 Gweithio i fynd allanfaith! Rwy'n ddod nhw'n ddim ychydig yn ddim yn fawr ac yn gweithio'r lecwyr hynny, yn fawr o'n ddalch chi i ddim yn bair oedd y Garrol Ddeudol yn ei ddim yn ddim yn gweithio y Youtube LIVE nhw'n i ymwyaf o'r adeithio. Rwy'n ddim yn gweithio'r lecwyr hyn oherwydd mae'n gwahaniaeth hir yma yn mynd i ei beth oeddeol, carbs mor cymdeithasol i gynghŷr a fachio'r cael ei gynhyrch yn ein oed i'r cyflawn cyflawn i'r hwnnw yn ymgyrchol yn y cyflawn i'r gwahanol, ac mae'n gwybod pethol yn ymgyrchol yn ein bod yn gyflawn i Stephanie'n cyd-redu. Ymgyrch yn ymgyrchol yn ffawr i ymddangosol yn y bywyd yn y cyd-redu ac yn y gwybod yma, mae'n gweithio yn fwyaf i'r cyfrannu cyflawnol o ddechrau ac oedd yn cyflawn i'r cyflawn i'r gweithio'r ymgyrchol. Felly, yma'r ystafellai, Stephanie Taylor, yw'r profesor yn gyfnodol syddol yn y Sgolol Siwgol a'r Fyrogyn yn gweithio'r amser i'r ffawr i'r hollu yma yn y gweithreithio'r cyffredinol. Felly, yna'n gweithio cyntaf i'r wych yn ei wneud, felly, os ydych yn y gweithreithio, yna'n gweithreithio'n gweithreithio'n gweithreithio'n gweithreithio, a'r Helene, Efallai chi'n ychwanegai anodgoidd ym mwyddiannais scaffoldau neu na fawr ychwanegau ffobos o'n ymryd ar gwahanol, lle ydych yn ôl pan'i gwahanol ar gweithio'r YouTube. Os ydych chi'n gwahanol, os wrth ymlaen i gydych yn ffrwy. Mae'n meddwl i wneud fy fan chi'r twwyddiad y sylw i gweithio pan ond mae'n gwneud hynny. Felly, fod oedd gwybodaeth i gyd yn Open University neu sy'n ddim nhw'n iawn o'ch cyddiad weithio gwylltu'n cyddiad ar hynod. Yn ystod yn rhoi ein bod Ynw'r profiad yn psychologiau sosial, mae'r byd yn gallu'n rhoi a'r unig o'r unig o'r ddechrau, ychydig o'r ddechrau o'r byd yn ein bydd. Mae'n rhoi'n wneud yn 1998. Mae'n ffordd o'n dweud i'r ddechrau i'r ddechrau, ac rwy'n meddwl, o'r brifyddiant o'r cyfnodol, mewn ysgrifennid, mewn mynd i'r rhaid, a'r moddol yn cyfnodol. Mae'r rhaid i'w ddod, yma'r ysgrifennid ar gyfer gweithio'r pethau yn ymgyrch yn y gallu'r pethau yn ysgrifennid yn cyfle, yn cyfnodol, yn ysgrifennid o'r pethau ac yn ysgrifennid ar gyfer gwylliant. Mae'r gŵn o'r pethau yn cyfnodol yw'r pethau o'r cyfnodol gweithiol cyfnodd cyfnodd, a yw'r cwliau'r holl. Mae'r wyf yn ddau cyd-dwybod cwmpwysau o'r cyfnodd, ac mae'r cyfnodd cyfnodd ar gyfer Caren Lytlton, yr oedd sy'n cyfnodd cyfnodd yn gweithioau a'r ysbytfod y dyfodol. Felly mae'n cael eu rhefnodd am yw Stephanie. A hynny'n gweithio i'r wych. Fel hynny'n gweithio, mae'n gweithio'n gweithio'n gweithio. Well, creativity is one of those words that initially seems to have an obvious meaning, and then it becomes more complicated on a closer examination. Being creative is associated with being innovative, with making something that's new and original. So we might think of scientists, entrepreneurs and writers, but the ultimate image of the creative person is probably that of the artist. The image or the cliché of the artist is of someone who's gifted, who's inspired, driven, a nonconformist who doesn't care about the values of polite society, suffering in a garret and pursuing art for art's sake. And we might add that in the image the artist is usually a man and usually a white European or Anglo-American man at that. To quote a couple of critical descriptions from academics, the image of the artist is of a Bohemian character who adopts a disdainful attitude towards a conventional way of life. And the making of art requires special talents, gifts or abilities which few have. People with such gifts cannot be subjected to the constraints imposed on other members of society. We must allow them to violate rules of decorum, propriety and common sense. Now, of course, neither of these is intended to be an accurate description. The second one is from the sociologist Howard S. Becker and he called it a romantic myth. Art historians could probably tell us something about the origins of that myth, including as a kind of marketing device that was developed by the agents of European painters in the late 19th century. But that's not my area. As a social psychologist, I want to consider the myth as part of a common sense understanding of creativity. The myth is also implicated with academic psychology, which has in turn influenced common sense understandings. So it becomes a rather complicated story. I'll be approaching all this through the lens of critical discursive psychology, the area that I work in. And my additional focus will be on how that approach captures some of the feelings and the emotions, the affect that is attached to creativity. These points are, of course, additionally interesting because we do live in a time in which creativity is very widely celebrated, including in relation to a whole global economic sector, the creative industries. But first, let me go back to the psychology discipline. There are arguments that the myth of the artist has impacted on the academic field of psychology, influencing research and theories. For instance, in the mid 20th century, the President of the American Psychological Association, JP Guilford, suggested that psychologists should pay more attention to the study of creativity because the US economy was in need of new ideas and creative people. Guilford's call has been identified as a prompt for the development of the whole field of the psychology of creativity, which of course is now very large. In his address, Guilford criticised the mass education of the time for promoting conformity, apparently accepting that implication of the myth that creativity and non-conformity are linked. Similarly, the psychologist who's probably best known for studying creativity, Mihai Cikmenchihae, wrote about how psychologists were called on by the US Air Force to develop a test for creativity. Mihai, well, the Air Force had found that overly conformist pilots who went by the book weren't able to deal with sudden emergencies. So the solution was seem to be to recruit more creative people to become pilots. So it seems that psychology and the US Air Force took from the myth of the artist the idea that creativity and non-conformity are connected. As one writer summarises it, since the early 1950s, influential psychologists and management theorists have tended to present the study of artists as straightforward evidence that the social is a form of constraint to be transcended by the effective working self. So creativity was linked to effectiveness