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A magical noun: thinking critically about creativity [URL hyperlink to video file]
Seminar at the UCL Knowledge Lab by Dr. Mark Readman exploring the ways in which the concept of creativity is socially constructed, mobilised, and mythologised. At its simplest, creativity is a word used to describe certain kinds of activity. But these activities can be very different – a mental activity such as solving a mathematical problem or a physical activity such as making a sculpture, for example – which should make us question the coherence of the single word which accounts for them. ‘Creativity’ is a potent signifier, but what it signifies is slippery; it is a particular kind of problem – a problem of meaning rather than a problem of practice This talk examines some of the dominant versions of creativity – from Ken Robinson’s formulation of ‘having original ideas that have value’, to Csikszentmilhalyi’s notion of an alchemical phenomenon arising from a confluence of different factors – and puts them to the test in relation to some contemporary examples. Much research tends to treat creativity as a ‘thing’ and seeks to identify what ‘it’ is; I suggest that it is more critically rigorous to circumvent questions which seek equations for answers and to look, instead, at the factors which produce a sense of ‘things’ and which give them real effects. I argue, ultimately, that to think critically about creativity means asking what we talk about when we talk about creativity.

Shared with the World by Dr Michelle Cannon

This list was generated on Sun Dec 8 19:17:10 2024 UTC.