No Way To Make A Living is a sociological space about work, generating discussion and exchange on what work, paid or unpaid, is like in today’s world

Towards the end of the first series of the Emmy-award win­ning US drama, Mad Men, set in the fic­tional world of the New York advert­ising agency, Stirl­ing Cooper, in the early 1960s, there is a scene which offers a seduct­ive vis­ion of the work of advert­ising prac­ti­tion­ers and their role in weav­ing com­mer­cial fables. The…

On the 13th Feb­ru­ary, 2011, I pho­to­graphed my work­place at night, as part of a pro­ject on dreams. Sound artist Will Mont­gomery was with me, record­ing the uni­ver­sity breath­ing. Click on the present­a­tion to hear how the boiler room hums and the air­con­di­tion­ing units buzz. A silent, dream­less night is an illu­sion. Dreams The photographs…

For some time I’ve been work­ing on a pro­ject about musi­cians and the work they do. This star­ted as an invest­ig­a­tion into the rela­tion­ship between work, con­sump­tion and leis­ure in the lives of cre­at­ive work­ers. Here, the pre­car­ity of being a worker in the informal eco­nomy, depend­ent on an act­ive, pay­ing audi­ence and (prob­ably) a…

‘There’s blood in the water for months,’ explains the tour guide at the Museo Civico di Car­olforte. She’s been telling us about the mat­tanza, the tra­di­tional killing of blue-fin tuna (tonno rosso) in May and June each year as the fish swim past the Isola di San Pietro off the west coast of Sardinia on…

Wed­nes­day, 1 Decem­ber I wandered down to the docks in Cag­lari tonight at around 6pm. Walk­ing down Largo Carlo Felice, the main road from Piazza Yenne (sort of the centre of town), you know the water is there because of the view of the fer­ries (and on some days, cruise liners) above the hori­zon. Alongside…

My first taste of the fish mar­ket in Cagliari was just that. It seemed to me that as soon as we got out of the car parked next to the mar­ket the air quite lit­er­ally tasted of fish. Down a few steps into the fish sec­tion of the purpose-built covered Mer­cato San Bene­detto, we were…

I saw the wooden posts pho­to­graphed in these pic­tures on a recent visit to Lowest­oft (on the east coast of the UK) to research the his­tory of fish­ing there. They looked strange but estab­lished on a small stretch of land between the sea and the main road, in the area north of the town known…

2010 marks fifty years since the clos­ure of the Naval Dock­yard on the Isle of Shep­pey in Kent. It was quite a blow to the island. There was the imme­di­ate loss of an ‘occu­pa­tional com­munity’ where the single large employer that had dom­in­ated the local eco­nomy and brought people together with a shared sense of…

Research­ing women and work can be really puzz­ling. There is a series of things I genu­inely don’t under­stand: how it feels to earn your liv­ing in a work­place where you are the only woman or in a small minor­ity; what it’s like fre­quently find­ing your­self the only per­son of your sex in work­place con­texts; the…