and anti-social individuality. But in addition to apparently accepting that myth of the artist, the academic discipline of psychology has also contributed some different ideas that contradict the myth. And those ideas have themselves become part of the common sense understanding of creativity. There's that idea that creativity should be valued because it's useful. It contributes to safe flying and also the national economy. Now of course art has always been utilised for many purposes to support many interests including national interests. But the point here is the contrast with the myth of the artist who pursues art for art's sake. Instead creativity is presented as something to be valued for its practical applications and uses or utility. Another idea from the psychology discipline is that creativity isn't limited to a few exceptional people with extraordinary gifts. Like famous artists. Instead, Guilford suggested that almost anyone can be creative, provided that they aren't being inhibited by mass education methods or by society more generally. In 1958 he wrote a paper titled Can Creativity Be Developed? And his answer was differently affirmative. He suggested that 20th century America had lost the creative thinking that had been stimulated in early settlers by the challenges of their lives. And he called for Yankee ingenuity to be reclaimed. So a further implication here is that creativity arises out of nurture rather than nature. It's a capacity that can be cultivated in everybody. We could say that psychology challenged the elite art associations of creativity and democratised it. And psychologists Abraham Maslow made a distinction between what he called special talent creativeness used for example in painting, writing poetry, composing music and self actualising creativeness which he associates with a free and positive approach to life and to almost any activity he mentions for example home making and social care. And he was less interested in the elite art activities as self actualising creativeness in ordinary life. He refers to self actualising creativeness as that more widespread kind of creativeness which is the universal heritage of every human being that is born. And he linked it to psychological health and to freedom and the experience of happy and secure children. He described it as a fundamental characteristic inherent in human nature a potentiality given to all or most human beings at birth which most often is lost or buried or inhibited as the person gets inculturated. So yet again we see the parallels with the idea of the creative person needing to be freed from social rules. And of course all those ideas have contributed to the contemporary assumption that people should exercise their creativity that to do so is beneficial including for mental health whether or not that's as part of a formal art therapy or a personal activity. And we can see a claim about that in a report from a UK parliamentary working group that said the act of creation and our appreciation of it provides an individual experience that can have positive effects on our physical and mental health and wellbeing. But despite the common threads and the arguments that I've sketched so far psychologists don't always agree about creativity. For instance although Gilford and Maslow suggested that there was a potential conflict between creativity and the demands of society other psychologists have proposed that creative processes are social not individual. For instance, Cich Menchihai emphasised that a creative person functions within a wider social context and a community or social network. If we extend his systems theory to an artist we might point out that the artist's work will come out of a tradition of previous work or several traditions so it's being influenced by the existing knowledge within the context. And whether or not any new work becomes accepted as good art or even at all noticed as art that will depend on people within a network or what Howard Becker called an art world people like critics or experts. So Cich Menchihai's point is that any investigation of creativity has to consider the whole system not just an individual. He said that studying individuals to determine how creative they are is like listening to one hand clapping. To give a few other examples of psychologists emphasising the social aspects of creativity Theresa Marbelle modelled a complex, confidential framework of personal, cognitive and social factors that influence creative behaviour. In sociocultural psychology Vera John Steiner argued that artists and scientists and other significant creative people are always working with partners and co-contributors whether or not that's acknowledged. So the creative unit is always a collaborative relationship, not a lone individual. Keith Sawyer suggested that there's a model for that collaborative creativity and the ways that jazz musicians or actors improvise together. And Sawyer also related these ideas back to the kind of utility celebrated by Guilford proposing that industry can benefit from group genius to produce innovations. Excuse me. So within the various accounts we can see some different and sometimes conflicting characterisations of creativity, most of which have now become part of common sense. It's the gift of just a few special people or it's a universal capacity. We all possess it, we can all use it. Relatedly, creativity is a gift from nature. You have it or you don't. Or it's a potential that can be taught or nurtured in anyone, for instance through the right kind of education and social environment. It's located within an individual. Or it's developed and recognised in the interactions between people in wider social networks and contexts. Creativity should be pursued as an end in itself. So that's art for art's sake again. Or because it has practical applications including therapeutic uses for mental health. Those different characterisations to some extent coexist in psychology, usually with the contradictions going on unacknowledged and in common sense. It's noticeable that psychology researchers on creativity tend to begin their articles with references to acclaimed creative individuals. It's a particular favourite, even if the research then adopts a social approach. But my particular interest is that psychological knowledge has entered common sense. It's contributed to general understanding of creativity