Techniques for shifting economic subjectivity: promoting an assets-based stance with artists and artisans

In the early 2000s the minority world turned towards the creative sector to revitalize regional economies. The resulting development policies ultimately led to gentrification and social exclusion based on race, ethnicity, class and gender. These exclusions also apply to artists and artisans, occupational groups whose economic activity and needs have been paradoxically erased from dominant creativity-based development prescriptions. This chapter draws on an action research project that aimed to reframe artists and artisans as active subjects of a regional economy so that they could take a more active role in shaping the nature of redevelopment. The project employed the practice of reframing as used in post-structuralist participatory action research. The author focuses on the techniques that were used to enable new economic subjectivities for artists and artisans to emerge: interacting as equals, facilitating multiple forms of interaction, and creating a space in which to practise emergent subjectivities.