Dr Kristina Kolbe

Early Career Fellow 2023-24

From creative labor to social change: rethinking cultural work through a politics of care

This research project explores the transformative role of grassroots music collectives in (re)shaping urban politics in postcolonial, multicultural Europe, with a special emphasis on Berlin (Germany) and London (UK). Epitomising Europe’s contingent political moment, both cities sit between lived multiculture and sharply rising socioeconomic inequality, postcolonial melancholia, and strengthening ethnonationalism. Within these heightened junctures of urban politics, cultural work plays an especially formative yet contingent part. Certainly, Europe’s creative industries are themselves marked by precariousness and structural inequalities of race, class, gender, and sexuality. Yet, cultural production also offers sites of creative justice struggles and social change. Against this ambivalent background, this project addresses the question of how local music collectives reconfigure the fabric of contemporary urban life in creative and grounded ways.

More information

Areas of interest

Sociology of Arts & Culture Grassroots Movements Europe Berlin London Urban Politics

Cohort

ECF7

Biography

Kristina Kolbe is an Assistant Professor in Sociology of Arts and Culture at the Erasmus School of History, Culture and Communication (ESHCC) at Erasmus University Rotterdam as well as a Visiting Fellow at the LSE International Inequalities Institute.

She joined ESHCC after completing her PhD in Sociology at the LSE and working as a postdoctoral researcher in Sociology at the University of Amsterdam.

Overall, her work explores how intersectional inequalities of race, class and gender are reworked in and through culture, ranging from wider cultural discourses of migration, citizenship and belonging to concrete processes of material culture, media representations, creative labour and cultural production. Her particular research interests lie in the field of music and its relationship to urban multiculture, and in the contingent social effects of on-going diversity and inclusion discourses in the cultural industries, as well as in the relationship between a politics of cultural production and a politics of care. Kristina’s work draws from current debates in sociology, cultural studies, critical race and migration scholarship and is informed by Feminist epistemologies.

Besides the ISRF’s Early Career Fellowship, Kristina has won research grants, including from the Leverhulme Trust and the Dutch Research Council (NWO).

Biographical details correct as of 18.09.24