Reframing the Class Divide: Caring Imaginaries, Class Struggle and the Social turn

Reframing the Class Divide is a practice as research PhD project informed by everyday life. I construe my research interests in and through my lived experience of eurocentric patriarchal capitalism, a system that wounds many people. In my analysis of damage done by capitalist realism, I deploy an intersectional framework. The particular type of wounding my work examines, is the exclusion, silencing and dismissal of poverty, precarity and intersectional class inequality, in the context of socially engaged art production. My critical praxis explores the causes and solutions to working class exclusion in socially engaged art practices in the UK. Specifically, I examine barriers faced by people coming from working class backgrounds; the recurring impossibility of secure employment, renumeration and career progression within the field of socially engaged art. Undertaking this research, I deploy a practice as research methodology. I conduct critical self-reflection on my own experience as a woman coming from a low-income single parent family, desiring and continuing to work in the creative and cultural industries. I conduct in-depth secondary research, scrutinizing academic research examining the scale and causes of socio-economic inequality reproduced within the UK creative and cultural industries. Concurrently, I conduct primary research, conducting semi-structured interviews with audiences and collaborators exploring the affects of sitting and listening to acousmatic voices, giving an account of first person lived experience of day-to-day life lived under economic precarity. Key findings of my praxis include proposals for further research into the causes and scale of class exclusions within the field of socially engaged arts and convivial listening practices as one tactic of resisting class exclusions in the arts. Further, I propose a new mode of doing caring, healing aesthetics – approaches to making socially engaged art that puts promiscuous and disruptive care practices as central tactics of reimagining the false promises of capitalist modernity.