The COVID-19 pandemic, cultural work and resilience

This chapter explores how cultural workers positively adapt and reorganize their personal and professional lives in times of the COVID-19 pandemic – an ongoing adversity worth being explored. Based on 26 interviews and numerous informal conversations with cultural workers operating in different Cultural and Creative Industries (CCIs), our qualitative research reveals feelings, work reorganization practices, prospects for the future, and lessons learned during and after the first COVID-19 lockdown (Europe, March–May 2020). We show an overall improvement in the cultural workers’ resilience after they lived the first lockdown by virtue of several resource endowments but foremost by virtue of their personality and experience built before the COVID-19 times. The chapter reveals how the usual precarious working conditions in the CCIs have helped cultural workers prepare to face adversities during their career. The chapter contributes to the psychological resilience literature, as it deals with some of the underexplored impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic, such as: adversity in both personal and professional spheres of cultural workers’ lives; the development of their resilience over time; the reflection of individual resilience in cultural workers’ narration about their life lessons learned. The chapter also explores one of the frontiers in the current research on CCIs.