Internalization and Resistance of the Business Self in Activist Performing Artists: A Critical Arts-Informed Research Project
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Neoliberalism has been tied to the creation of the "business self" and other flattening subjectivities that inhibit critical thought. Art has the potential to challenge this cultural disimagination through radical imaginaries and societal critique. However, explorations of neoliberal subjectivity among artists raises doubts about its potential for resistance. There is little subjectivity research, though, with those from whom artistic resistance is most likely to emerge: activist artists. The present study uses a critical, arts-informed approach to explore how the neoliberal self is internalized and/or resisted by activist performing artists in Ontario. Interviews, a focus group, and collaborative workshops were employed with four activist artists. A thematic analysis identified nine themes. Findings indicate little internalization of the business self. Rather, the results gesture towards a model of activist artist as care worker. Such a model reframes our understanding of activist artmaking and sheds light on strategies of subjective resistance to neoliberalism.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.008 | 0.010 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.024 | 0.026 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.012 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".