Entangling unexpected enterprises with transcultural encounters

Ashton, Daniel (2022) Entangling unexpected enterprises with transcultural encounters. Entanglements: Transcultural encounters, new forms of work and entrepreneurship, , London.

Record type: Conference or Workshop Item (Paper)

Abstract

This presentation will discuss findings from the Unexpected Enterprises project (led by Dr Emma Agusita) that examined how higher education students and established entrepreneurs negotiate creative work careers. This project explored and expanded upon the concept of ‘unexpected enterprises’ set out in Ashton (2017). This concept considers how vlogging can suggest a shift in enterprise education away from modelling existing ways of working to analysing how everyday creativity and media making can give rise to imaginative and unexpected forms of entrepreneurship. More specifically, the project used design thinking and creative methodologies, including remixing and repurposing, to contest dominant entrepreneurship repertoires and resources used in higher education around self-promotion, business planning, and spaces and networking (Agusita and Ashton, 2020).

Firstly, this presentation will evaluate the project’s activities and offer critical reflections relevant for practitioners, educators and policymakers in understanding, shaping and contesting pathways into creative work. Secondly, reflecting on the symposium’s themes, this presentation will examine how dominant repertoires and resources of entrepreneurship can be further contested through transcultural encounters. Initially, this involves extending the sources of inspiration for identifying and exploring unexpected enterprises beyond everyday creativity within a specific Western context to a range of perspectives, including women’s entrepreneurship in the global south (Ojediran and Anderson, 2020) and informal media economies (Lobato and Thomas, 2015). Moreover, the implications of transcultural encounters for entrepreneurship will not confined to simply offering more non-West case studies. Rather, this presentation will pursue an ‘ex-centric perspective’ which aims at ‘destabilising, decentring and provincialising’ taken-for-grantedness (Alacovska and Gill, 2019). As Alacovska and Gill (2019) set out, this involves questioning the general truths and universal principles claimed for (creative) work.

In opening up further discussion, this presentation will reflect on how concepts and experiences of unexpected enterprises and transcultural encounters can be used to identify new forms of work and entrepreneurship and new ways of destabilising and contesting work and entrepreneurship.

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