The Class Ceiling: What Working-Class Exclusion from the Arts Means for Archaeology
Nazir Afzal OBE and Matt Baker join DigVentures for a special #DVTrends session unpacking the findings of Class Ceiling: A Review of Working Class Participation in the Arts, the pioneering Greater Manchester inquiry that sparked national conversation about who gets to build a creative career, and who gets shut out.
Their findings are stark: over half of working-class creatives surveyed had experienced bias or discrimination based on their background, fewer than half earn enough to make a living from their work, and the infrastructure that once supported working-class talent into the sector has largely disappeared. The report’s 21 recommendations – from treating class as a protected characteristic, to ending unpaid work and expanding apprenticeships – go beyond diagnosis to offer a concrete blueprint for change.
For archaeology and heritage, the parallels are impossible to ignore. Our sector shares many of the same structural barriers: dependence on university pathways, a culture of low pay and voluntary labour as rites of passage, leadership concentrated in narrow socioeconomic groups, and a widening gap between diversity ambitions and the material conditions that determine who can actually enter, stay and progress.
In this event, Nazir and Matt unpack what the Class Ceiling research reveals, and help us consider what a blueprint for working-class representation, and greater diversity in general, would actually look like for archaeology as a sector.
