Special section the minnesota review: Mobilizing Creativity

Professors Kiene Brillenburg Wurth, Iris van der Tuin, and Nanna Verhoeff have edited a special section in the journal the minnesota review (Duke University Press) on Mobilizing Creativity: A Humanities Perspective (part 1 of 2). The collection includes contributions from international scholars as well as from colleagues in the Faculty of Humanities.

Mobilising creativity

This first issue of two proposes a contemporary notion of creativity from a practice-based, responsive, and prospective positioning of the concept. Taken together, the articles in both issues develop updated conceptions of creativity, responding to the contemporary cultural moment of algorithmic, environmental, and world-systemic dynamic processes that shape what we have in common as well as how we radically differ from each other.

The authors offer a collection of case studies that open up a variety of fields for creativity research: from art to activism, from science to spirituality, from prisons to private enterprises. Together, these yield a performative perspective on creativity.

Three axes

From this mobilising, performative perspective, we can discern three cross-cutting axes of characteristics of creativity:

1. Creativity is practiced: creativity is embodied, institutional, relational, and emergent – there is no use for a static, ‘universal’ definition of creativity, because such a definition does not meet its expectations in practice.
2. Creativity is responsive: creativity is engaged, reflexive, response-able, collaborative, and appreciative of difference – there is no place for preconceived notions of ‘good’ or ‘bad’ in creativity contexts because such notions are formed along the way.
3. Creativity is transformative: creativity moves through relational and responsive engagements toward transformation – the participant in, and researcher of, creative practice is changed in the [research] process.

The authors of this first of two issues, include David Rodowick, William Uriccio and Katerina Cizek, Coco Kanters, Anna Poletti, Véronique Richard, Vlad Glăveanu, and Patrice Aubertin.