Call for Papers: Special Issue of Cultural Trends Mental Health and Wellbeing in Creative Labour: Policy, Organisation, and Practice Across Media Industries

Call for Papers: Special Issue of Cultural Trends Mental Health and Wellbeing in Creative Labour: Policy, Organisation, and Practice Across Media Industries

Guest editors: Dr. George Musgrave, Prof. Tanja Bosch, Prof. Crystal Abidin, Prof. Mark Deuze

This Special Issue for Cultural Trends seeks to critically examine mental health and wellbeing in creative labour as organisational, cultural, and policy concerns. The issue aims to bring together interdisciplinary and internationally grounded scholarship exploring the relationship between creative work and psychosocial conditions across media and cultural industries, alongside applied ‘practitioner perspectives’ from cultural organisations ‘on the ground’ who are confronting these issues head-on. In doing so, this Special Issue seeks to advance emerging conceptual, theoretical, and methodological debates concerning wellbeing, governance, labour conditions, organisational responsibility, and cultural policy in contemporary creative work. The issue particularly welcomes contributions that move beyond individualised understandings of mental health to examine the wider organisational and structural conditions shaping wellbeing across creative labour contexts. We are especially interested in contributions that foreground international and comparative perspectives, including research situated within Global South contexts and underrepresented labour regimes.

The Special Issue also seeks to foster dialogue between scholarship, policy, and practice. In addition to peer-reviewed academic articles, we welcome proposals for Policy Perspectives: contributions from practitioners, industry organisations, unions, cultural institutions, media companies, record labels, support organisations, policymakers, and others working directly within the creative and cultural sectors. These contributions may reflect on organisational learning, implementation challenges, sector initiatives, organisational dilemmas, evidence gaps, intervention evaluation, or emerging models of institutional responsibility and care. Topics may include, but are not limited to:

• Psychosocial risk, precarity, and insecurity in creative labour
• Organisational cultures, leadership, and workplace wellbeing in media and cultural industries
• Platformisation and digital labour, encompassing themes such as algorithmic visibility, audience exposure, and the role social media in mental health (e.g. via platform provisions such as nudges, features, guidelines, and/or policies)
• Burnout, overwork, and sustainable creative careers
• Harassment, discrimination, and inequalities in creative work
• Race, gender, class, disability, sexuality, and their interactions with wellbeing in cultural labour
• Global South and comparative perspectives on creative labour and wellbeing
• Cultural policy responses to mental health and wellbeing in the creative industries
• Organisational responsibility and duty of care frameworks
• Evidence regimes and intervention evaluation
• Trade unions, advocacy organisations, and sector-wide initiatives
• Critical perspectives on wellbeing discourse
• AI and changing psychosocial conditions in creative work
• Historical or longitudinal perspectives on wellbeing and labour in media and cultural industries
• Practice-based and/or participatory approaches to wellbeing in creative work

We welcome submissions from scholars across cultural policy, sociology, media and communication studies, organisational studies, labour studies, psychology, management, cultural studies, digital labour studies, public health, and related fields. We particularly encourage submissions from early-career researchers, scholar-practitioners, and contributors working outside traditional academic centres.

Submission formats

How to submit

A title and an abstract of between 300 and 500 words (plus references if applicable) should be emailed in the first instance to G.Musgrave@gold.ac.uk. The deadline for submissions is Thursday December 17th, 2026 at 1pm. Please write ‘Special Issue CfP’ as the Subject line.

The Special Issue editors will collectively review all abstracts submitted and notify successful authors by February 26th, 2027, with full papers due to us for initial review by May 4th, 2027. The formal peer review process will then begin in July 2027.

For more details, refer here