with those contradictions. One site in which the various characterisations and the contradictions have appeared relatively recently is in the creative industries. And this is a sector of the economy that was initially identified in the late 20th and early 21st century, both by policy makers and academics. It's been widely celebrated around the world for its economic success and social potential. Definitions of the sector vary including with some overlap, for instance with the cultural indices, the creative economy and so on. The key features of the creative industries are that they centre on the conventional territory of the arts, design the arts market, the performing arts. But they also extend beyond that territory to encompass many other occupations and activities, including new kinds of work, so for example on the online gaming industry. Many of the workers in the sector pursue individual career paths, they're self-employed or they run small businesses, what Susan Luckman calls micro-enterprises. And the sectors associated also with new kinds of work often linked to digital technologies. There's a lot of use for example of digital shop fronts for selling things that people have made. The creative industries supposedly demonstrate the economic importance of creativity and innovation. UK policy makers have claimed that in the creative industries wealth for the nation will be generated by individual workers using their creative talents. So we're back to the claim made by Goldford. One of the original claims that was made for the creative industries was that the creative workers themselves would achieve a better quality of life than in other sectors. They'd achieve self-actualisation through following their own creative interests in creative projects. You can see the echo of Maslow. They'd also escape the constraints of the 9-5 routine and that sort of secure but boring job for life that's variously been associated with work under forwardism or modernism or in the UK with the post-war Keynesian welfare state. So again the echo of that opposition between creativity and conformity. In most countries the creative industries were hit very hard by the 2008 global financial crisis and then again by the austerity policies that followed particularly in the UK and then again by the pandemic. But some of the previous positive claims about the industries have been reiterated recently in relation to the pandemic. In the UK journalists and other commentators have called for support for the creative industries as a vital sector of the UK economy and some of them have suggested that creative people particularly important to help build a post-pandemic economy. And there has been recovery within the sector. At the end of 2021, Government figures located nearly 7% of UK employment in the creative industries. And on another level there were also many recommendations during the pandemic as I'm sure you'll remember for us all to embrace creative practices in order to protect our mental health and maintain our wellbeing. So in both those sets of claims we can see the utility of creativity being invoked again. On the other hand, the association with the elite arts was also used to suggest that the time of the creative industries was over. People now need to be less romantic, more hard headed about work. And you may remember a poster produced by Rishi Sunak's office that showed a ballet dancer with a caption that suggested it was time for her to find a new career in IT. So it was a sort of get real statement elegantly presented presumably by a creative designer. As a more general criticism, not just relate to the post-pandemic economy, critics of the sector have argued strongly that the initial promise attached to work in the creative industries is seldom fulfilled. Creative work is likely to be poorly paid, short-term and insecure. Workers in the sector often find that their experience and qualifications aren't rewarded. Career pathways are uncertain. And all the worst employment inequalities of other sectors are perpetuated and even exacerbated. What success there is in the sector is heavily weighted towards white men from relatively privileged backgrounds. Now the central point of those criticisms is that the positive associations of creativity that I've been discussing blind workers to the difficulties. The promise of self-actualisation provides a greater motivation than financial reward or secure employment. That image of the artist pursuing fulfilment supposedly encourages workers to tolerate the difficulties. For example, to put in long hours over a long period and to let the boundaries between work and the rest of life get blurred. Angela McRobbie has argued that the romance of creativity is promulgated through university courses and mentoring schemes and reports and TV programmes that target young people and particularly young women. George Morgan and Paris Nelligan referred to the creativity hoax suggesting that mundane occupations are talked up as creative with the ultimate effect that young people are being forced to do bad work to serve the interests of the neoliberal economy. A number of writers have also noted that the promise is attached to creative work, like doing a job that you love and achieving fulfilment and the freedom of pursuing your own interests, that all of those are increasingly being attached more generally to other kinds of work as well without any apparent connection to the arts as if the exploitation of creativity is being extended. A further criticism is that as creative workers pursue individual projects and accept individual responsibility they are abandoning the more collective culture of old-style work. Perhaps unrealisingly they are relinquishing hard-won employment protections as they accept and sacrifice themselves to the competitive market-driven ideology of enterprise culture and neoliberalism. To consider these criticisms and the experience of creative practitioners more generally I want to turn to the particular area of psychology that I work in, critical discursive psychology. And like most academic areas this has developed over time so there are different versions. My interest is broadly in how our understandings of the world and of ourselves are shaped by our social environments. Now that's not to say of course that people follow conventions without any choice or without challenging them so that we're all the