Hope Labour Revisited: Post-socialist Creative Workers and Their Methods of Hope

Abstract

Creative work has been defined and critiqued as essentially future-oriented ‘hope labour’: underpaid work executed in the present on the assumption/speculation of future employment. This chapter outlines a theoretical framework for capturing the performative role of hope in sustaining creative careers amidst widespread precariousness and work casualisation, approaching hoping as a practice of getting through the hardships of the concrete realities of work–life. It outlines the ways in which creative workers resort to and mobilise hope to restore hopeful engagement with work amidst technological disruption, institutional failure, industrial collapse, and global competition for creative work. The study is based on a rich data set of interviews with fashion designers, musicians, actors, and new media workers in the post-socialist Balkan states of Macedonia and Albania.