
Dr Orian Brook
Digital Scholarship Postdoctoral Fellow, December 2018 - August 2019
Project: Social mobility in the Creative Economy in Scotland and England
My research focuses on social and spatial inequalities in the creative economy, with a focus on how space and class interact in explaining both cultural participation and creative careers. My doctorate at the University of St Andrews used spatial modelling of cultural participation to explore how access to cultural opportunities (such as museums and performing arts venues) intersects with education and ethnicity, in particular, in explaining attendance at these venues. More recently I have been exploring social mobility in the creative economy, in a mixed methods project which used both the ONS Longitudinal Study of England and Wales and 235 semi-structured interviews with creative workers, and worked with colleagues to deliver the report "Panic! Social Class, Taste and Inequalities in the Creative Industries". (please add http://createlondon.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/Panic-Social-Class-Taste-and-Inequalities-in-the-Creative-Industries1.pdf as hyperlink for the title)
During my IASH Fellowship I shall be exploring automated text analysis of the creative worker interviews to explore how the language that they use describes differences in experiences: of career paths and opportunities according to place and generation. I will also use the Scottish Longitudinal Study (SLS) to establish whether Scotland’s creative economy has distinctively different social patterning compared to England, in terms of social class origin, gender and ethnic group, and whether the underlying changes in social structure associated with significant changes in the class origins of creative workers also apply.