Sharing Like We Mean It: Working Co-operatively in the Cultural and Tech Sectors.

A hybrid research report and co-op primer, Sharing Like We Mean It: Working Co-operatively in the Cultural and Tech Sectors is based on a survey of 106 co-operatives in Canada, the UK, and the US. It offers a snapshot of the co-op landscape in creative industries, explores what co-operative work can look like in practice, and features profiles of several worker co-operatives. Our survey results confirm that the co-operative model is a promising strategy for mitigating individualized patterns of work, democratizing work relationships, and providing satisfying work in creative industries contexts. Co-ops are not a magic solution to systemic work problems. But the co-op model – in conjunction with other pro-worker policies and organizations – holds potential to democratically remake work in ways that have yet to be fully realized, or widely tested, in creative industries

The Co-operative Alternative and the Creative Industries: A Technical Report on a Survey of Co-operatives in the cultural and technology sectors in Canada, the United Kingdom, and the United States.

This report presents the findings of a 2019 online survey of co-operatives in creative industries in Canada, the UK, and the US. This survey was an international collaboration between the SSHRC-supported project, “Pathways beyond Precarity in the Cultural and Creative Industries: Sustainable Livelihoods and Cultures of Solidarity,” and the British Academy-supported project, “Mapping Cultural Co-operatives.” This technical report is a companion to our community publication, Sharing Like We Mean It: Working Co-operatively in the Cultural and Tech Sectors. Whereas the latter presents select findings for workers who are new to co-ops, this technical report provides a fuller account of the results for co-op researchers, associations, policymakers, and other interested readers. Our survey was initiated in the context of research on cultural work. Scholars have produced extensive evidence of the precarity faced by workers in creative industries, including arts and culture, media and communication, and information technology. As the perils of Big Tech and the precarity of cultural work have become increasingly contentious, the need to explore and enact worker-centered strategies for democratizing labour and sustaining livelihoods has become urgent—all the more so in the face of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, which has hit self-employed cultural workers particularly hard. While the co-operative model has recently begun to receive more attention among researchers seeking alternative work structures for the cultural and tech sectors, knowledge of the co-op landscape in the creative industries and the conditions of work therein remains limited. Building on Dave Boyle and Kate Oakley’s reflections on the complementarities of co-ops and creative industries, this report summarizes findings from our 2019 survey of creative-sector co-ops in Canada, the UK, and the US. In undertaking this survey, we set out to generate a preliminary portrait of co-op presence in creative industries; working conditions within creative-sector co-ops; the benefits of working co-operatively; reasons why cultural and tech workers choose the co-op option; and creative-sector co-ops’ involvement in the wider co-operative movement. As further described in Sharing Like We Mean It: Working Co-operatively in the Cultural and Tech Sectors, the results of our survey confirm that the co-op model is a promising strategy for mitigating individualized patterns of work, democratizing work relationships, and providing satisfying work in creative industries contexts. While co-ops are not a magic solution to systemic work problems, our research is suggestive of co-ops’ potential to remake work in ways that have yet to be fully realized, or widely tested, in creative industries

Opioid suppression of conditioned anticipatory brain responses to breathlessness

Opioid painkillers are a promising treatment for chronic breathlessness, but are associated with potentially fatal side effects. In the treatment of breathlessness, their mechanisms of action are unclear. A better understanding might help to identify safer alternatives. Learned associations between previously neutral stimuli (e.g. stairs) and repeated breathlessness induce an anticipatory threat response that may worsen breathlessness, contributing to the downward spiral of decline seen in clinical populations. As opioids are known to influence associative learning, we hypothesized that they may interfere with the brain processes underlying a conditioned anticipatory response to breathlessness in relevant brain areas, including the amygdala and the hippocampus. Healthy volunteers viewed visual cues (neutral stimuli) immediately before induction of experimental breathlessness with inspiratory resistive loading. Thus, an association was formed between the cue and breathlessness. Subsequently, this paradigm was repeated in two identical neuroimaging sessions with intravenous infusions of either low-dose remifentanil (0.7ng/ml target controlled infusion) or saline (randomised). During saline infusion, breathlessness anticipation activated the right anterior insula and the adjacent operculum. Breathlessness was associated with activity in a network including the insula, operculum, dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, anterior cingulate cortex and the primary sensory and motor cortices. Remifentanil reduced breathlessness unpleasantness but not breathlessness intensity. Remifentanil depressed anticipatory activity in the amygdala and the hippocampus that correlated with reductions in breathlessness unpleasantness. During breathlessness, remifentanil decreased activity in the anterior insula, anterior cingulate cortex and sensory motor cortices. Remifentanil-induced reduction in breathlessness unpleasantness was associated with increased activity in the rostral anterior cingulate cortex and nucleus accumbens, components of the endogenous opioid system known to decrease the perception of aversive stimuli. These findings suggest that in addition to effects on brainstem respiratory control, opioids palliate breathlessness through an interplay of altered associative learning mechanisms. These mechanisms provide potential targets for novel ways to develop and assess treatments for chronic breathlessness

Co-production: towards a utopian approach

This article outlines how co-production might be understood as a utopian method, which both attends to and works against dominant inequalities. It suggests that it might be positioned ‘within, against, and beyond’ current configurations of power in academia and society more broadly. It develops this argument by drawing on recent research funded through the UK’s Connected Communities programme, led by the Arts and Humanities Research Council; and by attending to arguments from the field of Utopian Studies. It explores particular issues of power and control within the field of co-production, acknowledging that neoliberalism both constrains and co-opts such practice; and explores methodological and infrastructural issues such that its utopian potential might be realised

Academics, Cultural Workers and Critical Labour Studies

The aim of this paper is to locate academics within the sights of critical labour studies, and, in particular, the contemporary interest in cultural workers. Despite a growing literature about - and in response to - the transformation of the University there have been few attempts to study academics as workers. This paper argues that there are a number of parallels between academic work and the much more well-documented experiences of work in the cultural and creative industries. The paper examines the increasing experience of precariousness among academics, the intensification and extensification of work, and the new modes of surveillance in the academy and their affective impacts. The aim of the article is to build on the critical lexicon of studies of cultural labour in order to think about academic work as labour and to generate new ways of thinking about power, privilege and exploitation. It argues for the need for a psychosocial perspective that can understand the new labouring subjectivities in academia

In the social factory? Immaterial labour, precariousness and cultural work

This article introduces a special section concerned with precariousness and cultural work. Its aim is to bring into dialogue three bodies of ideas -- the work of the autonomous Marxist 'Italian laboratory'; activist writings about precariousness and precarity; and the emerging empirical scholarship concerned with the distinctive features of cultural work, at a moment when artists, designers and (new) media workers have taken centre stage as a supposed 'creative class' of model entrepreneurs. The paper is divided into three sections. It starts by introducing the ideas of the autonomous Marxist tradition, highlighting arguments about the autonomy of labour, informational capitalism and the 'factory without walls', as well as key concepts such as multitude and immaterial labour. The impact of these ideas and of Operaismo politics more generally on the precarity movement is then considered in the second section, discussing some of the issues that have animated debate both within and outside this movement, which has often treated cultural workers as exemplifying the experiences of a new 'precariat'. In the third and final section of the paper we turn to the empirical literature about cultural work, pointing to its main features before bringing it into debate with the ideas already discussed. Several points of overlap and critique are elaborated -- focusing in particular on issues of affect, temporality, subjectivity and solidarity