Introduction

Our goal in this article is to better understand the way in which knowledge for cultural work is organized and shared as this work becomes increasingly digitally mediated. We believe that the ongoing transformation of cultural work (Ashton and Noonan, 2013; Banks, 2007; Hesmondhalgh and Baker, 2011) will crucially be shaped by if and how practitioners pass-on the ‘personal know-how’ (Dormer, 1997) they develop through experiences of working with others (Borkenhagen, 2017; Sennett, 2012). For this reason, we propose a reconceptualization of a key social arrangement for organizing how people share their know-how for cultural work: mentorship.

Mentorship traditionally involves a mentee learning know-how from a mentor by co-presently working together on shared projects. But as cultural work becomes increasingly precarious and digitally mediatized, the possibility to share the space and time needed to reproduce know-how through mentorship can no longer be taken for granted. Properly investigating the new phenomenological conditions for sharing know-how for contemporary cultural work requires that we reconsider its relational, institutional, and technological dynamics. In the following research, we demonstrate how mentorship for cultural work constitutes more than a mere means of skill transmission through shared proximity, but a figuration (Couldry and Hepp, 2016) – an interweaving of a constellation of actors, frames of relevance and communicative practice. Reframing mentorship in such a way allows us to better understand the technological mediation of know-how and the shift from face-to-face co-presence as a default social arrangement to what Couldry and Hepp term connected presence. As our findings suggest, through the figuration of mentorship for cultural work, mentors and mentees can share collective experiences and knowledge, but in ways that involve contested negotiations over what they mean and how they are technologically mediated.

In the next section, we review scholarship on craft and mentorship to conceptualize how the reproduction of know-how for cultural work has historically relied on face-to-face co-presence. We then show how this foundation is problematized by structural conditions of increasing precarity. We end the section by introducing deep mediatization as theorized by Couldry and Hepp (2016) to argue for the reconceptualization of mentorship as a figuration. In the third section, we relate findings from fieldwork for a case study of a mentorship programme taking place in Greater Vancouver, Canada, to illustrate how a figuration can be used to investigate this shift from co-presence to connected presence and to investigate its implications for how cultural workers collaborate, learn and sustain their practices. By examining the mentorship’s constellation of actors, its frames of relevance, and communicative practice, we uncover how cultural workers generate and sustain a mentor–mentee dyad to pass on know-how.