Summer School 2025 – Creative Work(s): Cultural Production Studies Across the Disciplines
Dates: 23-26 June 2025
Location: University of Groningen
Instructors: Kathryn Roberts, Thijs Lijster
Registration: NICA website, starting March 7th 2025, 13:00
Credits: 5 ECTS
The COVID-19 pandemic accelerated existing trends in the arts and culture. On the one hand, creative workers made use of digital platforms to develop new networks and artistic practices. On the other, the shutdown of performance spaces and the hospitality industry, and subsequent austerity imposed by governments, have only increased the precarity and inaccessibility of creative work. Although creative work is almost universally celebrated, it is financially sustainable for very few creators. Meanwhile, platform-based entertainment and advertising generates massive profits for multinational corporations. This Summer School explores the way artists and scholars have dealt with these contradictions: through protest and critique and explanation; through innovative creative and scholarly practice; through building new kinds of institutions and collectives.
“Creative work(s)”—art objects, artistic practices, and an expanding employment category—is the multifaceted topic around which we bring together scholars from both the Humanities and the Social Sciences. (If you are an art-maker in addition to being a scholar, so much the better.) The keynote speakers, workshops, and student presentations will dive into contemporary scholarly debates in cultural production studies from a number of angles. Critical approaches, influenced by the Frankfurt School or the sociology of Pierre Bourdieu, do important work to situate the arts in their economic and political context—yet they are often accused of ignoring, flattening, or instrumentalizing the art work itself. Moreover, the most famous of these paradigms were developed in reference to specific historical and regional contexts (such as nineteenth century France or late twentieth-century London) that may limit their explanatory power today. In response, scholars from a variety of disciplines have embraced other theories and methods, from feminist and decolonial epistemologies to Actor-Network Theory, to explore the agency that artists, communities, and even art works exert to sustain creative practices under challenging conditions.
Confirmed speakers for the 2025 edition of the summer school include Bojana Kunst on art and capitalism (Giessen); Ana Alacovska (Copenhagen Business School) on decolonial critiques of creative labor paradigms; Wike Been (Groningen) on gender inequality in the Dutch cultural sector; and Elizabeth Falade (Groningen) on black popular music. The summer school also includes a site visit to a local artist collective.
Readings are selected by the speakers, and may include manifestos from the past and present; classic works from the philosophy and sociology of art (e.g., Virno, Bourdieu); methodological interventions from various disciplines; and case studies that focus on literature, performance, visual art, film, music, video games, or institutions (training programs, artist residencies, museums) in different contexts, from the Northern Netherlands, to Ghana, to South Korea, to the United States.
Written assignments must be completed to earn credit (5 ECTS) for the course. In addition to attendance at all sessions, the grade will be based on 1) preparatory discussion board posts about the readings and 2) a research presentation + reflection or research proposal that builds on concepts and questions from summer school by applying them to a case study relevant to your own research interests.
Financial support is available for students traveling to Groningen to participate in the summer school. Please email NICA for more information.