Hannah Curran-Troop

Hannah Curran-Troop is Creative Manchester’s Research Associate. With a background in feminist media studies, cultural studies and creative industries research, Hannah’s research uses the creative industries to generate theoretical framings and insights into broader societal questions. Primarily, these are questions relating to feminism, precarious labour, entrepreneurialism and platformisation, and inequalities within the workplace.

Hannah’s PhD was a qualitative study into feminist creative and cultural organisations in London: ‘Feminist CCIs’. The project explored how Feminist CCIs have emerged as a response to the creative industry’s growing self-awareness of inequality, discrimination, and exploitation. However, in the context of normalised precarity in creative fields, it examined how Feminist CCIs negotiate the entanglement of commercial ‘solutions’ to problems of precarity, and the possibilities for more equal forms of creative production. Using the new theoretical lens of ‘freelance feminism’, it explored how these feminist projects are being shaped at the intersection of feminism, activism, entrepreneurialism, and precarity. 

Hannah has worked on a range of major funded projects over the last six years as a Research Assistant, Researcher, and Post-Doctoral Researcher. Projects include Fashion Start Ups and IP: London, Berlin and Milan (AHRC), Prodem: Protests and Democratic Quality (Volkswagen Stiftung), Mediated Menopause (Leverhulme), and Creative Impact Research Centre Europe London Lab (Brexit Reserves Funding). Hannah was recently the Lead Researcher on the UKRI (HEIF) funded project, Workforce Challenges, Diversity and Cultural Leadership, in partnership with Manchester City Council. 

Hannah is currently working as Principal Investigator on the project Industry-led Activism in the Creative and Cultural Industries. This project examines how new kinds of freelancer-led initiatives are working to challenge issues of precarity, discrimination, and exploitation in creative industries.

Hannah has published in The European Journal of Cultural Studies, A Soundings Journal of Politics and Culture, and The Cultural Politics of Femvertising (Palgrave), and is currently working on her first book Feminist CCIs: Ending Sexism, Saving Creative Industries, and Getting Paid to Do It.

• Feminist CCIs
• Freelance Feminism
• Precarity, entrepreneurialism, and activism
• Self-branding and platformised labour
• Creative workforce inequalities