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Vi lever i Sverige i en demokrati. På de flesta håll i samhället eftersträvar man jämlikhet mellan grupper såväl som individer av olika kön, sexuell läggning, etnicitet, ekonomisk ställning samt kulturell tillhörighet. Detta gäller framförallt inom den offentliga sektorn och politiken som har en skyldighet att föregå med gott exempel. Hur detta arbete ser ut inom kulturområdet har för mig varit okänt. Under min utbildning har vi inom det Föremålsantikvariska programmet, Högskolan på Gotland, haft ett fåtal föreläsningar och lektioner som tagit upp de kvinnliga respektive manliga representationerna inom museerna i samlingar och utställningar. Vi har haft diskussioner om jämlikhet inom kulturområdet men inte så ingående att jag känner att jag är insatt i arbetet eller att jag kan säga att jag känner till de olika mål man jobbar mot för jämlikhet inom kulturområdet. Detta var något jag ville undersöka närmare. Ett av mina främsta intressen inom kulturområdet ligger i det publika arbetet på museerna. I detta ingår främst utställningar. Detta är det arbete som i huvudsak riktar sig till publiken, det har som syfte att locka till sig och underhålla såväl återkommande som nya besökare. Genom dessa två synsätt kom huvudämnet för min uppsats fram. Hur representeras den etniska och kulturella mångfald som idag präglar vårt samhälle i det publika arbetet på museerna?

This thesis discusses the relationship between the two forces—the Internet and the conventional media, and the rules and etiquette that have governed these media from the mid-1990s to present day. I divide the history of interaction between them into three phases, corresponding to different power balances and stances in the field of cultural production. By analyzing three Internet-themed TV talk show episodes, I probe how the Internet has gradually evolved into an active competitor, and how the conventional media have correspondingly changed their stance in response to their thriving counterpart. / text

Inspired by Michael Foucault’s "technologies of the self" and Jacques Rancière's idea of the politics of aesthetics, specifically, his concept of "the distribution of the sensible", this thesis examines two groups of people who actively pursue creativity in China today: first, a group of Chinese youth who seek their identity as creative writers through their participation in the Xin Gainian Zuowen Dasai, or the New Concept Writing Competition, held by Mengya magazine since 1998; second, a group of men and women who are grouped together under the name of "Dafen painters", who pursue their creative identities as oil painters either for their own artistic dreams or for better lives. Through these two cases, this thesis explores the relationship between creative practices and individuals’ identity formation, and attempts to achieve a better understanding of how the formation of these identities relate to broader desires for creative identity in China’s society today. This paper argues that an individual's own desire for creative expression and recognition in fact acts to diminish their ability to engage in truly creative expression, and that the attempts at recognition reconfigure groups to block individuals from finding opportunities to express their creative identities.

This dissertation offers a unique examination of new cultures and forms of social movement organizing that include horizontal networking, non-hierarchical decision-making and governance combined with the importance of public visual art. Based on 23 months of ethnographic fieldwork, I analyze how processes of neoliberalism and globalization have influenced youth organizing and shaped experiences of historical marginalization. What makes youth activism in Southern Mexico unique from that occurring elsewhere (i.e. Occupy Movements in U.S. and Europe) is the incorporation of indigenous organizing practices and identities with urban subcultures. At the same time, the movements I study share important characteristics with other social movements, including their reliance on direct-action tactics such as occupations of public space and sit-ins, as well as their creative use of digital media technologies (i.e. Arab Spring). This research contributes to the study of social movements and popular politics, globalization, culture and resistance, and the politics of space by examining how youth activists combine everyday practices and traditional social movement actions to sustain autonomous political projects that subvert institutional and spatial hierarchies. They do so through decentralized activist networks that resist cooptation by the state and traditional opposition parties, while at the same time contesting the spatial exclusion of marginalized communities from the city center. This research contributes a critical analysis of the limits of traditional models of social change through electoral politics and traditional opposition groups, such as labor unions, by challenging us to take seriously the innovative models of politics, culture and governance that Mexican youth are offering us. At a larger level, my work suggests the importance of genuinely engaging with alternative epistemologies that come from places we may not expect- in this case urban, indigenous, and marginalized youth. / 2015-10-03

