Collective Visibility, Concentrated Labor

Collaborative cultural initiatives in Sweden depend on coordination work that funders rarely see: applications, reports, schedules, contracts. The thesis calls this pre-legitimacy labor. It is the work that keeps an initiative visible and understandable enough to be judged at all, before anyone decides whether it deserves support. Built on fifteen interviews, the thesis follows who carries that work and why it ends up with so few people.

Supervised by Filip Wijkström. Graded Excellent.

Below, the main ideas of the thesis in four short image series.