Creative arts workers during the Covid-19 pandemic: Social imaginaries in lockdown

The Mode of Reflexive Practice among Young Indonesian Creative Workers in the Time of COVID-19

This article examines reflexive practice among young creative workers in Yogyakarta, Indonesia, during COVID-19. Since March 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic has unleashed a series of relentless and overlapping crises across the Indonesian archipelago. In urban centres across Indonesia, the arts and creative sectors are among the key economic sectors severely afflicted by the pandemic. COVID-19 implies a lot more than the loss of income and livelihoods. Mobility restrictions, gig cancellations, venue closures, all entail the loss of connections, opportunities, and creative outlets. Yet despite such uncertain conditions, young creative workers remain reflexively creative in order to survive in everyday life. Building upon interviews and focus-group discussions with young creative workers in Yogyakarta, we found three modes of temporality-based reflexive practice: waiting, doing something and re-learning, which represent young creative workers' active responses manifested in the practical and contradictory relationship to the diverse possibilities within hierarchical and heterogenous cultural fields in a pandemic era characterised by regular ruptures. The analysis of the data below contributes to the literature on reflexivity and habitus among young creative workers in a time of pandemic.

'The show must go on!': Hustling through the compounded precarity of Covid-19 in the creative industries

The article offers a qualitative examination of compounded precarity in creative work during the Covid-19 pandemic. Drawing on repeated in-depth interviews with twelve creative workers operating in the creative industries in Ghana, we examine one of the most prevalent practices for navigating, coping with, and managing compounded precarity: that of hustling. We empirically identify and discuss three interrelated practices of hustling in creative work: digitalization, diversification, and social engagement. We present a new way of conceptualizing creative work in precarious geographies by theorizing hustling, and the associated worker resourcefulness, improvisation, savviness, hopefulness, and caring not merely as an individualized survival strategy, but rather as an agentic and ethical effort to turn the vicissitudes of life into situated advantages and opportunities, and even social change.