The Cultural Intermediary in Plutocratic Times
- Submitting institution
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Coventry University
- Unit of assessment
- 32 - Art and Design: History, Practice and Theory
- Output identifier
- 19402212
- Type
- D - Journal article
- DOI
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10.1177/1367549414526732
- Title of journal
- European Journal of Cultural Studies
- Article number
- -
- First page
- 265
- Volume
- 18
- Issue
- 3
- ISSN
- 1367-5494
- Open access status
- Out of scope for open access requirements
- Month of publication
- April
- Year of publication
- 2014
- URL
-
-
- Supplementary information
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-
- Request cross-referral to
- -
- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
- -
- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- No
- Number of additional authors
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0
- Research group(s)
-
-
- Proposed double-weighted
- No
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- The article draws on Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of the cultural intermediary as a way to think through the combined effect of an intensification of economic inequality with the lack of a viable language of contemporary social class. Through an examination of organisers in art and activist spaces in London in the late 2000s, the article looks at the mixed motivations and contradictory tendencies of these intermediaries. In using a Bourdieuian conceptual framework with material gathered from ethnographic methods, the article explores the lives of people caught within a protean world of flexibility and insecurity. It provides a construction of biographic portraits, drawn from participatory observation and interviews, which distill various tensions of current social class.
The article explores how, although fraught with internal conflicts and with the risk of immobilization, a possible basis of an emergent class agency is considered owing to an orientation towards collective practices and an openness to heterogeneous formations stemming from the very lack of conventional class coherence.
By directly posing questions of class and inequality, the article makes an intervention into recent research on the cultural intermediary which over past decade has more or less departed from an engagement with processes of class domination. In doing so, it addresses pressing issues around mounting socio-economic inequality.
- Author contribution statement
- -
- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
- -