Young People’s Transitions into Creative Work
Navigating Challenges and Opportunities
Routledge Research in Education Series

Exploring how formal and informal education initiatives and training systems in the US, UK and Australia seek to achieve a socially diverse workforce, this insightful book offers a series of detailed case studies to reveal the initiative and ingenuity shown by today?s young people as they navigate entry into creative fields of work.

Young People?s Journeys into Creative Work acknowledges the new and diverse challenges faced by today's youth as they look to enter employment. Chapters trace the rise of indie work, aspirational labour, economic precarity, and the disruptive effects of digital technologies, to illustrate the oinventive ways in which youth from varied socio-economic and cultural backgrounds enter into work in film, games production, music, and the visual arts. From hip-hop to new media arts, the text explores how opportunities for creative work have multiplied in recent years as digital technologies open new markets, new scenes, and new opportunities for entrepreneurs and innovation.

This book will be of great interest to researchers, academics and postgraduate students in the fields of youth studies, careers guidance, media studies, vocational education and sociology of education.

• Acknowledgment



• A note of authorship

1. Young people’s journeys into creative work: Challenges and transitions into the workforce






Julian Sefton-Green, S. Craig Watkins and Ben Kirschner




2. Being Indie: The DIY ethos and Indie game development






S. Craig Watkins and Andres Lombana-Bermudez




3. Building a music innovation ecosystem: Creative labor in hip hop culture






Andres Lombana-Bermudez and S. Craig Watkins




4. Learning creative identities in filmmaking: The dubious pleasures of precarity






Julian Sefton-Green




5. Engaging youth in industry-led filmmaking projects: The limits of social and cultural capital in career-making






Julian Sefton-Green




6. Higher education, intellectual property, and incubation mechanisms: The case of Australia’s Indie 100






Phil Graham




7. Guiding young creatives in the last mile






Ben Kirshner and Adam York




8. Building and brokering pathways in new media arts: A new dimension of youth program quality

Ben Kirshner, Josephina Chang-Order, Michael Harris, Katie Van Horne

Julian Sefton-Green is Professor of New Media Education at Deakin University, Australia.

S. Craig Watkins is Founding Director of the Institute for Media Innovation (IMI) and the incoming Ernest S. Sharpe Centennial Professor in the Moody College of Communication at The University of Texas at Austin, USA.

Ben Kirshner is Professor of Education at the University of Colorado Boulder and Faculty Director of CU Engage: Center for Community-Based Learning and Research, USA.