Diversifying the creative: Creative work, creative industries, creative identities

The call to 'diversify the creative' invokes critical engagements with both the concept of 'diversity' and that of the 'creative'.The two have been yoked together in policy discourses which position creative industries as a panacea for economic decline, especially in regions where traditional industries were failing (Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS), 2001).These have migrated from the United Kingdom across a range of other national and regional spaces, mutating as they travel (Flew, 2012;Prince, 2010).In the United Kingdom, diversity policies have been explicitly linked to the hope that creative industries would provide employment to marginalised groups, addressing social diversity in terms of equal access to work and of cultural inclusion and exclusion (Oakley, 2006).Creative labour has increasingly been recognised as work, with governmental technologies accounting for creative subjects x in data sets where earnings and occupations can be surveyed.The evidence so far -drawing on this same official data -is that this hope has largely been unfulfilled (Hesmondhalgh et al., 2015).Critical diversity scholars have addressed this failure and the nuanced processes by which it is achieved across a range of creative occupations.Triumphalist claims about a new 'creative class' (Florida, 2002) are undercut by critical empirical studies showing continuing patterns of class, gender and racial inequalities (Leslie and Catungal,