We are happy to announce that this is CLCF’s 100th blog post! Since 7 Dec. 2024, we have published:
Our posts have covered a wide range of topics, from football to museums to screen industries to embodied and relational leadership to artistic intelligence to photography to protests to legislative interventions.
Check out this wordcloud for our blog:
We have worked on our four key thematic areas in both unexpected and anticipated ways. These include:
Theme 1: Contexts and Constraints: Political Economy of AI and the Digital Today
CLCF’s first theme is focused on key contexts and constraints workers face in creative industries, especially those that depend on digital platforms and generative AI. This theme analyzes sustainability, barriers for the future of work, political and digital economies, and the impact of AI on production and circulation.
Theme 2: Creativity: Artistic Responses to AI in a Digital World
Our second theme focuses on how artists’ projects can inform and contribute to pathways for building more equitable futures. This theme includes artist workshops, developing artist and researcher residencies, and other artistic interventions.
Theme 3: Conditions for Change: Policies and Practices for Sustainable Working Conditions
The third theme focuses on sustainable working conditions and how cultural production and distribution technologies, policies, and practices influence how workers live, operate, and produce within creative industries and broader society alike. A critical part of creating conditions for change in this context is recognizing how workers in this sector have faced precarious work conditions for many decades; the current transformations related to AI exacerbate extant labour conditions such as unstable contracts, low wages, flexible arrangements, and lack of social protections and policies.
Theme 4: Collectivities: Grassroots Organizing for and against AI
Our final theme is explicitly grounded in activist and grassroots commitments to creating alternative futures “from below.” This thematic area is focused on imagining and designing futures through grassroots collective organizing and action, investigating the role of unions, associations, cooperatives, and other collectivities trying to re-appropriate, bargain and/or refuse AI in the workplace.
We’re thankful to all of our CLCF contributors, who have made this blog an active and lively site for sharing ideas, nascent research, and completed projects alike.
A round-up of our favourite photos from the blog!
See you next time, in our 101st post!
CLCF Co-Director & Associate Professor
Dr. MaryElizabeth (“M.E.”) Luka is PI and Co-Director of the Creative Labour and Critical Futures (CLCF) cluster and Associate Professor, Arts & Media Management, at University of Toronto, where they examine modes and meanings of co-creative production and distribution in the digital age for arts, culture, and media.
CLCF Co-Director & Assistant Professor
Rafael Grohmann is a Co-lead and Co-Director of the Creative Labour and Critical Futures (CLCF) cluster and an Assistant Professor of Media Studies (Critical Platform Studies) at the University of Toronto. Rafael is the leader of the DigiLabour initiative and founding editor of the Platforms & Society journal.
CLCF Co-Director & Assistant Professor
Dr. Daphne Rena Idiz (she/her) is Assistant Professor in Film and Media Industries at York University. Her research investigates how media industries, cultural policy frameworks, and production cultures respond to and shape technological change, with a particular focus onstreaming and generative AI (GenAI).
CLCF Postdoctoral Fellow
Dr. Cate Cleo Alexander is a graduate of the Faculty of Information at the University of Toronto. Cate employs a wide variety of methodologies in her research, including autoethnography, digital ethnography, media historiographies, sampling/scraping, qualitative coding,& artistic autoethnographic experiments with genAI
