ECREA Conference – Vulnerability, Responsibility and Resilience in Cultural and Media Industries

Le projet RENUM sera présenté à ECREA (European Communication Research and Education Association) Conference 2026 le 11 septembre 2026.

Lucas Fritz et Marta Severo présenteront la communication « Responsible digital practices in cultural and creative industries: Frictions, reconfigurations and socio-ecological imaginaries » dans le cadre du panel « Vulnerability, Responsibility and Resilience in Cultural and Media Industries ». Cela représente une occasion importante de faire connaitre les résultats du projet à niveau européen.

Résumé de la communication :

Over the past decade, calls for “responsible” or “sustainable” digital practices have increasingly structured public discourse, regulatory frameworks and professional norms across media and cultural sectors. While these debates often focus on the environmental footprint of digital technologies, less attention has been paid to the ways in which cultural and creative industries (CCIs) interpret, negotiate and reconfigure these injunctions in relation to their specific modes of production, values and imaginaries. This paper addresses this gap by examining how responsible digital practices are articulated, appropriated or resisted within the field of CCIs, with a particular focus on digital arts and creative production.

The paper draws on empirical research conducted within the French research project Renum (https://renum.parisnanterre.fr/, Reconfiguring Digital Practices for the Ecological Transition: Professions and Skills), which investigates socio-ecological transformations of digital practices across sectors. Focusing on CCIs as a heuristic field, the study combines a mixed qualitative methodology. First, we carried out a digital ethnography of the online discourses and practices of 100 French cultural and creative organisations (theatres, festivals, art centres, artistic NGOs, professional networks, etc.) identified on the basis of national listings of digital arts actors. We then sent a questionnaire to these organisations, collecting 30 responses, which were complemented by fifteen semi-structured interviews with professionals working in these organisations. This methodological triangulation allows us to analyse both declared commitments and situated professional practices, as well as the tensions between symbolic positioning and operational constraints. The analysis aims to distinguish between corporate social responsibility commitments, ecological engagement, inclusive socio-ecological initiatives, accessibility policies, and queer and feminist engagements related to the uses of digital technologies, both by organisations and by the artists they host.

Our findings show that responsible digital practices in CCIs cannot be reduced to environmental optimisation or “green” technological fixes. Instead, they are embedded in broader socio-ecological framings that intersect with long-standing concerns around labour conditions, accessibility, territorial inequalities and cultural diversity. Professionals mobilise heterogeneous repertoires to make sense of responsibility, ranging from digital sobriety and infrastructural reduction to commitments against discrimination, queer and crip approaches to creation, and efforts to improve accessibility for marginalised publics. These engagements, however, are marked by persistent frictions: between artistic experimentation and technical standardisation, between economic precarity and ethical commitments, and between institutional frameworks and grassroots professional cultures.

By situating responsible digital practices within cultural production, this paper aims to outline possible futures for the sector as it copes with socio-ecological and digital transitions. It argues that CCIs offer a privileged observatory for understanding how these transitions are translated into professional identities, skills and cultural imaginaries, revealing both the limits and the transformative potential of current responsibility discourses in media industries.