The Creative Labour and Critical Futures cluster focuses on the potential for creative workers to generate transformative technological and social futures in the wake of challenges posed by AI. A multi-disciplinary approach is required to address urgent needs arising from the sprawling, often exploitative digital worlds where we live and work. The environments, working conditions, and ways of working in these worlds usually intensify rather than mitigate social inequities.

The CLCF cluster brings together faculty from different career stages and disciplines across several arts, culture, and media fields of study to offer collaborative and community engaged approaches that can address racialized, gendered, colonial, economic, and geopolitical power dynamics at play in the AI context. While addressing such conditions is important for the sector and the workers therein, there is a larger socio-cultural contribution we aim to make: to critically imagine and design insightful and joyful futures in the context of ubiquitous digital demands and opportunities, including the recent explosion of AI in our work worlds and lives.

Our project will apply and expand previous research by cluster members, partners, and collaborators in four thematic areas:

• Theme 1: Contexts and Constraints: Political Economy of AI and the Digital Today
• Theme 2: Creativity: Artistic Responses to AI in a Digital World
• Theme 3: Conditions for Change: Policies and Practices for Sustainable Working Conditions
• Theme 4: Collectivities: Grassroots Organizing for and against AI

Coming soon: more information on each theme as the cluster research gets underway!