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.

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