Creative Labour and Critical Futures (CLCF), based in the Department of Arts, Culture, and Media, has been awarded 3-years of funding by the UTSC Office of the Vice-Principal Research & Innovation Clusters of Scholarly Prominence program. This CLCF includes eleven faculty members from the Department of Arts, Culture, and Media: ME Luka and Rafael Grohmann as co-leads, with Mark Campbell, TL Cowan, Desirée de Champlain-Leverenz, Yi Gu, Sanaz Mazinani, David Nieborg, Laura Risk, Hadiya Roderique, Jas Rault.
The Clusters of Scholarly Prominence Program (CSPP) is UTSC’s flagship program for supporting the pursuit of strategic initiatives.
What is the CLCF cluster?
The Creative Labour and Critical Futures (CLCF) cluster will study the potential for creative workers to generate transformative technological and social futures in Canada and internationally today. What, how, and why do we need a set of critical ethical approaches to digital research in the wake of challenges posed by Artificial Intelligence (AI) – the latest in a series of technological transformations not just to the creative sector but to society itself? How can we imagine and design critical and creative futures for creative workers considering this latest AI context?
The University of Toronto is recognized as one of the world’s strongest research hubs on topics such as digital labour and cultural work. The Creative Labour and Critical Futures cluster is another step in this direction. Currently, workers in the arts, culture and media sectors are experiencing AI in the workplace. We will explore what this means and what it might mean in the future – in terms of the political economy, artistic responses, policy and collectivities. In this cluster, I am particularly interested in how workers are fighting back for and against AI in strikes, unions and cooperatives through strategies of bargaining, reappropriation or refusal of AI. I consider that our cluster team will lead debates like these over the next three years.
Rafael Grohmann, CLCF Co-Director
What I’m most excited about in the CLCF is the way we propose working collaboratively with arts organizations, artists, and creative worker collectives, as well as a wide swath of amazing scholars at U of T and beyond. How can we imagine and design critical and creative futures for and with artists, activists, scholars, and consumer-worker-citizens considering late-capitalism AI developments? How do we resist (re)colonization impulses, and instead rebuild/ revisualize/repair the world(s) we want to live and work in?
M.E. Luka, CLCF Co-Director
The CLCF cluster simultaneously researches and builds towards inspiring, inclusive, and critical futures in relation to creative labour. The cluster addresses how these sometimes-totalizing technological processes are affecting creative workers, and how creative workers are fighting back and innovating on their own terms, in terms of developing new processes, grassroots organizing, policy making, and design of technologies.