Constructing creativities: Higher education and the cultural industries workforce

Research into cultural industries has generally focused on what makes cultural industries distinct from other industries. Scholars working in the cultural industries tradition draw attention to its commerce/creativity tensions, the relative autonomy of creative workers and loose/tight control in industrialized cultural production (see Hesmondhalgh 2013). Conversely, there is a focus as well on how, in the shift toward neoliberal market models, the cultural industries behave like other industries where production is rationalized to counter the inherent risk involved in producing cultural commodities (Ryan 1991). Where cultural industries research has been lacking is in issues to do with the nature of the text itself. While praxis in this field of research is discussed in terms of media regulation and cultural policy (Garnham 1990; Oakley 2004) or workers' rights (Banks 2007; Ross 2007), there has been very little attention paid to what structural changes (and continuities) in the cultural industries mean for the nature of media representation, particularly for marginalized groups (see Hesmondhalgh and Saha 2013). This is surprising because, as I aim to demonstrate in this chapter, a cultural industries approach has much to offer in deepening our understanding of the governance of race under capitalism. Within the Western media racialized minorities are either left out of discourse entirely or represented in a way that that reinforces racial stereotypes. Unpacking these neo-colonial processes from a cultural industries perspective exposes us to the operations and mechanisms through which the media work to reproduce ethnic and racial stereotype, while pointing us to ways in which these processes can be disrupted and subverted.