Filmmaking education and enterprise culture: an ethnographic exploration of two filmmaking education contexts and their relation to bedroom culture and the creative workplace

Abstract

Filmmaking education has never been firmly integrated into schooling and in past years has suffered from cuts to funding for youth work and formal and non-formal arts education. It continues to exist only by drawing on creative industry and cultural consumption practices as well as state funding. In this paper we explore the filmmaking education contexts we encountered while doing our own pieces of year-long ethnographic research. These contexts import 'enterprising' ways of thinking, doing and being from the creative workplace and 'bedroom culture'. Located across life's domains, they address enterprising subjects who take pleasure in work, make use of leisure, and who are always learning. We argue that these filmmaking education contexts support young people to develop their private creative practice and introduce them to the possibility of work in the creative industries but, because of the enterprise culture in which they are entangled, uncritically address these young people as enterprising subjects.Key words: art, comparative ethnography, creativity, enterprise, education, film

Artistic Production and (Re)production: Youth Arts Programmes as Enablers of Common Cultural Dispositions

“…In trying to challenge these stereotypes through the film that he has made, Jack is trying to repair or bridge this position, by speaking back to deficit discourses of youth, creating resistance while simultaneously not knowing what the resistance achieves. The film can be seen as an inheritance of radical work supporting marginalised groups to gain control over their representation in the arts and media (Coles and Howard, 2018). However, hierarchies of value of different arts practices, as highlighted in previous research (Bull and Scharff, 2017;Burnard, 2016) can result in positional suffering (Bourdieu, 1999).…”

“…The film can be seen as an inheritance of radical work supporting marginalised groups to gain control over their representation in the arts and media (Coles and Howard, 2018). However, hierarchies of value of different arts practices, as highlighted in previous research (Bull and Scharff, 2017; Burnard, 2016) can result in positional suffering (Bourdieu, 1999).…”

“…Artistic Production represents a democratic approach to cultural production and demonstrates a shift from the assumed superiority of high art and traditional aesthetics, towards cultural activities that can form part of individual identity formation, entrepreneurship and subcultural arts practice. However, previous research has identified bedroom culture as the development of sophisticated practices of self-expression which often draw from a limited repertoire of relating and meaning-making implicit in online media consumption (Coles and Howard, 2018). As a result, young people are addressed uncritically as enterprising subjects and subject to the wider social forces of reproduction.…”