same of course not, or on the other hand that we're fickle and ever-changing so that we become somebody entirely different in every new situation. No, the premise is that we live within already existing cultural and social contexts but these are multiple and not static and allow of change. Social life is dynamic. People follow established ways of doing things and they innovate. They take ideas and conventions for granted, they operate from given perspectives and they also challenge them and sometimes confront the contradictions. So the approach assumes that existing ideas including many that have come from academic psychology provide our starting points for making sense of the world. We take them up selectively in our ongoing interactions and in the more extended project of constructing a personal identity a sense of who I am that's been shaped over time by the ideas that are in circulation in our social context. The personal is also social. Critical discuss of psychology doesn't attempt to tidy away the multiple associations of creativity or the contradictions that are set out. Instead these are all analysed as part of people's shared understanding or common sense. My research including with Karen Nittleton and Marie Paladin has analysed interviews with creative practitioners mostly in the UK. Creative workers, aspiring creative workers, art college students, people who pursue their own creative projects alongside more conventional employment. And in their talk yes we found the mix of ideas about creativity that I've already talked about. We also analysed their talk as a practice in itself. So when they talk about being creative about engaging creative work the participants are doing things. They're presenting themselves as certain kinds of people perhaps as unusual or special. Or they're justifying not pursuing a more conventional career. Or they're simply justifying the time they spent on the creative practice many of them refer to it as something that other people might see as selfish. In doing all these things in their talk the practitioner will be both repeating and innovating. They'll be talking appropriately for a new situation like a research interview but they'll be taking up and reusing and reshaping ideas. Well I'm surprisingly we found that the practitioners interpret what they do much more positively than the critics would. They emphasise that they love what they do and that claim of loving it has been found in many research projects over an extended period. They emphasise the associations with the elite arts. For instance they'll cite famous artists as influences on what they do. They present their own creative practice as special because art is special. So that image of the elite artist. But more in line with the ideas from psychology that I've mentioned the practitioners also characterise what they do as having practical applications or utility. It isn't just art for art's sake. It can make money most of them don't make much but some people do make a lot. For others the utility lies in escaping capitalism and its values. Pursuing a larger political or moral project. Mark Banks has written about how many creative workers link what they do to social and political causes in the motion of social justice or environmental protection. And we found that too. A different form of utility relates to the assumed therapeutic value of creativity. So echoing the claims and that report that I cited the practitioners emphasise that their practice is good for their own mental health. And they also say that it's good for other people's mental health. They might run creative workshops for example and say that they want to learn to exercise their own creativity and better manage their own stress and life difficulties. So in the talk of these research participants we can detect the ideas about creativity that I've mentioned. Not only the specialness and the association with the arts but also the idea of utility and the assumption that everyone is creative and will benefit from engaging in a creative practice. Critics of critical discuss of psychology might dismiss all this too much about words and ideas. Where's the territory that goes beyond a language game as a kind of rational intellectual exercise? Can research based on the analysis of language capture the feelings and emotions or in a now widely used term sorry Paul, the affect attached to creativity? The answer from critical discuss of psychologists is that the analysis of language use can tell us about the affect attached to creativity. Language isn't neatly separable from other meanings that circulate in a social context or from feelings. To speak or to communicate in other ways isn't an exercise in dry rationalising. It's a complex play around emotions and feelings because words and ideas are coloured with values and with associations and other life situations and practices. The affect attached to creativity appears not simply in that claim to love the work but in more complex ways. For example, to take an experience that many people will recognise I've referred to the association of creativity with elite art and in turn this tends to carry for many people further sort of meanings of some significant communication to recognise so that the practice of viewing art and visiting an art gallery carries an expectation of an emotional response and that can become an uncomfortable pressure. People experience uncertainty what am I supposed to be feeling here am I responding correctly if not am I failing in some way what does that indicate about the kind of person I am. All those feelings are linked to the meanings and associations of art. Of course those aren't the only possible feelings the experience of visiting a gallery might be linked to many other things to escaping the mundane engaging with the concerns that artists have shared over long periods of time recognising extraordinary technical skills. But what critical discourse of psychology can offer is an insight into how the meanings and associations the life practices and the affect, the feelings and emotions are entangled. Now that of course challenges another common sense image which is that each of us is a kind of bubbling container of mental and emotional activity full of internal thoughts and feelings that we subsequently express send out to the external world. Critical discourse of psychology challenges that individual