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This paper analyses the working practices of several feminist creative and cultural enterprises in London (which I term 'feminist CCIs'). In particular, it shows how pandemic precarity has driven feminist CCIs towards more entrepreneurial, self-promotional, and self-branding practices in order to sustain their work. Drawing on both digital ethnographic material and interviews with 12 workers in feminist CCIs conducted online between 2020 and 2022, the article provides insights into the landscape and contemporary realities of arts and cultural funding within these fields. It considers how decades of austerity measures and cuts have forced some feminist CCIs to operate independently outside of the UK public sector funding models. Survival tactics include adopting corporate funding models, subscription and membership schemes, platformisation and digitalisation. Focusing on funding, money and subjectivity, it unpacks the contradictions these imperatives bring to feminist politics: tensions about which some feminist CCI workers themselves are aware of and critical of. In the process, this paper considers how activism, feminism, entrepreneurialism, and precarity are fused together and negotiated in this form of 'freelance feminism'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Through historical, economic and technological contextualisation and empirical data analysis, this article explores the cultural purchase the image-sharing app Instagram and the printed Michelin Guide have on contemporary food criticism. Both platforms contribute to popular understandings of 'good food'. Yet, there are important functional and discursive distinctions in how culinary criticism is done in Instagram vis-à-vis Michelin. To that end, this article focuses on London's restaurant scene and proposes the concept of the Instagram gaze as a means of understanding the representational repertoires and knowledge claims advanced by foodies on visual social media platforms. The Instagram gaze also facilitates insight into the relationship between Instagrammers' culinary judgements and Michelin ' s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay, based on a 'militant ethnography' of the small radical grassroots activist group Our London,1 outlines the importance of mood in developing political collectivity in oppositional politics. Applying Gilbert's notion of affect as key to sociality, Highmore's discussion of mood and mood work and Dean's concept of affective infrastructure, I develop an account of Our London's activities, and in particular its organisation of public events, that argues for the production of mood in political spaces as key to mobilising political collectivity. The significance of this work is in showing how oppositional political practices, as opposed to mere rhetoric or discourse, can develop forms of political collectivity and action; this is also a study of how forms of class politics can be performed and practised despite the difficulty of articulating such politics discursively – or even conceptualising society in class terms – in the context of a fragmented, neoliberal, post-Fordist city like London. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Coworking spaces have been affirmed in recent years as a mainstream, 'neo-corporate' model of flexible work in post-recession, urban knowledge economies. However, there is growing evidence of spaces that apply the discourses and practices of the coworking movement in ways that are alternative to the neo-corporate paradigm, both in urban and non-urban contexts. Exploring the ethos and practices of an urban co-operative space in London and a rural innovation hub in Southern Italy, the article illustrates the emergence of coworking endeavours that set in opposition to the neo-corporate model, and describes them as 'resilient'. We show that resilient coworking spaces are organisational actors that interact with the surrounding context much more than their counterparts, blending entrepreneurial logics with forms of political and social activism. We argue their emergence might be the harbinger of a new phase in the evolution of the coworking phenomenon. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, we argue that in the context of the rise of nationalism and increasing inequalities across European metropolises, developing an attentiveness to the sounds of the city can be utilized to unpack individual and collective claims to entitlement and belonging. Focussing on London and Berlin, we argue that thinking through two aspects of sonic registers – languages and non-verbal sounds – together can enrich understandings of cities where questions of living with difference have become politicized and fiercely charged. We draw on and further develop the concept of xenoglossophobia – the fear of foreign languages – to become inclusive of non-verbal sounds as well. Using the concept of xenophonophobia – the fear of all foreign sounds, including, but not limited to, foreign languages – we begin the process of naming racism beyond words in an attempt to find new ways to explore how the struggle for belonging is unfolding within the city. A consideration of the meanings given to sounds can offer a way to understand how boundaries between 'us' and 'them' are being drawn in European capital cities like Berlin and London. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article draws on Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of the cultural intermediary as a way to think through the combined effect of an intensification of economic inequality with the lack of a viable language of contemporary social class. Through an examination of organizers in art and activist spaces in London in the late 2000s, the article looks at the mixed motivations and contradictory tendencies of these intermediaries. Although fraught with internal conflicts and with the risk of immobilization, a possible basis of an emergent class agency is considered owing to an orientation towards collective practices and an openness to heterogeneous formations stemming from the very lack of conventional class coherence. By directly posing questions of class and inequality, the article makes an intervention into recent research on the cultural intermediary which has been all too silent on these pressing matters. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article draws on recent theoretical developments within sociology which have proposed new ways of looking at and understanding class. Drawing on two contemporary examples, namely the Gambling Bill and the recent 'riots' at Ikea in Edmonton in north London, the article demonstrates some of the ways in which class operates subjectively within the practice of everyday life. Using these examples, I show how class continuously informs identity and how, by looking at a range of contemporary cultural consumption practices, it is possible to gain a sense of how boundaries surrounding rights to middle-class identity are constantly tightened and refined. By presenting a range of responses to these consumer practices, I show how representations of the working class are often problematic and leave important questions about the everyday performance of class unanswered. The article thus offers an alternative understanding of class to those that have often positioned the working class as a dangerous deviant mob, as romantic rebels or simply as victims of an oppressive capitalist state. It concludes by arguing in favour of a renewed sociology of class and for ensuring that class features more prominently on the sociology of consumption agenda. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]