Love, labour, lost: creative class mobility, stories of loss, negative affects

Creative class workers are highly mobile, yet the struggles, disruptions and
inequalities that emerge in their new, trans-local, experiential geographies are
usually erased in the upbeat, Florida-inflected narrative on creative work and
creative class mobility. This article aims to break open discussions of creative
class mobility with the insertion of affect. It argues for the inclusion of
personal, affective experiences to complicate the fluidity, the ease, the resolve
that are usually assumed in the imaginary of being mobile. Furthermore, the
article builds on the increasing volume of scholarship on affective labour –
conceptualized as the affective dimensions of labour – but via a different
route. I argue that any examination of affective labour may expand from the
affect in labour, to how labour affects; from affective labour to labour affects.
This inquiry brings to mobility studies the resonances between moving
(geographically) and being moved (affectively), supplementing cultural
studies’ critique of creative work with precarity of a different category, that of
the affective. The empirical section presents the affective accounts of three
re-located creative workers. They show us that mobility is never as frictionless
as it sounds, and doing what people love may well come at the cost of losing
those whom they love. I tease out three themes for further connections with
affect: ethos and values, gender, and technology.