container view of the person. I won't go into the arguments here but I'll just summarise the main claim. Aspects of experience that might be considered individual, emotional experiences feelings are socially mediated. It's as a consequence of social context that affect becomes recognisable and able to be named as a particular feeling and experience. Margaret Weatherall, the founder of critical discourse of psychology affective practice is a form of social practice and she says very complicated and mostly seamless feedbacks occur between accounts, interpretations body states, further interpretations further body states in recognisable flowing and changing episodes. Well if we take this back to the wider celebration of the creator sector we might see the sector as a whole and any specific creative practice like say painting or sculpture. We might see those as sites where these feedbacks are reinforced. Where meaning, doing and feeling are being connected and reconnected. And some of those connections between meanings, feelings and forms of doing were indicated in the interviews with the creative practitioners whose talk I've analysed. For instance one pattern in the practitioners talk was that engaging in a creative practice was presented as highly personal, something of the practitioners own, something that comes out of their history and who I am. So being creative is linked to an experience of a personal affirmation. Another pattern was that engaging in a creative practice was talked about as an escape an escape from mundanity from routines, from the claims of other people. And we might think of the image of the artist's studio as invoking that experience of escaping into solitude and focused working in a dedicated space. Though not everyone can attain it Alison Bain has written how women's challenges to studios tend to be challenged. In addition there was a pattern in the participants talk of references to a trail of encounters that for each of them contributed additional associations and feelings linked to the creative activity. For example practitioners who had bad academic experiences at school would talk about how the supposedly non-academic art classes were the only ones where they hadn't felt like failures. So the feeling that the success that they got there was then carried through to their later creative practice. For others the creative practice was linked positively to a long-term position as someone different as an outsider. So we're back to that image of the artist again. So that the feeling of not belonging acquired a more positive emotional colouring through creative practices. And more generally there was a pattern of references to pleasant childhood memories. Often very unremarkable activities that were shared by other people like doing paintings at primary school or watching people in your family sewing or doing woodwork or doing creative practices. The emotional colouring of those early experiences is reclaimed in the practitioners accounts of their current creative work and cited as an explanation for their current interest. And viewed on a wider scale this becomes a moving picture of ongoing change. For example, Susan Luckman and I have been looking at participants accounts of an Australian arts mentoring program. The participants in the program are practitioners who engage in a very wide range of specialisms and activities. The participation in the program working with mentors can be seen as a process through which the activities and the feeling experiences around those activities those are together confirmed to carry meanings as creative and positive meanings. So engagement in the program not only reinforces a participant's self identity as an artist or a creative practitioner it also reinforces a complex experience of doing and feeling as linked to that identification. I am an artist and this is what doing art feels like. Now of course the extended entanglement of doing and feeling and naming isn't guaranteed by the program or by any other situation there are always potential obstacles and complexities to be researched but the program is a window on change on new connections between meanings and feelings and forms of doing so that art worlds expand to incorporate new practices and new people and the new practices are all imbued with the effect of colours of being creative. Well to conclude where does all this leave creativity the claims about exploitation in the creative industries the undeniable difficulties that are faced by many creative workers can't be ignored the problems of short term contracts low earnings persistent inequalities if the celebration of creativity is only a mask for exploitation it might seem that a logical response is to destroy the illusion to abandon the concept of creativity entirely and return to more conventional ideas about work restating the benefits of working in more moderate terms the satisfaction of making an effort and using skills and achieving results and being of service on the other hand we might point out that the criticisms of the creative industries are now very well established new creative workers and practitioners will be under no illusions about the difficulties that they face and that is confirmed in the research and of course unfortunately another relevant point is that the negatives of work and employment in the creative sector precarious employment fall pay those aren't new and they aren't confined to that sector too many people are working too hard for too little reward and for most of them there won't be a neat choice between an insecure creative job and an unexploitative secure non-creative job the arguments from critical discursive psychology presented indicate that the celebration of creativity isn't just about words but it's part of a more complex phenomenon reinforcing links between meanings activities and effective experience creativity is an umbrella for a rich aggregate of words, ideas associations, practises and feelings that does offer experiences that are important and in addition creative practices creative work are linked to a personal identification the linking of creativity to the self and that in itself has a renewed importance in uncertain times this personal identification can provide what Bourdieu has called the generative principle of a life narrative the creative identification can become a source of continuity for workers who are on a