5th ISA Forum of Sociology (6-11 July 2025)

Creative employment has always been insecure in modernity. The irregular nature of most creative works, their demanding working hours and limited earnings are the main sources the insecurity. These conditions impact on not only creative workers’ professional lives, but also their personal lives (Taylor and Luckman, 2020: 2). The most recent developments, namely pandemic and uses of artificial intelligence in the aesthetic production, have deepened and added more to the existing insecurities. The session aims to shed light on older and newer forms of insecurities by bringing involved researchers together to talk about the employment conditions and experiences of craft and/or art makers in precarious times, to use Anne Fuchs’s (2019) conception. The main objective of this attempt is double fold. One-fold is about making precariousness more visible to open up a space to debate on the threads of personal and collective empowerment in creative jobs. The other fold is about ways in which people in creative jobs resist to precarious conditions and times. Overall this session seeks to answer three broad questions: What the impacts of insecurity are on people working in creative jobs; how they cope with and resist against those conditions; and what may be the sources of collective empowerment.