Abstract
For many critics, the cultural sector is the poster-boy for neoliberal, deregulated, de-unionised, ‘flexible’ employment practices which are being taken up to an alarming extent in other sectors as well, from services and retail to health and the public sector. Nevertheless, young people are still queuing up to accept zero hours contracts, unpaid internships and precarious project-based assignments as the price of entry to an exciting, creative career. Universities find themselves increasingly complicit in this scenario, preparing students for the ‘realities’ of a job market which disadvantages women and minorities and exploits students’ idealism and enthusiasm. Given the declining quality and quantity of jobs on offer, the editors of Cultural Work and Higher Education argue that it is in everybody’s interests to reassess cultural work and the crucial role played by higher education (HE) in the creative ecology.
Ashton and Noonan point out that universities have followed a trajectory similar to that of the cultural sector, towards a neoliberal model in which students are customers and where transferable skills and the promise of future employment are marketable commodities. All of this creates a dilemma for those preparing students for careers in the creative and media industries. What in the end are universities for – providers of ‘industry-ready talent’, or spaces for critical reflection? Can we prepare our students for ‘good work’ – injecting critical thinking and creativity to challenge an oppressive, unequal workplace – or will such inoculations render them unemployable? And will any deviation in the curriculum from ‘employability’ and skills acquisition be penalised by declining student numbers?
Drawing on a refreshing diversity of perspectives, this collection of 13 chapters addresses these questions and dilemmas. Most of the authors are implicated in their subject matter, teaching courses in some of the United Kingdom’s leading centres of creative and media education. As researchers, they are critical; as educators, they are (to varying degrees) pragmatic. If a consensus emerges, it is on the need for a critical engagement with the realities of working in the creative industries, summarised by Catriona Noonan as ‘the critical-vocational paradigm’. A key challenge here is the attitude of students themselves. Contextual/critical studies are said to receive ‘a relatively low usefulness rating’. Kim Allen describes female students’ reluctance to place their negative experiences in a broader context of structural inequality and gender bias, preferring to wear their individual self-exploitation as ‘a badge of honour’. As Richard Berger and his colleagues at Bournemouth note, universities need to do a better job of explaining the value of non-vocational learning as part of a vocational course.
Citing David Kolb’s theory of experiential learning, Berger’s chapter argues that learning is a process whereby knowledge is created through the transformation of experience. These transformations occur at the transition points between theory and practice, and especially between the university and the workplace. Internships, for all their difficulties, allow students and educators to make sense of these transitions. Stephanie Taylor and Karen Littleton describe students using different ‘spaces of identification’ to negotiate their own identities as independent creative workers. Even negative experiences can be transformed through debate and discussion and used to reflect upon structural inequalities, individual ‘identity work’ or simply to learn from mistakes. Most authors here agree that developing a critical pedagogy will require engagement with industry, not solipsistic detachment. It is not enough for universities to ‘imagine future alternatives to the “commodication of everything”’ as David Lee suggests. That critical imagination must also be transformed into knowledge by taking it from the classroom to the workplace and back again.
In other words, the relationship between universities and the creative industries cuts both ways. Daniel Ashton points out that creative industries professionals involved in HE not only contribute practical knowledge and experience, they also reaffirm the value of critical thinking. Indeed, the extent to which they idealise the university as a site for self-reflection and critique is often at odds with the naive pragmatism of their students. The learning can be mutual. In her chapter, Kate Oakley recalls the historic role of the university as a place for experiment, a third space between home and work where a new generation could try out new identities and new ideas, challenging rather than conforming to industry conventions. Those opportunities may be receding as experimentation in HE is replaced by ‘employability’; but educators can perhaps start to rediscover that sense of risk and discovery, particularly in student-led learning and peer-to-peer activities.
The book includes chapters on internships, the barriers to entry presented by networking and institutional bias, working with industry practitioners, tensions between local and global learning, gender, class and racial biases. The authors draw on a range of qualitative studies, interviews and surveys, to give voice to students’ own anxieties over the value of a university qualification in their chosen professions. The central challenge here is the tension between critical understanding and employability, exemplified in Annette Naudin’s comments on ‘the difficulties in encouraging a critique of aspects of entrepreneurship while teaching for enterprise’. The book attempts to address these challenges through practical solutions as well as critical analysis. Optimistically speaking, the growing interdependence and structural similarities between universities and creative industries workplaces may not necessarily be a bad thing, provided there can be a genuine two-way flow of ideas, not just a one-way export of students. These connections are reinforced in the book’s coherent structure, with authors sharing reference points and experiences.
As the editors note in their conclusion, it would be fascinating to have some longitudinal research which allowed graduates to reflect back on their educational experiences with professional hindsight. It would also be interesting to compare the UK experience here with what is happening in China or the United States. As the Australian academic Susan Luckman notes, workers and students are ‘precariously mobile’ in a global market, but given UK Higher Education PLC’s position as a major importer and exporter in this market, the British focus of this collection is justifiable. Certainly, this is a highly relevant and timely study of the challenges facing universities teaching creative and media enterprise, cultural entrepreneurship and media studies. As such, it should be required reading for educators in this field, for our students and for employers and policymakers seeking a constructive and creative collaboration between the cultural sector and universities.