stop-start pathway of uncertain employment the creative identification can substitute for the continuity of the older ideal of secure employment or a predictable career pathway and in a kind of paradox this alternative continuity of creativity also accommodates stops and starts the creative self can emerge and retreat we all know that it's difficult to make a living as a creative practitioner but if someone has to take on some drudge work as a day job just to make ends meet the creative self isn't being mobilised sure but it isn't erased or invalidated either the creative career is always there and it doesn't necessarily start at a specified age and life point like leaving school or proceed steadily and step with the passing of time and the stages of conventional family life it goes on separately to a linear narrative of biological ageing or a conventional career now of course that detachment of the creative pathway from the biological narrative is linked to one of the noted problems that's encountered by creative workers that their working lives don't easily accommodate family life responsibilities but again unfortunately those problems aren't limited to the creative occupations the positive corollary of a creative identification is that the personal career pathway can be joined or resumed at many life points the creative self remains available as for example in the situation of people who've spent many years looking after children or doing other kinds of dutiful work who then reclaim their creativity in a change of life or a change of existence being creative isn't linked to a particular age or a particular life stage it's possibilities and the emotions and feelings that are linked to it continue undiminished thank you Steffi, thank you for a wonderful talk we are going to head over to the coffee chairs we've got time to have a discussion super so if anybody's got any questions just raise your hand whilst you're getting ready I've got a lot of things to ask you but I'll limit myself to one initially so I'm interested in the opportunities that arise in the future so if you look at books like A World Without Work by Daniel Suskind which is proposing that some of the drudgery work that you've been discussing could disappear over the next 20 or 30 years that potentially put forward as a way of opening up opportunities for people to do things more for the fun of it and do you think there are opportunities there for people to be able to spend more of their lives in creative roles? I'm not good at prediction I think we have to be careful about utopian generalisations I heard Jill Rubery once give a very convincing lecture about how the promise of technology taking over from the jobs that people don't want to do that this had been kind of coming back and back and back and back and that it never quite manifested itself in the kind of in a sort of egalitarian utopia that one might hope for but I think I suppose also we are kind of on a moving train and I was very struck and I remember once talking to some younger people a context in which there was a lot of talk about the the threats to workers' rights and so on and it didn't make much well it didn't exactly not make sense to them but I think they almost felt as if they were being invited to go back to the past which wasn't their life you know they didn't have the option of going back to an earlier sort of working situation so I suppose I'm saying I'm trying to claim something positive in a complicated and always unequal changing context Thank you Yes please, we've got a roving mic that will come to you, great Thank you. Hi, I enjoyed that very much thank you very much indeed for that lecture, gave me some insights. My name's Paul Burns I'm Emeritus Professor of Entrepreneurship at the University of Bedfordshire which means I retired about 10 years ago also one time visiting professor here at the business school that was about 20 years ago. Anyway I had a book published early this year on entrepreneurship of course one of the chapters is on the entrepreneurial mindset and that chapter is based around a number of interviews with entrepreneurs and a psychometric test that they all took so the discussions were around the elements of that psychometric test and when the book came out earlier this year the publisher decided to put on the cover to make it attractive a little ceramic pot by a well-known famous successful ceramicist and I knew this was coming out so on an impulse I got her to take the same test, the entrepreneurial test that these entrepreneurs had taken and guess what she came out better than any of the other entrepreneurs she was exceedingly good at entrepreneurship the test itself doesn't necessarily tell you whether you're going to be successful it tells you whether you're going to be comfortable doing these things but when I started interviewing her about why she was comfortable doing these things what it meant to her she started talking about why she was successful and what she was saying to me was were many of the things that good management people would say but she was using a completely different set of languages words, constructs but they meant the same thing she had developed a brand for example a simple example around her name in certain ways and it was all good management practice now at the time it surprised me thinking about it more during your lecture for example I was thinking it shouldn't surprise me because many of the factors you were talking about many of the traits you were talking about that artists have are very similar indeed to entrepreneurs and I'm certain they get the same satisfaction from developing, growing their business as the artist does from being successful I wonder what your comments about that are is that a surprise to you the thing is I could comment at such length that we couldn't go through at all but a couple of the points I'd make I am not a person who works with tests and I am somewhat skeptical of them and I'm not a person who works with tests but I am somewhat skeptical of them and I think my point my opening point perhaps all I have really time to say is that are we talking about differences between people or are we talking about language that's being mobilised for certain purposes including in terms of self presentation that belongs to certain fields and I think I might leave it there with a question back I think it's too big for me