Documentary filmmakers have been considered artists, authors, or intellectuals, but rarely as labor. This study investigates how the nature of work as well as life is changing for those who work in the expanding area of TV documentary in China, in the midst of China’s shift towards a market-based economy. How do documentary makers reconcile their passion for documentary making with the increasingly precarious conditions of work? And, how do they cope with and resist the pressures of neoliberalism to survive in increasingly competitive local and global markets? Based on data gathered through the interviews with 40 practitioners from January 2014 to August 2017 and my own experience as a director and worker in the Chinese documentary for a decade, I outline the particularity and complexity of the creative work in China. My research indicates that short-time contracts, moonlighting, low payments and long working hours, freelancing, internship, and obligatory networking have become normal working conditions for cultural workers. Without copyright over their intellectual creations, cultural workers are constrained to make a living as waged labor, compelled to sell their physical and mental labor in hours or in pieces. Self-responsibility and entrepreneurism have become the symbols of the neoliberal individual. Following the career trajectories of my interviewees, I elaborate on the mechanisms by which cultural workers are selected, socialized and eliminated. When they decide to escape from the production line, they use four types of strategies: going international, surviving in the market, switching to new media career, and sticking to journalistic ideals. This dissertation also reveals that global production has intensified exploitation by increasing working hours through a 24/7 production line that works across national borders and time zones, amplifies competition by introducing global talent, and alienates local workers by imposing the so-called “universal” aesthetics of global production. The crisis of cultural work is the outcome of the incapacity of the neoliberal imagination to imagine plausible and feasible futures for sustained creative work. It is through my research into the history of documentary production in China and conversations with cultural workers that I found explanations for the increasing precarity of work and possible forms of resistance to it in post-socialist China.

Filmmakers first received widespread academic attention as case studies into the increasing casualisation of labour in post-industrial economies. Their precarious existence in project-based labour markets provided much food for thought about the future of work, while their status as artists and producers of culture entered them into debates around just what art is and how to approach it. But in light of recent transformations in the cultural industries and the accompanied blurring of boundaries between production and consumption, academic understandings of the lives filmmakers lead have also been somewhat blurred. This ethnography of networks of cultural production in Beirut re-introduces filmmakers into the very sociological debates that they helped spark. Might a return to the situated experience of these theoretically and methodologically challenging people, who form workgroups and collaborate with each other repeatedly across projects as they craft their own careers, shed productive light on academic understandings of precarity, cultural production and indeed our increasingly confusing relationships with the objects around us? With that in mind, in this thesis I ask the following research question: how are networks of film production formed and maintained in Beirut? Based on an 'insider' ethnography of various film projects weaved into a mixed-methods social network analytic methodology, I adopt a relational sociological approach that conceives of production networks as akin to social worlds and find three analytic planes to delve deeper into: markets, objects and relationships. In relation to markets, I echo the argument that current classification systems of cultural production are too consumption-based and adopt a social network markets framework more sensitised towards production. Here, I find that the cyclical, project-based relationship of patronage that ties production networks to their clients is highly varied and contingent, shaping not only the process of cultural production but also its organisational structure. Further, I argue that the management of these contingencies is key to the potential repeat collaboration not just with clients (and their own social networks), but fellow producers as well. But past projects do not simply disappear once completed, they might well come back to haunt their makers. Drawing upon ethnographic and recent historical data on a number of web-series that emerged out of Beirut between 2009 and 2012, I compare using two-mode networks the past and more recent projects my interlocutors were involved in. Here, I find that one's past projects shape one's future by conducing or hindering their chances of finding new work. Moreover, and perhaps more importantly, I find that filmmakers (and those around them) increasingly define themselves (and are defined by others) in relation to the past projects they have done. Over time, though, as filmmakers collaborate on an increasing number of films, their relationships take on deeper characteristics than monochrome economic considerations. Here I draw upon the notion of embeddedness to shed light on emergent meaning at the network level across a number of projects and, therefore, the emergent social world-ness of networks. While the first set of findings relates to debates in the sociology of work and the second to those in the sociology of cultural production, my final analysis shows just how intimately the two are connected. I conclude by highlighting the potential of empirically-grounded relational sociological approaches to finessing our understandings of cultural work in its economic, social, but also material and technical contingencies.

The myth and image of Southern Appalachia spun by local color writers of the early nineteenth century and, later, by local elites in privileged positions of power have long cast the historiography of the region in tones of Caucasian lineage and remediation. The production of culture, contribution to community, and service to church and, family long considered to be the domain of women has predominantly been viewed from the privilege of a white perspective. Prescriptive definitions of a monochromatic culture in the Uplands of Southern Appalachia has written out the cultural contribution of diverse ethnicities who continue to call the region home. The purpose of this study is to illuminate the ways in which women of color and diversity contribute to the production of culture through service to their communities, volunteer outreach, and service in the church and, as models of core Appalachian values for their families.