Creative precarity? Young fashion designers as entrepreneurs in Russia

Gurova, Olga; Morozova, Daria

doi:10.1080/09502386.2018.1428646

Cited by 18 publications

(11 citation statements)

References 21 publications

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“…This study, therefore, focuses on the practices of eSports players in China’s specific context, to explore why and how eSports practitioners, especially the professional players, transform themselves into new self-enterprising subjects by pursuing meritocracy, suffering from precarity, and facing disposable futures. During this transformation, we can see how the neoliberal culture, ‘an entrepreneurial ethos’ (Gurova and Morozova, 2018: 719), is crucial for an eSports player’s neoliberal self-making, through which they become a ‘neoliberal laboring subject’ (Saddler, 2017: 22) that represents the ‘neoliberal model of entrepreneurial self’ (Peters, 2001: 58). This Chinese contextualized understanding of eSports players, therefore, may be recognized more broadly in other contexts, and even the global context, because it demonstrates control and regulation in the context of neoliberalism, and, accordingly, the ontological status of the enterprising self in our time.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Self-enterprising eSports: Meritocracy, precarity, and disposability of eSports players in China

Lin¹,

Zhao

2020

International Journal of Cultural Studies

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The emerging realm of eSports has become an inescapable part of overall sports and game culture. However, this study investigates eSports beyond sports and games, regarding it as a meta-change in the context of neoliberal Chinese society. In particular, this study focuses on the practices of Chinese eSports players to explore research questions of why and how eSports practitioners, especially professional players in China, have transformed themselves into new, self-enterprising subjects. Based on data collected from our fieldwork and interviews, this study demonstrates that Chinese eSports players pursue meritocracy, suffer from precarity, and face disposability in the future. The study finally proposes questions for sports ontologies and the challenges that eSports have created for the games empire.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In this sense, this participant has become a model neoliberal entrepreneur who actively assumes responsibilities previously borne by the government and industry and regards this action and the following possible failures completely as their own choice (Gurova and Morozova, 2018).…”

Section: Disposable Futuresmentioning

confidence: 99%

Self-enterprising eSports: Meritocracy, precarity, and disposability of eSports players in China

Lin¹,

Zhao

2020

International Journal of Cultural Studies

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“…Creative economy and creative work are claimed to be youth-friendly, and proponents of creative cities and spaces assert the appeal of a diverse, supportive and youth-friendly environment (see, for instance, Florida, 2002; Gurova & Morozova, 2018). In short, creativity and youth are often mutually constituted, or conflated.…”

Section: Ageing: ‘I Am Already 32’mentioning

confidence: 99%

No longer aspirational: A case study of young creative workers in Hong Kong who quit

Wong¹,

Chow²

2020

Global Media and China

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While many young creative workers are braving precaritization presumably with the drive of aspiration, this article focuses on the other end of their career path: disillusionment. Informed by the experiences of five self-proclaimed wenyi qingnian – loosely translated as cultural youth – in Hong Kong, this article tracks their aspirations which kept them hoping and going till they were disillusioned and decided to quit. Drawing together two lines of research – on precarity and on failure – our study fills in a gap of the scholarship on creative work and workers that is dominated by concerns with precarity and related abuses. We attend not only to the abuse, exploitation and precarity of creative work, but to a more open understanding of how and why young creative practitioners leave. We do so with an unusual deployment of longitudinal inquiry that does not only concern itself with struggles of creative workers but also with the termination of such struggles. We observe four dimensions of failure: their increasingly precarious way of life; their disillusionment with creativity; the urgency posed by their ‘ageing’; and the specific local political situation. As transpired, only one factor is immediately related to precarity. This article argues to include ‘failure’ as a significant phase of creative work, that warrants further investigation and may open up more understanding on precarity, or in general, creative work and workers. While precarity is dominantly defined in economic and market-related terms – with good reasons – we see the need to loosen it up to acknowledge more aspects of precarity and experiences of creative work. This article is part of the Special Issue Creative Labour in East Asia.

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“…Over the past decades, the field of Russian cultural studies has grown increasingly nuanced and today it encompasses a multiplicity of different research with different theoretical framings. 13 In this instance, we would like to single out research on fashion and fashion industry, which has brought up questions of class (see Gurova and Morozova 2018) and gender (see Dashkova 2013, Vainshtein 2017). Dashkova's and Vainshtein's research shows how gender structures are reaffirmed in the fashion economy.…”

Section: Cultural Studies In the Russian Contextmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The fact that they discuss 'creatives', for instance, museum workers (Safonova et al, Kuleva), in the Russian context is a sign of globalization. Furthermore, the conceptualizations the authors use, such as precarity (Gurova and Morozova 2018), the digital turn (Ratilainen), urban initiatives (Suleymanova, Trubina), changes, in the library and reading culture (Pape and Smirnova) call for the acknowledging of globalization's effect at the grass-root level. As a whole, as this collection of articles contests that, far from constituting a unitary concept or a one-dimensional process, globalization emerges as a differentiated set of processes driven by contradictions, mutual influences, varying push and pull factors, and a local constellation of actors and institutions.…”

Section: Globalization and Culture As Resourcementioning

confidence: 99%

At the intersection of globalization and ‘civilizational originality’: cultural production in Putin’s Russia

2018

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This special issue originates from a transnational collaboration of scholars in philology, comparative literature, social theory, sociology, anthropology, ethnography, and media studies. The collection strives to advance a research agenda built on the nexus of three intellectual and academic domains: post-Soviet 'Russian cultural studies', the research paradigm put forward by Cultural Studies, as well as empirical methods developed in sociology. The collection illustrates the importance of expanding the experience of Cultural Studies beyond its established spheres of national investigation, while it also speaks to the necessity to re-evaluate the hegemony of the English-language academic and cultural production on the global scale. The collection offers insights into the gamut of cultural practices and institutional environments in which Russian cultural production happens today. It shows how cultural industries and institutions in Russia are integrated into the global marketplace and transnational communities, while they also draw on and contribute to local lives and experiences by trying to create an autonomous space for symbolic production at personal and collective levels. Through diverse topics, the issue sheds light on the agency, i.e. practitioners and participants, creators and consumers, of Russian cultural production and the neoliberal practices implemented on creative work and cultural administration in Russia today. The Introduction outlines the development of academic studies on Russian cultural practices since 1991; describes main political developments shaping the cultural field in Putin's Russia; and, finally, identifies the Cultural Studies debates the editors of the collection find most productive for investigations of Russia, i.e. the instrumentalization of culture and culture as resource. Relocated in an analysis of a post-socialist society, these conceptualisations seem increasingly problematic in a situation where local and federal policies governing cultural and creative work focus simultaneously on marketization and on nationalism as the main tools of legitimizing the federal government.

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Creative precarity? Young fashion designers as entrepreneurs in Russia

Cited by 18 publications

References 21 publications

Self-enterprising eSports: Meritocracy, precarity, and disposability of eSports players in China

Self-enterprising eSports: Meritocracy, precarity, and disposability of eSports players in China

No longer aspirational: A case study of young creative workers in Hong Kong who quit

At the intersection of globalization and ‘civilizational originality’: cultural production in Putin’s Russia

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