Spatialities of homeworking and wellbeing: the case of the independent creative worker

The flexibility gifted by the rise of media technologies has seen the number of people working from home almost double over the last decade. Unaffiliated with an organisation and often characterised by precarious working conditions, independent workers are a growing segment of the workforce, and epitomise this trend towards individualised and lone work often conducted in people's own homes. Wellbeing-related concerns regarding independent home-based work have been raised, with specific attention drawn to the potential problems facing creative workers, who constitute a large proportion of the labour behind the UK's growing creative industry. This is because it has been argued that, flexible creative work, unbound by physical space and entangled with the non-economic lives of its practitioners, threatens to disrupt the sanctity of home life, with consequences for mental health. However, there is yet to be a rigorous investigation into the impact of this style and type of work on wellbeing.

Responding to these trends and addressing this gap in research, the project will investigate the implications of this spatial conflation of the two spheres of work and home for the wellbeing of home-based independent creative workers. To do so, it will employ Fleuret and Atkinson's (2007) 'spaces of wellbeing' framework to foreground the interrelationship between space and wellbeing. As well as contributing to the ESRC's priority to research the changing nature and location of employment, the project will add to various academic literatures, both across Human Geography and the interdisciplinary field of work and employment research. Firstly, it will contribute to a growing focus on wellbeing in Geography by studying the effects of particular contexts on individual wellbeing. Secondly, engaging with the Critical Geographies of Creativity, it will help to reconcile disagreements within literature regarding the wellbeing of creative workers. Thirdly, by focusing on the key figure of the independent creative worker, it will answer calls within the sub-field of Economic Geography to attend to the trend towards individualised work conducted within the home and its consequences for wellbeing. Finally, by utilising geographical understandings of the dynamics of space, it will also contribute to Organisational Studies work that is conceptualising and considering the impact of the spatial processes of homeworking.

Adopting a qualitative methodology to assess wellbeing subjectively, the research will align with current trends within Social Geography. Innovative and multi-modal, the methodology will firstly use participant-led video diaries to access the complexity and spatial interactions of the everyday experiences of home-based independent creative workers. Subsequently, follow-up narrative interviews will be conducted with each participant to discuss excerpts from the video diaries and further explore the relationship between their homeworking practices and wellbeing. Both sets of data will be subject to thematic, discourse and case study analysis.

The Association of Independent Professionals and the Self-Employed (IPSE), and StoryFutures, an enterprise supporting the creative 'Gateway Cluster' to the west of London, are collaborative partners on this project and will contribute to its success. As well as supporting the recruitment process and helping to connect the project with industry and policy institutions, both partnerships will enable the project to have societal impact. This will be achieved by feeding into IPSE's work representing creative workers and supporting the wellbeing of independent workers, and StoryFutures' work concerning wellbeing and the development of business models in the creative cluster. In addition to a thesis, the research will also inform a policy brief that will be co-authored with IPSE. An event will be held at the end of the project to help socialise subsequent materials and ideas and engage stakeholders.