Suchergebnisse

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.

Covid-19 has created an unprecedented crisis for performing musicians globally. But how are these new circumstances perceived by musicians in localities that have gone through multiple crises in the recent past? This article unfolds as a dialogue between two academics and two musicians from Greece and Iran, touching on issues of precarity, creativity, capitalism, state support and control, and radical ideas for a post-Covid cultural economy. Reflecting on conditions of economic crisis (Greece) and sanctions and military tensions (Iran), we argue that a return to 'normalcy' post-Covid is neither feasible nor desired by most musicians outside of institutional elites. By examining the experiences of musicians in the periphery of global markets and artistic circulation, we enrich the analysis of these unprecedented circumstances, but also find well-established coping strategies and seeds of resistance.