to unravel because we are coming from some very different places here That's a safe answer but I mean you're right because the tests and I use the tests really as a discussion point rather than anything that's highly predicted it's just the result I got from her surprised me at the time and I do wonder whether after all many creative artists are self employed and this overlap between entrepreneurship and artistic endeavour creativity is part of an entrepreneur's soul if you like being innovative, being creative certainly the successful ones I wonder whether this overlap is something that could be exploited for example in training and education A lot of questions Thank you very much for that fascinating comments and questions Let's go here Just need to get a mic down to Rebecca Thank you It was great, really good to hear that summary of your work and this is a question that I think is perhaps much more in your wheelhouse because we're both interested in narratives and counter narratives and I was interested to know whether you ever got kind of counter narratives from your creative people that were all about it's not about the creativity I just want to earn lots of money or I just want to be famous or what were the stories about being creative that you thought were counter narratives were going against the general trend of what people say That's interesting I think I'm thinking about several bodies of interview material with a lot of differences I think one is the emphasis on skills and it's interesting that in different fields all of which obviously involve their own skills for some people the technical skills and the claim to improving their expertise in particular skills area is something that they would kind of hold on very hard to that it's not simply a matter of your creativity it's that I've learnt how to do this say working with glass for example and that is an inescapable aspect of what I'm doing I wonder if I could ask some questions around Covid and the pandemic I'm sorry we always end up talking about Covid and the pandemic these days but I mean I've had the interesting experience of joining the OU right in the middle and my experience has been dominated by having online meetings with the people and in fact Jean and Rose are here tonight it's the first time I've actually met them even though we must have been on I don't know 100 teams of course and you talked in your talk about group creativity I'm just wondering whether you're seeing any real challenges in the way we're currently working in getting that group creativity to really work and my starting position for that would be online is great for powering through a list of things you want to do but actually in being creative it is so much better being in the room with people reading body language sparking off each other so I don't know if you've got any thoughts about how creativity is affected by the way we're living our lives now well it's not my particular area of research but there are other people in the room who know quite a lot about the issues of working in online environments about basically about different kinds of interactions in person virtual and so on and I think we do kind of we can't ignore context teams is a context, we all know teams we all know Zoom, these are context which have their own sets of rules and ways of operating so it is different so putting aside the issue of creativity I'd just say that those experiences are different in a way that's not just about what people do but it's also about the meanings that are attached to them and so on and the possibilities and so I think that you can't say that they're just sort of substituting one for the other absolutely, yeah I mean it's interesting that online that some people are quite comfortable in the chat space making suggestions and new ideas actually probably more comfortable doing that than actually doing it in person so there are ups and downs in the different experiences that we're having certainly discussive researchers who focus on the different nature of different interactions would be pointing out how completely different those interactions are yeah yes please, just on the front thank you that was great I, naturally I want to ask you more about affect and the kind of what you found in the interviews and the talking around because towards the end the talk was very, seemed felt very positive whereas you start with the precarity and the expressions of the issues around the industry and the exploitativeness and the way people seem to feel or talk themselves back into it in what I felt expressed as a kind of like a blues hope almost so it's pointless but we must go on so towards the end I felt we lost the thread a bit of the precarity and the what's driving people forward so I want you to talk a bit more about the idea of affect and the emergence of things vis-à-vis the the socio-cultural context in which this happens and how people talked about that because it's also a thing obviously in academia where you have been to a conference an online conference last week where there was a whole session on the precarity of work in academia and I know you might not believe it but the UK is one of the more comfortable countries to work where there are career paths so you can get on a ladder and that ladder actually gets you somewhere where lots of colleagues work in countries where you're in your late 50s and you're still on two year contracts and things like that but people carry on and more people want to do research and you think what's going on there really good points so there were several threads but in a lot of discussion I mean I cited the book called the creativity hoax it's as if any phenomenon disappears beyond the cultural dupe argument and this is sort of profoundly unsatisfactory because people are engaging in a lot of activities with their eyes wide open and as I say a lot of the problems that were initially associated with the creative industries actually kind of had an implication it was almost as if people were living in two times again as if they could kind of go back to a sort of ideal of a sort of 1950-60s working which itself not many people had it was the kind of secure factory job where you kind of could work your way up the ladder and so on so it was trying to pin down not pin down but trying to understand what was going on also in the fluidity of these activities because as soon as