars engage in postcolonial critiques of video games within academic intellectual frameworks. What is postcolonial game studies, and what is its purpose, within the context of larger issues of inclusion, representation, diversity, and the challenging of hegemonic power structures? After surveying some of the key literature in postcolonial game studies, the author provides critical frameworks for understanding the means by which these approaches have largely been excluded from video game studies, and their crucial function in operating against the grain of profit and innovation-driven discourses in games. This work is the extension of a larger discussion of inclusion, diversity, and tolerance discourse within the liberal academy, and particularly the functions of postcolonial, postmodern and other critical cultural scholarly interventions. In this article, the author argues for a postcolonial approach to game studies, but one that refuses to be reduced to an institutional cultural labor of due diligence, or according to Slavoj Žižek’s term, a ‘culturalization of politics’. Through the work of Stuart Hall and Sara Ahmed on intellectual diversity work within the context of large systems and academic institutions, this article asserts that the perception that critical theorizations (like postcolonial game studies) exert pressure on efficiency and innovation is greatly outweighed by the rich toolkits they bring to video games as maturing cultural forms.

The unfashionable cultural worker? Considering the demography and practice of artists in Greater Western Sydney

Urban cultural policy is increasingly focused on economic development and city reimaging rather than the priorities and experiences of local artists and cultural workers, while those approaches embedded in creative industries/creative cities frameworks, implicitly imagine creative workers to be young, ‘hip’, male, urban, and geographically mobile. Drawing on the findings of a major study of creative practice in Australia’s most culturally and demographically diverse urban area, Greater Western Sydney, this paper considers the creative, biographical and social profile of local cultural workers. Respondents were older, predominantly female, highly educated, and not particularly mobile. And although actively involved with local creative communities and networks, they do not fit established community arts and cultural development paradigms any more than those of the creative industries. These findings suggest that the typical cultural worker may not be the imagined artist of creative industries-informed cultural planning, nor those generally considered in accounts of creative work. The paper argues that in order to support the work of a diversity of local artists and cultural workers, including those who may be ‘unfashionable’, what is required are inclusive explanatory frameworks of cultural labour, and cultural planning and urban cultural policy approaches informed by community consultation and engagement.

GALLERY: Poster Art as Cultural Labor in the Cinematic Archive of Claire Denis

GALLERY: Poster Art as Cultural Labor in the Cinematic Archive of Claire Denis

Digital Tradition: Arrangement and Labor in Istanbul's Recording Studio Culture by Eliot Bates

Digital Tradition: Arrangement and Labor in Istanbul's Recording Studio Culture by Eliot Bates

LABOR AND EDUCATION: FROM WORKING SOCIETY TO DIGITAL ONE

The article discusses the problem of how the interrelation between the institutions of labor and education in European culture has changed. Also, the author analyses what kind of labor and education conceptualizations existed in European philosophical and pedagogical thoughts. She shows that labor and education are closely related in their historical development, and the ideas of labor and education, representing these cultural phenomena, expressed this connection in different ways in different periods of the European culture. According to her the Greek antiquity was characterized by opposing the institution of labor and education because the conceptualization of labor provided the opposition of the material/productive labor and contemplative one, which was cultivating the soul. During the Middle Ages, while maintaining the low status of material / productive labor, also changed the meaning of contemplative labor, which was filled with religious content. Author proves that in the New Age along with the existing labor institute an education institute appeared, which included the professional education institute. The further development of modern society led to the emergence of the so-called work society, which was characterized by the deep connection between the institute of labor and of education one. The education institute was a preparation for the profession in the work society (U. Beck). Author highlighted the reasons of transformations in the field of labor that identified by the metaphor of the death of work in the 60-ies and 70-ies of the last century. Furthermore, the author shows the reasons of the radical changing the phenomenon of labor in the potscapitalist and postsocialist digital society. These reasons cause the rupture of the direct link between the institute of labor and education one, as well as the further expansion and growth of distance education.

The art of the good life: culture and sustainable prosperity

ABSTRACTThe creative economy has seen cultural policy swallowed up by a narrow vision of economic growth, its impacts on the urban fabric captured by property developers, and its promises of meaningful activity challenged by the exploitation and inequities of cultural labour markets. So it needs to be abandoned and re-thought, but on what basis? This paper analyses the potential for cultural work to encourage alternative visions of the “good life”, in particular, how it might encourage a kind of “sustainable prosperity” wherein human flourishing is not linked to high levels of material consumption but rather the capabilities to engage with cultural and creative practices and communities. We critically explore these ideas in three locations: a London borough, a deindustrialised city in England’s midlands and a rural town on the Welsh/English border. Across these diverse landscapes and socio-economic contexts, we look at different versions of the good life and at the possibilities and constraints of cultural activity as a way of achieving kinds of sustainable prosperity.

On the move: Twentieth anniversary editorial of the European Journal of Cultural Studies

Twenty years of the European Journal of Cultural Studies is a cause for celebration. We do so with a festive issue that comes together with our first free open access top articles in three areas that readers have sought us out for: postfeminism, television beyond textual analysis and cultural labour in the creative industries. The issue opens with freshly commissioned introductory essays to these three thematic areas by key authors in those fields. In addition, the issue offers new articles showcasing the range of the broad field of cultural studies today, including pieces on the politics of co-working, punk in China, Black British women on YouTube, trans-pedagogy and fantasy sports gameplay, featuring work by emerging as well as established scholars. Our editorial introduction to this celebratory issue offers reflections on how both the journal and the field of cultural studies have developed, and on our thoughts and ambitions for the future within the current conjuncture as we ‘move on’ as a new editorial team.

Cultural Capital: Arts Graduates, Spatial Inequality, and London’s Impact on Cultural Labor Markets

This article looks at the degree to which spatial inequalities reinforce other forms of social inequality in cultural labor markets. It does so using the example of London, an acknowledged hub for the creative and cultural industries. Using pooled data from 2013 to 2015 quarters of the United Kingdom’s. Labour Force Survey, we consider the social makeup of London’s cultural labor force, and reveal the extent to which, rather than acting as an “engine room” of social mobility, London’s dominance in fact reenforces social class disparities in cultural employment.

‘A Plague of Salaried Marxists’: Sexuality and Subsistence in the Revolutionary Imaginary of Concha Michel

This article examines work of Mexican singer and activist Concha Michel, particularly the pamphlet Marxistas y ‘marxistas’ that sealed her expulsion from the Mexican Communist Party (Partido Comunista de México, PCM). Michel wrote the pamphlet after her return from the Soviet Union, where her experiences only confirmed her belief that revolutionary governments in Mexico and the Soviet Union alike had failed to attend to the massive amounts of social and cultural labor performed overwhelmingly by women. In particular, Communists' emphasis on modernization and scientific theory privileged the ‘social economy’ of commodified production and devalued what she dubbed the ‘natural economy’ of subsistence, reproduction, and artistic labors. The pamphlet draws parallels with the capitalist exploitation of laborers and the sexual exploitation of women perpetrated even by Communist Party leaders. Michel’s refusal to submit to the Party line resulted in her high-profile expulsion from the party, a fate that befell much of her social circle. Over subsequent decades, however, her commitment to activism on behalf of women, celebration of Mexico’s indigenous cultures, and persistent critique of the elision of subsistence labors would earn her celebrity among Mexican maternalist feminists.