Dave O’Brien is Chancellor’s Fellow in Cultural and Creative Industries at the University of Edinburgh. It helped us identify that we wanted to expand into Merseyside, which has been really successful, and now Brighton. Since defining culture is closely related to inequalities, as academics we should not reproduce these distinctions like the survey does.

Culture is bad for you is a sobering, enraging picture of the creative industries and the inequalities at their heart.What we found was that the proportions change a lot over time because the social class profile of the broader society changes over time.

They show cultural workers see culture as so valuable that it is worth changing themselves for – this means accepting to work for free, accepting a career in culture is irreconcilable with childcare and accepting there is no boundary between work and life. British parents came to accept vaccination as a safe, effective and cost-efficient preventative measure. This analysis of nationally representative quantitative data shows the patterns of inequality in contemporary society. Any views expressed within media held on this service are those of the contributors, should not be taken as approved or endorsed by the University, and do not necessarily reflect the views of the University in respect of any particular issue. In many occupations the default image of a cultural worker, as Henna points out, is a white man from a middle class background.The emphasis on luck, individual choice, talent and mobility is precisely how inequalities in the cultural sector are normalised. Thus, at times the British public demanded more comprehensive vaccination coverage from the welfare state; at others they eschewed specific vaccines that they thought were dangerous or unnecessary. This is the message from governments and arts organisations across the country; however, this book explains why we need to be cautious about culture. For others, “culture” will mean hanging out with friends, going to gigs in independent venues, going to non-league football matches, or attending religious ceremonies. Both groups are right, but the first group tends to have its voice heard more often than the second group.

For women of colour who are socially mobile, the experience of cultural occupations and cultural institutions is of an often hostile environment. The technical storage or access is strictly necessary for the legitimate purpose of enabling the use of a specific service explicitly requested by the subscriber or user, or for the sole purpose of carrying out the transmission of a communication over an electronic communications network. He has published extensively on sociology of culture and cultural policy, and is currently part of a large scale AHRC project assessing the impact of COVID-19 on the cultural sector in the UK. I think this is definitely a must-read if you're working or want to work in the culture/creative industry. In that sense an alternative, similarly provocative title for the book could have been Culture Is Not for Everyone.This book tells the story of how Henna’s observation that film, and much of the rest of culture, is not a meritocracy. Especially in a pandemic, we should attribute more value to how culture is lived informally at home and on the streets. In the midst of the lockdown in spring that followed the outbreak of the pandemic, Mark Banks, professor of Culture and Communication, wrote: “While culture and arts may not be vital to the preservation of life, they are proving increasingly vital to preserving the sense of life being lived” ( Banks, 2020, p. We demonstrate in the book that there’s an overwhelming belief in the power of culture: culture can change lives.

Dave O’Brien is a Chancellor’s Fellow in Cultural and Creative Industries at the University of Edinburgh. note = "Maggie Cronin is an actress, playwright and director currently undertaking a PhD at Queen{\textquoteright}s University Belfast. One of the organisations Dr Brook worked most closely with is Arts Emergency, an award-winning mentoring charity and long-term support network that works with young creatives.

This isn't the whole story (and the book flags up the exceptions), but the data is well collected and presents a difficult to defend tale about the making of national identity by the select few. As we recover and rebuild, a ‘business as usual’ cultural sector will struggle to find legitimacy if it reverts back to an exclusive workforce and an exclusive audience. The colour of a scarf, the accent of a conversation, can unite people or divide them, and the smallest detail can play its part in signalling who are allies and who are enemies, as much for elites as for citizens in a democracy. She is the author of The Headcount (2021) report into gender breakdown at eight core funded theatre companies in Northern Ireland for Waking the Feminists NI. Culture is Bad For You, by Orian Brook, Dave O’Brien and Mark Taylor, is published by Manchester University Press.