Stephanie Taylor – författare

In recent years, cultural work has engaged the interest of scholars from a broad range of social science and humanities disciplines. The debate in this ‘turn to cultural work’ has largely been based around evaluating its advantages and disadvantages: its freedoms and its constraints, its informal but precarious nature, the inequalities within its global workforce, and the blurring of work–life boundaries leading to ‘self-exploitation’.

While academic critics have persuasively challenged more optimistic accounts of ‘converged’ worlds of creative production, the critical debate on cultural work has itself leant heavily towards suggesting a profoundly new confluence of forces and effects. Theorizing Cultural Work instead views cultural work through a specifically historicized and temporal lens, to ask: what novelty can we actually attach to current conditions, and precisely what relation does cultural work have to social precedent? The contributors to this volume also explore current transformations and future(s) of work within the cultural and creative industries as they move into an uncertain future.

This book challenges more affirmative and proselytising industry and academic perspectives, and the pervasive cult of novelty that surrounds them, to locate cultural work as an historically and geographically situated process. It will be of interest to students and scholars of sociology, cultural studies, human geography, urban studies and industrial relations, as well as management and business studies, cultural and economic policy and development, government and planning.

In recent years, cultural work has engaged the interest of scholars from a broad range of social science and humanities disciplines. The debate in this ‘turn to cultural work’ has largely been based around evaluating its advantages and disadvantages: its freedoms and its constraints, its informal but precarious nature, the inequalities within its global workforce, and the blurring of work–life boundaries leading to ‘self-exploitation’.

While academic critics have persuasively challenged more optimistic accounts of ‘converged’ worlds of creative production, the critical debate on cultural work has itself leant heavily towards suggesting a profoundly new confluence of forces and effects. Theorizing Cultural Work instead views cultural work through a specifically historicized and temporal lens, to ask: what novelty can we actually attach to current conditions, and precisely what relation does cultural work have to social precedent? The contributors to this volume also explore current transformations and future(s) of work within the cultural and creative industries as they move into an uncertain future.

This book challenges more affirmative and proselytising industry and academic perspectives, and the pervasive cult of novelty that surrounds them, to locate cultural work as an historically and geographically situated process. It will be of interest to students and scholars of sociology, cultural studies, human geography, urban studies and industrial relations, as well as management and business studies, cultural and economic policy and development, government and planning.

Changes of residence are common in contemporary Western societies. Traditional connections to birthplaces, home towns and countries are broken as people relocate and migrate, yet where they live remains significant to people’s identity and stories of who they are. This book investigates the continuing importance of place for women’s identities, employing a theoretical and empirical approach based on previous work in narrative and discursive psychology.

Through an analysis of women’s talk, the book examines how commonsense meanings shape and limit people’s identity-work to establish a connection to place. It argues that talk about place, and especially place of residence, enables a complex positioning of self and others in which identities of gender, class and national identity intersect. It shows how a speaker’s multiple interpretations of where she lives remain central to her life narrative, and to her fragile and idealized definition of ‘home’ as the place in which she may position herself positively.

Narratives of Identity and Place presents a unique and valuable integration of the popular methods of narrative and discourse analysis, compellingly demonstrating the value of these approaches for research on identity.

Changes of residence are common in contemporary Western societies. Traditional connections to birthplaces, home towns and countries are broken as people relocate and migrate, yet where they live remains significant to people’s identity and stories of who they are. This book investigates the continuing importance of place for women’s identities, employing a theoretical and empirical approach based on previous work in narrative and discursive psychology.

Through an analysis of women’s talk, the book examines how commonsense meanings shape and limit people’s identity-work to establish a connection to place. It argues that talk about place, and especially place of residence, enables a complex positioning of self and others in which identities of gender, class and national identity intersect. It shows how a speaker’s multiple interpretations of where she lives remain central to her life narrative, and to her fragile and idealized definition of ‘home’ as the place in which she may position herself positively.

Narratives of Identity and Place presents a unique and valuable integration of the popular methods of narrative and discourse analysis, compellingly demonstrating the value of these approaches for research on identity.