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De-westernizing creative labour studies: The informality of creative work from an ex-centric perspective
Open accessAbstract
Creative labour studies focus almost exclusively on Euro-American metropolitan ‘creative hubs’ and hence the creative worker they theorize is typically white, middle-class, urban and overwhelmingly male. This article outlines the contours of a de-Westernizing project in creative labour studies while introducing a special journal issue that examines the lived dynamics of creative work outside the West. The article advocates an ‘ex-centric perspective’ on creative work. An ex-centric perspective does not merely aim at multiplying non-West empirical case studies. Rather, it aims at destabilizing, decentring and provincializing the taken-for-grantedness of some entrenched notions in creative labour studies such as informality and precarity. An ex-centric perspective, we contend, offers a potential challenge to many of the claims about creative work that have taken on the status of general truths and universal principles in spite of them being generated from limited empirical evidence gleaned from research sites situated almost exclusively in the creative hubs of Euro-America.
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“Existing studies (Tse and Shum, 2022;Alacovska and Gill, 2019) on creative work on platforms are mainly based on social media in Europe and the United States, such as YouTube and Instagram.”
From ‘Traffic rewards’, ‘algorithmic visibility’, and ‘advertiser satisfaction’: How Chinese short-video platforms cultivate creators in stages (2024) · cites this paper as Alacovska and Gill, 2019
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Metadata
- Authors
- Alacovska, A., & Gill, R.
- Affiliations
- Copenhagen Business School, Denmark
- City, University of London (GB)
- ORCID
- Gill, Rosalind
- Venue
- International Journal of Cultural Studies
- Publisher
- SAGE Publications
- Published
- 2019-01-23
- Volume
- 22
- Issue
- 2
- Pages
- 195-212
- ISSN
- 1367-8779 (ISSN-L)
- 1460-356X
- OpenAlex
- W2912981854
- Cited by
- 101
- References
- 107
- Citations by year
- 2026: 15 · 2025: 12 · 2024: 18 · 2023: 13 · 2022: 17 · 2021: 15 · 2020: 8 · 2019: 3
- FWCI
- 30.36
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- green
- research.cbs.dk
- Locations
- International Journal of Cultural Studies (publishedVersion)
- Goldsmiths (University of London) (acceptedVersion)
- City Research Online (City University London) (acceptedVersion)
- CBS Research Portal (Copenhagen Business School) (submittedVersion, other-oa)
- Funders
- Direktion für Entwicklung und Zusammenarbeit
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Urban Studies › Cultural Industries and Urban Development
- Social Sciences › Business, Management and Accounting › Industrial relations › Employment, Labor, and Gender Studies
- Social Sciences › Sociology and Political Science › Digital Economy and Work Transformation
- Keywords
- creative labour, de-Westernization, precarity, creative hubs, decolonial research, creative workers
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