The Impact of Opportunity: Reflections of a TASA 2024 Bursary Recipient by Carolina Triana Cuellar
Attending TASA 2024 in Whadjuk Nyungar Country was an incredible opportunity to develop new connections, engage with fascinating research, and share my work with the Australian sociological community. I want to extend my heartfelt thanks to TASA for supporting my participation through a Postgraduate Bursary, which made it financially possible.
After three years of undertaking my PhD in the UK, I have returned to Australia, where I am completing my thesis. Presenting my work and receiving feedback at TASA 2024 was encouraging and a wonderful opportunity to showcase and advance my PhD research at this crucial stage.
I was grateful to present my paper titled Entangled Temporalities of Artistic Labour, Migration and Precarity: The Experiences of Migrant Theatre Artists in London, drawing on one of the empirical chapters of my PhD thesis. My presentation explored the structural and everyday impacts of time on artists' livelihoods, creative practice, and migration trajectories, revealing the overlapping forms of temporal precarity that affect both their professional and personal lives. More broadly, my PhD research seeks to interrogate inequalities in cultural work to expand our understanding of the set of challenges, barriers, and opportunities faced by professional artists after migration to another country.
My paper was part of a session facilitated by the Migration, Ethnicity and Multiculturalism (MEM) thematic group in TASA. I appreciated the opportunity for a productive exchange of ideas with fellow presenters and a small but engaged audience. As a migration researcher, I spent most of my time at the conference attending MEM sessions, engaging with fascinating new research in this area, and fostering connections within the field. Additionally, I participated in various other conference streams, keynotes, and workshops, which proved to be both stimulating and insightful.
I have come back motivated and ready to take on the final months of my PhD. Being away from my institution, the University of Sussex, it has been important to feel connected to an academic community, and I have been grateful for this since joining TASA in June 2024.