The Creative Labour and Critical Futures (CLCF) cluster is co-led by PI Dr. MaryElizabeth (“M.E.”) Luka and Dr. Rafael Grohmann at the University of Toronto. M.E. is an Associate Professor, Arts & Media Management, where they examine modes and meanings of co-creative production and distribution in the digital age for arts, culture, and media. Between conferences, talks, and juggling research projects, M.E. shared some tidbits about their research identity, CLCF’s beginnings, and thoughts on AI and creative labour.

Daphne: ⁠In a nutshell, who are you as a researcher?

M.E.: As a researcher, in a nutshell, what I look at is how a creative worker makes their way through their life and their career over the course of many years and many changes. I look at how people operate within particular ecosystems and think about how those processes could be made more supportive, or more flexible, or more inclusive.

I aim to build on the work and experience that I’ve had through my life in the culture sector and elsewhere. This is one reason why I’m interested in how creative workers make their way in systems. And I’m not just interested in the workers themselves, although that’s my priority, but I’m also interested in how systems can function better.

So, I work on policy matters, I work on working conditions, I think about how governance structures work, I think about how people are compensated for their time and work, and I think about how aesthetic practice intersects with capitalism.

And one of the things that I think over time has become more apparent to me and many others is how difficult it is for creative work to take place in capitalism. But as a through line, I am definitely interested in how creative workers make their way through systems, particularly in the digital age.

Daphne: ⁠ What’s CLCF’s origin story?

M.E.: I think the origin of Creative Labour and Critical Futures stretches back much further than any of us have been at UTSC. But the more recent history has been about how the trajectories of the folks who do research in ACM, the Department of Arts, Culture and Media, have come together.

For example, one of the things that happened when I was hired was that—along with about another half dozen hires in the years on either side of me—we were charged with growing a research culture in the department. We had been explicitly hired because of our research trajectories. And one of the first things that we came up with—and that was Barry Freeman, T.L. Cowan, Jas Rault, David Nieborg and I—was to seek funding to found what we called the “Critical Digital Methods Institute” (CDMI).

Now, institute has a very particular meaning at U of T. So today we wouldn’t be allowed to call it an institute, but we would call it something like “an initiative,” which is actually closer to the truth. What we found at the time was that the thing that we had in common was a whole lot of interest in methods. How we could think critically about how creative work, creative industries, creative practice, performance practice, all of those kinds of things could be encapsulated in working through different understandings of method.

With that foundation in place, we were able to spider out and do a whole bunch of other work together and apart. And then a few couple years ago we decided that we would try to make an attempt to secure one of the Cluster of Scholarly Prominence grants. We actually had two runs at it, the year before last and last year.

One of the things that I think is really interesting about the change in the Department over that time period is that there were even more people who came on board as researchers. What we started to have in common across the Department was an interest in creative labour. That is to say, we had shifted to an interest in creative labour versus an interest in methods. Which is to say that we had shifted from thinking about what we had in common as scholars to what we had in common as people in the world who do research. And that’s a big shift, so I think that’s kind of the seed of where CLCF came from.

Daphne: ⁠How does your industry background change your approach to research?

M.E.: My industry background changes my approach to research in a whole variety of ways. First of all, I have lived experience in the culture sector, and particularly the creative industries. I worked as a producer and director from the early days of placing content on the World Wide Web and the Internet, even before broadband, which was a challenge.

One of the things that I think is really important is paying attention to what the cycles of technological transformation are. And what I learned from that particular moment in time was that creative people—and particularly people who’ve been marginalized or who are outliers—are often proved to be the ones who can really innovate or invent ways of dealing with whatever the new technologies are. Because they’re used to working with constraints and a lack of information or support. These are the opportunities that come up when gates that are gate-kept open up and people are allowed into mainstream systems.

Unfortunately, there’s also the back end of the cycle, which is generally that folks are pushed back out again, in capitalism, once people realize that there are opportunities for monetization that can be taken up or that other kinds of priorities take place, including the building of audiences, users, et cetera.

The other piece of my industry background is in policy development broadly and in organizational change. My first big jobs were in fundraising, and from there, I moved on to the kind of transformative, often governance-led projects that would look at how a particular organization or a particular association needed to make changes. And then how it related to the legislative and regulatory environment, and also how that trickles down to how people work in the field.

I think those experiences gave me a good set of experiences to look through a bunch of different lenses when I’m thinking about what changes or what stability might look like or what maintenance or sustenance means versus what growth might mean. It also makes me a very pragmatic scholar, so a lot of my work is done in collaboration with folks in the sector, partly because I know lots of people and I’ve built a reputation as somebody who’s good to work with, but also because to me “feet on the ground” as a researcher is a really important component of the kind of work that’s needed in the culture sector and creative industries.

Daphne: ⁠What do you think are some of the most critical research questions when thinking about AI and creative labour?

M.E.: Some of the most critical research questions when thinking about AI and creative labour, and particularly in the context of thinking about what our futures look like, really go from practical considerations around how will AI or the suite of things that are related to AI impact creative work at all stages of development, production and distribution.

I include very experimental or exploratory ways of advancing art forms or artistic practices, right through to, you know, how does a popular musical take place in this day and age? To that end, I think part of what I’m more interested in are questions like: in what ways can AI work for artists, audiences and citizens, rather than the reverse?

AI is a technology and a tool, it’s got its own dangers, it’s got its own advantages, and how do we understand what some of those might look like? More generally, and this would be a question that I would ask probably in any research endeavour is, how do we ensure that creativity and criticality grow as core skills and approaches to our lives, not just as researchers, but as citizens and creative folks. And what is our role here? How can the work that we’re doing mitigate inequities in society and value qualities like inclusion, inventiveness, play and joy?

Those are the kinds of things—attitudes or positionalities—that I think often get lost in some of the very serious inquiries into how AI advances scientific discovery, or how AI advances portentous ways of looking at how to represent weighty social issues, etc. This quality of play and joy, I think, is something that’s really important to keep in mind when thinking about how technology works with us, how we work with technology, what is our consideration about what the impact on the planet is, all of those kinds of questions.

Co-hosting this year’s Skagen Institute at Faculty of Information (hybrid) 2025