This conversation invites a reflection on artistic and cultural practices in formal and non-formal spaces in and between four distinct urban locations that nonetheless share fundamental similarities: Hayfa, Beirut, Amman and Berlin. This reflection provides an opportunity to think about the ways in which the multitudes of cultural and knowledge producers at work in the gig economy today respond to neoliberal capitalism’s precarious policies towards cultural labor. Thinking about the conditions of possibility of alternatives ways of organizing within this framework the panel ask several questions: What drives the creative class today? What structural challenges does it face and what shapes the varied forms of its production? And what role does urban context, generation, class and gender play in shaping the subjectivities and conversations this class of creatives generate, beyond issues of the politics of representation?
To answer these questions and launching the discussion with a critical engagement with the term the “creative class”, the panel discussion will address issues of creativity, knowledge production, political engagement, the mobility and immobility of artists, and art-related products, and solidarities in the lives and works of activists, scholars, artists and writers in and from four interconnected cities in the Arab region and Europe. Through the process of discussion the panel hopes to think about how to to read the particularity of each locality while at the same time emphasizing their transnational interconnectedness as critical meeting points of intellectual and creative encounters.