Third annual CAMEo conference: Re-Futuring Creative Economies

CAMEo, the Research Institute for Cultural and Media Economies, will hold its third annual conference next week. Re-Futuring Creative Economies will take place at Phoenix Arts on Thursday 5 and Friday 6 September.

As the creative economy has become instituted as a field of policy and industrial activity, so it has become invested with orthodox and optimistic assumptions about the social futures it anticipates – pacific visions of ‘progress’ and ‘advancement’ that tend to take for granted renewed and stable economic growth, an increase in social participation and inclusion, and the emergence of ‘clean’ technologies to drive benign and enabling social experiences and innovations. These optimistic projections overlook a range of problems occasioned by current and future crises. Such projections are also de-futuring - in that they serve to close down the range of different, alternative, sustainable and socially-just creative economies that might otherwise be conceived and lived. This year’s CAMEo conference will explore current opportunities for imagining and undertaking other, more progressive, creative economy futures.

Alongside academic discussion, the conference will be supporting One Roof Leicester, a grassroots homelessness charity based in the city. The mission of One Roof Leicester is to transform the lives of people affected by homelessness by mobilising local communities to provide sustainable housing, immediate support and information and advice. One Roof Leicester provides accommodation and support for those who have experienced homelessness or rough sleeping and are struggling to find suitable accommodation. Its aim is to house and support those in genuine need whilst they rebuild their lives.

• The Artist in the Room: An investigation of the independent artist as stakeholder in the decisionmaking of subsidised theatre in the UK
• Producing Sisterhoods: Women working with women in the UK film industry
• The Road Ahead: Victoria’s Secret goes to China, sexualisation, and the market of commercial sexism 
• Producing Diversity in BBC Radio
• Relocation, Relocation: Examining the significance, value and legacy of the Channel 4 move to regional production hubs 
• Towards Post-Growth Creative Economies? New and Old Technologies of Cultural Production in Argentina
• “You need at least one picture daily, if not you’re dead”: Content Creators and Platform Changes in the Social Media Economy

‘Re-Futuring Creative Economies’ builds on the success of the previous two CAMEo conferences, ‘Care in the Media and Cultural Industries’ last year and ‘Mediating Cultural Work’ in 2017.