‘Don’t use “the weak word”’: Women brewers, identities and gendered territories of embodied work

Focusing on an unresearched group of women brewers, and drawing conceptually on embodiment and identity work, this article explores worker corporealities within the gendered landscape of microbreweries and deepens understanding of the body/work/gender nexus in the context of brewer’s work. In doing so, it challenges the marginalisation of female worker bodies in scholarly work on male-dominated occupations. Drawing on interview and observation data collected in the UK in 2015, verbal narratives of women brewers’ experiences of their working lives are utilised to provide insights into how their gendered bodily practices constitute resources for constructing a distinctive ‘brewster’ identity. Women brewers engage in identity work, on both individual and collective levels, through the material and symbolic framing of their embodied and gendered working selves; navigating their physical working environments; downplaying gender to emphasise physical competence; and foregrounding gender in relation to non-physical aspects to accentuate difference and collective contribution

Entrepreneurial cultural affinity spaces (ecas): Design of inclusive local learning ecosystems for social change, innovation and entrepreneurship

The ECAS framework seeks to transform social design theory and practice through an emergent instructional paradigm of heritage-led, local learning ecosystem approaches, to leverage on diverse assets of people in community settings. This includes the cultural, social, sexual and religious diversity of locals. Such reconfiguration of design for social change, and our collective mindset, will create the conditions for more dynamic and powerful collaborations that stimulate and enable social innovation, entrepreneurship, and inclusion. The conceptual backdrop draws on the concepts of affinity spaces and embodied learning, incorporated into local learning ecosystem ideas that support viable, integrated and participative urban regeneration. This paper addresses the theoretical backdrop of how such ecosystems can be co-designed, implemented and evaluated, to include disadvantaged and underrepresented groups, such as minorities, women, migrants, refugees and asylum seekers, to empower them as lifelong learners and change-makers. We introduce the ECAS framework and how it can present an inclusive and open instructional paradigm that improves design for social change, innovation and entrepreneurship in practice through the framework, conditions, and support mechanisms developed