On Monday, 19 May 2026, the Institute for Development and International Relations (IRMO) in Zagreb hosted the eighth lecture in the Culturelink Guest Lecture Series, featuring Dr Katja Praznik, Associate Professor at the State University of New York at Buffalo (USA), with a lecture entitled ‘Comrades or Colleagues? The Class Challenges of Participatory Research and Policy Advocacy for Cultural Workers.’ The lecture was moderated by Dr Jaka Primorac.
In her lecture, Dr Praznik addressed the persistent invisibility of labour in the cultural sector, the precarity of artistic and cultural work, and the relationship between research, cultural policy, and collective organising. Drawing on social reproduction analyses and experiences of organising art and cultural workers in Slovenia and Croatia, the lecture examined how artistic labour is often framed as individual creativity or a ‘labour of love’, obscuring exploitation, unpaid work, and precarious working conditions.
Particular attention was given to the organising experiences of the Zasuk union in Slovenia and the SKUPA initiative in Croatia, as well as to the limitations of decades of policy advocacy and research which, despite extensively documenting precarity in the cultural sector, have often failed to produce structural change without organised collective power.
The lecture was followed by a rich and productive discussion involving researchers, representatives of cultural organisations, and a range of actors from the Croatian cultural and creative sector. The discussion focused in particular on labour conditions in culture, possibilities for collective organising, and the challenges cultural policies face in the context of increasing precarity in cultural work.
The lecture was organized in connection with the publication of the new book ‘Creative and Cultural Work in Europe’ edited by Bård Kleppe, Jaka Primorac, Miikka Pyykkönen and David Wright (published by Routledge).
