Our
Publications
Imaginaries of platform entrepreneurship in the creative industries: techno-optimism and subversion in Ghanaian filmmaking
By Robin Steedman, Ana Alacovska, Thilde Langevang, and Rashida Resario
Published in Information, Communication & Society
Key insights: Drawing on interviews and focus groups with 50 filmmakers in four different regions in Ghana we show how Ghanaian filmmakers mobilize, deploy and resist imaginaries of platform entrepreneurship in their efforts to make sense of their situated entrepreneurial practices and to imagine the future of their creative businesses. We found that rather than naïvely adhering to techno-optimist imaginaries, through their practices, Ghanaian filmmaking entrepreneurs challenged the power geometry of the current platform ecosystem dominated by major Silicon Valley players.
Read the article here: https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118X.2022.2062252
Care in creative work: Exploring the ethics and aesthetics of care through arts-based methods
By Thilde Langevang, Rashida Resario, Ana Alacovska, Robin Steedman, Dorothy Akpene Amenuke, Sela Kodjo Adjei & Rufai Haruna Kilu
Published in Cultural Trends
Key insight: Building on our experiences of conducting an artistic workshop in Kumasi in 2020 we argue that the ethics and aesthetics of care in creative work can best be captured and appreciated through the use of innovative arts-based methodologies that afford researchers the opportunity to explore care-fully the relational aspects of creative work. We show that artistic workshops themselves constitute a caring and socially useful form of empirical research that upholds the principles of ‘creative justice’ by fostering more respectful, attentive and affective relationships among research participants and between researchers and participants.
Read the article here: https://doi.org/10.1080/09548963.2021.2016351
The work of hope: Spiritualizing, hustling and waiting in the creative industries in Ghana
By Ana Alacovska, Thilde Langevang, and Robin Steedman
Published in Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space
Key insight: Drawing on twenty four in-depth interviews with creative workers in Accra, we contend that in conditions of radical and pervasive precarity, hope represents a distinct form of work in which the potentialities of the moment extend the present into the future, while the future, however hazy and unimaginable, affects the economic vitality of the present. We explore three dominant practices of hope: hustling, waiting, and spiritualizing.
Read the article here: https://doi.org/10.1177/0308518X20962810