Interrogating Internships: Unpaid Work, Creative Industries, and Higher Education

Greig de Peuter, Nicole S. Cohen, and Enda Brophy, eds. (2015) “Interrogating Internships: Unpaid Work, Creative Industries, and Higher Education”, special issue of tripleC: Communication, Capitalism, and Culture 13(2): 329-605. [PDF]

The cumulative effect of serial internships and zero-wages is the hardening of established social exclusions in the labour market, the devaluation of labour, wage depression across the labour economy, and the acclimatization of a generation of indebted workers to hustling from gig to gig with few expectations of their employers. Internships are, then, an entry point for interrogating contested conditions of life, labour, and learning at a historical moment when precarity is an encroaching structure of feeling.

Table of Contents

Introduction
Greig de Peuter, Nicole S. Cohen, and Enda Brophy

Conceptualizing Internships

Media and Cultural Industries Internships: A Thematic Review and Digital Labour Parallels
Thomas F. Corrigan

From Apprenticeship to Internship: The Social and Legal Antecedents of the Intern Economy
Alexandre Frenette

Interning and Investing: Rethinking Unpaid Work, Social Capital, and the “Human Capital Regime”
Sophie Hope and Joanna Figiel

What Killed Moritz Erhardt? Internships and the Cultural Dangers of “Positive” Ideas
Bogdan Costea, Peter Watt, and Kostas Amiridis

Internships and Creative Industries

Under the Cloak of Whiteness: A Circuit of Culture Analysis of Opportunity Hoarding and Colour-blind Racism Inside US Advertising Internship Programs
Christopher Boulton

Reality TV’s Embrace of the Intern
Tanner Mirrlees

Expo Milano 2015: The Institutionalization of Working for Free in Italy
Roberto Ciccarelli

A History of Internships at CBC Television News
Marlene Murphy

(De)valuing Intern Labour: Journalism Internship Pay Rates and Collective Representation in Canada
Errol Salamon

Internships, Workfare, and the Cultural Industries: A British Perspective
David Lee

Internships and Higher Education

Nothing for Money and Your Work for Free: Internships and the Marketing of Higher Education
Mara Einstein

“You Kind of Have to Bite the Bullet and do Bitch Work”: How Internships Teach Students to Unthink Exploitation in Public Relations
Michelle Rodino-Colocino and Stephanie N. Berberick

Negotiating Educated Subjectivity: Intern Labour and Higher Education in Hong Kong
Ip Iam Chong

Interrogating Course-Related Public Interest Internships in Communications
Sandra Smeltzer

Educating the Precariat: Intern Labour and a Renewed Approach to Media Literacy Education
Doug Tewksbury

Unwaged Posts in UK Universities: Controversies and Campaigns
Kirsten Forkert and Ana Lopes

Intern Labour Activism

Art Struggles: Confronting Internships and Unpaid Labour in Contemporary Art
Panos Kompatsiaris

Report on Intern Rights Advocacy in 2013–2014
Intern Labor Rights

Ontario Interns Fight Back: Modes of Resistance Against Unpaid Internships
William Webb

Challenging Intern Nation: A Roundtable with Intern Labour Activists in Canada
Nicole S. Cohen and Greig de Peuter

Exploited for a Good Cause? Campaigning Against Unpaid Internships in the UK Charity Sector
Vera Weghman

Image credit: Fairooz Aniqa and the Student Union of the University of Arts London [CC-BY-2.0]