Projects per year
Abstract
In this article, a transdisciplinary cultural labour perspective is used to examine the evolving and spontaneous networks and grassroots collective movements of performing arts freelancers in two contexts: Belfast (Northern Ireland) and Athens (Greece) in response to the outbreak of COVID-19. With a principally methodological contribution, the article proposes that evolving cultural ecologies research should mirror the ecologies it studies by adopting more collaborative and improvisational research approaches, drawing on inclusive research methods from disability studies and decolonising approaches within anthropology to reveal deeper knowledge and offer mutual benefit. Furthermore, it proposes that artists, overlooked in cultural ecologies research to date, bring knowledge from their practice beyond lived experience of value to such inquiry. The researchers collaborated with practitioner experts, revealing insights to freelancers’ milieu; their alternate systems for inclusion, representation and radical mutual care; and their increasing vulnerability in the face of ongoing exclusion from cultural recovery strategies and wider political and policy apathy to their concerns. This raises important moral and ethical questions for how cultural ecologies research and researchers engage with practitioner knowledge and the purpose of research in rendering such groups as creative freelancers visible within research and in the implicit and explicit urban and regional recovery planning in different locales. In addition, it proposes the inter- or transdisciplinary nature of cultural ecologies research may be better served by keeping its boundaries fluid, not just in the potential strength of blending research disciplines but also in its boundaries between the formal academy and practice.
Original language | English |
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Pages (from-to) | 461-478 |
Number of pages | 18 |
Journal | European Urban and Regional Studies |
Volume | 29 |
Issue number | 4 |
Early online date | 19 May 2022 |
DOIs | |
Publication status | Published - Oct 2022 |
Keywords
- cultural economy
- cultural ecology
- freelancers
- Creative industries
- Collaborative research
- performing arts
- COVID-19
Fingerprint
Dive into the research topics of 'Making it up: Adaptive approaches to bringing freelance cultural work to a cultural ecologies discourse'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.Projects
- 1 Finished
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R1386HAP: Interdisciplinary study: Social anthropology/Management & business studies
Tsioulakis, I. & FitzGibbon, A.
22/06/2020 → 31/12/2020
Project: Research
Activities
- 2 Oral presentation
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Presentation on consideration for cultural recovery in Northern Ireland
Ali FitzGibbon (Invited speaker)
08 Jun 2021Activity: Talk or presentation types › Oral presentation
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Presentation to Culture, Arts & Heritage Recovery Taskforce for Department of Communities
Ali FitzGibbon (Invited speaker)
26 May 2021Activity: Talk or presentation types › Oral presentation