Artists and Cultural Workers in Cultural Policy and Creative Practice: From the Big Break Narrative to Mutual Aid and Collective Care
"A focus on mutual aid has the value of challenging what’s often a default perspective in studies of cultural labour. It offers an opportunity to shift our perspective on artists and other cultural workers to something other than individualised competitive actors or something more than model workers of neoliberal capitalism. A mutual aid lens nudges us to look at cultural work not only as a site of exploitation or of austerity or inequity, but also as a site of struggle. Approaching cultural work from the concept of mutual aid invites us to look at how, despite all the structural pressures toward individualization and self-exploitation, cultural work is also a site of practices of care, of resistance and collective organising. So in terms of the thematic framework of artists’ narratives, an emphasis on mutual aid helps to open space for a counter narrative, centring not how cultural workers are victims, but how they push back, how they combine forces, and how they propose and enact alternatives."
Image credit: Better Creative
