Saskia Warren

The University of Manchester · School of Environment and Development

Muslima lifestyle media and fashion are reshaping global media, leisure and recreation, and creating new spaces of identification and belonging in predominantly Western-liberal societies. Typically educated and upwardly mobile, British Muslim women working as cultural producers in media and fashion are finding strategies for challenging stereotypes...

Since the 2000s, a rapidly expanding Muslim marketplace has offered faith-centred digital content produced by and aimed at Muslim women. In geopolitical events post 9/11, adoption of the term ‘Muslim women’, especially by younger generations, has grown in an act of supra-national identification with the Muslima – Muslim female community – that cros...

Within writing on walking practices, walking has often been presented as pleasurable, relaxing, and even liberatory. Research using walking interviews has recognised that different kinds of bodies can be excluded from mobile methods, impacting upon place-based knowledge production. However, the social and cultural politics of the walking interview...

From critics and cultural commentators to professionals who mediate between production and consumption for economic gain, the term ‘cultural intermediaries’ has been variously interpreted over recent decades. Often framed as self-interested entrepreneurs seeking to maximise economic value the wider set of political, social and moral motivations of...

In this chapter geographical and social ideas of being in place/out of place are reconsidered through looking at fashion and high street shopping practices by young Muslim women. Addressing the cultural economy of how power and agency are distributed, it attends to the changing dynamics of the high street amidst local contexts of social pluralism....

Muslim women are opening up new educational and career pathways across the UK, pioneering roles in digital media, fashion design and visual art. However, their contributions to the economy and culture are rarely the focus of media and government reports. Now, Saskia Warren draws on in-depth fieldwork with British Muslim women working in these roles...

This short commentary – part of the special issue on ‘Craft Economies and Inequalities’ - calls for moving beyond the preferred indexes of gender and class in research on inequalities in cultural production, and considers what can be gained by including religion and belief in broader understandings of creativity. Drawing upon the co-curated exhibit...

A critical agenda towards pluralising the politics and practice of mobile methods can enable more diverse epistemologies of uneven mobility and urban knowledge. In this article a challenge is offered to normative treatments of mobile methods including walking practices that inscribe dominant ways of seeing the city in anticipation of a liberal, sec...

‘The New North and South Network’ marks the seventieth anniversary of Indian independence from Britain. In 2017, 11 South Asian and Northern England organizations launched a series of artistic, cultural and intellectual exchanges around the legacies of British colonialism. Indian independence sparked partition where two new States were rapidly crea...

Children’s geographies, one area of childhood studies, is an interdisciplinary sub-field comprising research by human geographers, educationalists, psychology, sociology, and other cognate disciplines. The 1989 United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child defines childhood as a period until 18 years of age. However, work in this sub-field h...

Introduction Jakob and van Heur (2015) argue that, compared with the attention afforded the cultural policies and initiatives galvanising the creative sector, less is known about the role played across this field by intermediaries. While this absence is addressed across this volume (see also Perry et al, 2015), even less understood are the objects...

This book explores the policy and social frames through which citizens and wider communities are being engaged with culture as a tool to mitigate the effects of social exclusion and deprivation. The study is based on an inter-disciplinary four-year research project investigating those individuals and organisations whose mission is to use culture, i...

Within a paradigm of culture-led urban competition, discourse and debate has focused on attracting the mobile creative class, diverting attention on cultural resources for lesser privileged groups, both established and new. Policy agendas behind culture and the arts at the neighbourhood level are quietly shifting however, with increasing emphasis o...

The Birmingham Surrealist Laboratory investigates the ways in which new digital facilities can help unlock complex issues of art, community and cultural sensitivity in a super-diverse city. The neighbourhood of Balsall Heath was home to the Birmingham Surrealist Group during the 1930s–1950s, which was arguably the locale for Orthodox British Surrea...

Urban landscapes are produced through the combination of material forms and subjective human experience. Drawing on the concept of atmosphere, we argue that human experience of urban spaces drives alterations to the built environment, making it critical that these are studied in tandem. Atmosphere is created through the combination of human activit...

Creative practice is fetishised in the policy discourse of post-industrial economies as a driver of growth and social inclusion. Conceptually, we advance Lefebvre's incomplete rhythmanalysis project by combining the ideas of dressage and arrhythmia to give novel insights into contradictions within the contemporary creative economy. Our analysis sho...

The creative economy is a key arena where austerity, localism and social policy debates are being played out. This paper explores how cultural intermediation has been captured by a broader state agenda on socio-economic exclusion, examining how these processes function at the local level in Birmingham, UK. Intersections of local cultural policy wit...

Investigating how people and places are connected into the creative economy, this volume takes a holistic view of the intersections between community, policy and practice and how they are co-constituted. The role of the creative economy and broader cultural policy within community development is problematised and, in a significant addition to work...

Until now geographical research on creative labour has tended to characterise it either in terms of ‘hot’ jobs in ‘buzzing’ places or precarious, often poorly paid working conditions. This article argues for a subtler consideration of the complex combination of factors at play within the cultural ecology of art-making. The lure of creative labour h...

On 21 March 2013 a summit on the future of India's digital media - titled 'Big Tent Activate' - was held at the Taj Palace Hotel, New Delhi. The Googlefunded summit, which I attended as a delegate, exemplified the neoliberalisation of India's cyberspace. While I was in New Delhi, I also visited Sarai, an interdisciplinary research centre that is pa...

This article investigates the under-addressed topic of audiencing in relation to art in landscape, considering the ways in which this study can enliven cultural geography. Exploring how issues of interpretation and reception have been approached in the past, it tailors mixed methods to trace audience practices using the case study of James Turrell'...