Are we all cultural workers now?: Ros Gill in Sydney, and a new paper

Whilst in Australia, Ros also met up with long-time colleagues Professor Brett Neilson and Dr George Morgan, from the University of Western Sydney. Professor Neilson’s latest publication is a Special Issue of the Journal of Cultural Economy, entitled Are We All Cultural Workers Now? Ros has a contribution that reflects on academics as cultural workers.

Ros’s paper locates academics within the sights of critical labour studies, and, in particular, the contemporary interest in cultural workers. Despite a growing literature about – and in response to – the transformation of the University there have been few attempts to study academics as workers. This paper argues that there are a number of parallels between academic work and the much more well-documented experiences of work in the cultural and creative industries. The paper examines the increasing experience of precariousness among academics, the intensification and extensification of work, and the new modes of surveillance in the academy and their affective impacts. The aim of the article is to build on the critical lexicon of studies of cultural labour in order to think about academic work as labour and to generate new ways of thinking about power, privilege and exploitation. It argues for the need for a psychosocial perspective that can understand the new labouring subjectivities in academia.