Creative aspiration and the betrayal of promise? The experience of new creative workers

The promise of ‘doing what you love’ continues to attract new aspirants to creative work, yet most creative industries are so characterised by low investment, shifting foci and ongoing technological innovation that all promises must be unreliable. Some would-be creative workers negotiate their own pathways from the outset, ‘following their dream’ as they attempt to convert personal enthusiasms and amateur activities into income-earning careers. Others look to the proliferation of available training and education options, including higher education courses, as possible pathways into creative work. This chapter reviews recent research from the USA, Australia and the UK on the effectiveness – or otherwise – of higher education as preparation for a creative career. The chapter discusses the obstacles that many creative workers, including graduates, encounter on their creative pathways, for instance, as a result of informal work practices and self-employment. The chapter also looks at sources of advantage and disadvantage, such as those associated with particular geographic locations or personal identities. The chapter concludes by introducing the subsequent chapters in the collection. These critically explore the experience of new creative workers in a wide range of national contexts including Australia, Belgium, China, Ireland, Italy, Finland, the Netherlands, Russia and the United Kingdom

On the basis of risk: how screen executives' risk perceptions and practices drive gender inequality in directing

This paper explores how gendered perceptions of risk drive gender inequality. It does so by applying an Intersectional Risk Theory (IRT) framework to new empirical data on gender equality initiatives in the Canadian screen industries. The paper shows (1) that gendered risk perceptions constrain women directors’ work opportunities; (2) that the construction of gendered risk perceptions (‘doing risk’) is shaped by the screen industry context and social inequalities generally; and (3) that practices of constructing risk perceptions can be disrupted and changed, which creates opportunities for a ‘re-doing’ or ‘un-doing’ of gendered perceptions of risk and offers new analytical perspectives onto the efficacy of gender equality initiatives. By interrogating how perceptions of risk inform decision-making the paper contributes new understandings of the drivers of systemic and intersectional inequality as a defining characteristic of work and labour markets in the screen industries, and in the creative industries more broadly

More than ‘making do’: Rethinking cinema attendance in regional and rural Australia

Cinema is one of the most popular forms of cultural entertainment in contemporary rural Australia, yet very little is understood about film circulation, presentation and consumption in non-metropolitan locations. Despite a growing interest in the situation of rural cinema by film historians, scholars have been slow to engage with the detail and meaning of its more recent past. The preoccupation with the connections between cinema and contemporary modernity have tended to over-estimate the significance of the metropolitan and to obscure the diversity and richness of cinema-going practice in Australia. Drawing on analysis of national box office data and material from a microstudy conducted in the rural town of Merimbula on the far south coast of New South Wales, this article seeks to contribute to addressing this gap. It considers three key questions—Who is watching films at the cinema in rural Australia? Why are they watching? And what do these acts of consumption mean