you look at art worlds or creative fields and so on you're just in this continuous change the Australian Arts Mentoring Program the things that people their practices were so varied and so innovative and they crossed new technologies and old influences and it was fantastic and at the same time yes there is another story running alongside that of problems though not everyone has problems and sometimes I think it gets a little bit overemphasised that not everyone has problems but there did seem to be a set well I felt that the weatherals idea of effective practice gave some insight into how these these kind of multiple aspects come together in something that isn't purely illusory and isn't static either and is sort of simultaneously personal and yet it's recognised within art worlds and so on slightly incoherent answer I was trying to capture some complexity really another question on the front and we'll go to Muriel two more questions on the front I really enjoyed that stuff sorry I wanted to ask you a question kind of I was just thinking about the gendered edsifications of art and craft if you had had any I read an article recently there's been a mass load of women just leaving Etsy because it's just destroyed their love of what they were doing and I was just wondering if you'd come across that at all in your work this kind of idea that people started this Etsy business and how that was experientially for them and how they talk about that I don't know if that's come up in your research at all but it was really interesting research on Etsy which was a little bit the converse of how it was very much about selling not just something that you made that might be a printed fabric or jewelry or something but selling a whole self-image which was very very heavily tied to a conventional sort of the kind of thing that would make beauty freedom scream of sort of these beautiful houses and these beautiful children with a dog and the whole thing and that this was promoted through lifestyle photographs and so on I think so that's kind of one aspect then you've got another whole aspect of loads of research which basically says that women, people of colour and so on tend to be pushed into the least satisfactory forms of work within a creative context the lowest earning positions the fewest possibilities I don't think I can bring them together but yeah it's again a complex picture Thank you Steffan it was so interesting as always I really found very intriguing the connection you made between creativity and precarity and I think this speaks to the politics attached to the notion of creativity the creative industries what do artists do and so on and so forth and I wonder whether creativity as a context and as a concept has become a kind of tool for oppression in a way it sounds a bit much perhaps the way I put it but precarity seems to be part of what we understand as creativity so you're free, you change jobs you do a bit of barista on the side barista jobs and then in the evenings you go to your crafts or whatever you go to the festivals and you sell them and as some of the other questions raised similar issues particularly for women artists so I wonder I wonder if you agree and I wonder if you see a way out so it seems to me but that maybe we should resist creativity and maybe find new perhaps concepts, new visions of what it means to be a productive society or a society that makes that creates, that does or you know I wonder if creativity has been completely hijacked by this hope it makes sense You're sitting next to the person who wrote the definitive article on the political implications of creativity and that's Roslyn Gill and we've been responding to it ever since I think I suppose I was trying to go over those sort of possibilities I mean ideas don't disappear they're certainly being mobilised there is certainly a place as Anthony McRobbie says to draw people's attention to the implications but there's also I think there's also a place to tell other stories that there are other possibilities and also that there are well if I just take an example Lenny Henry has been pushing very hard for better opportunities for challenging raced inequalities within sectors which are very much recognised as creative TV and theatre and you could say that a point of what he is doing is to say it's not just about creativity it is about conditions and more certainty than just accepting precarity we can actually take action we can legislate we can have quotas we can do all sorts of things we can challenge our own recruitment procedures so I think I suppose I keep coming back to the fact that the ideas have become linked that can be mobilised to somebody's advantage well if you want to do this you're going to have to accept not having secure employment and you're going to be challenged and I don't think that creativity kind of disappears in these discussions complexes they are Thanks Dan, we're going to take two more very short questions we just got one online which I'm really keen to take if that's okay that's our first online Meryl did you have something Thank you so this is from YouTube live it's from Jordan Taylor if you can make a small commentary on the broader field of psychology why is there tension regarding the nature of creativity and why must it reduce to either an individual or a social phenomenon Okay, well hi George in Philadelphia I think I've given an overview which makes it reduce it sounds a bit reductive in the overview in fact there's a very the field of socio-cultural psychology has attempted very much to explore creativity as being somewhere between the individual and the social not going to the one of the other so it's I don't think that needs to be that dichotomy needs to be there as I say there are some of the research which I prefer to feel briefly does attempt to doesn't attempt to it embraces the implications of both Thanks Dan We're going to take one more We're just going to run just by a minute Hi Muriel, I'm an ethnomusicologist a creative, I'm a singer and I work for Rez so my question comes from an interdisciplinary perspective within the arts and humanities and social sciences we have a lot of talk about virtuosity your interviewees talked a lot about the links between high art or high creative outputs as well as some of the things they may do today ethnomusicologists would argue that creativity is everywhere virtuosity is not so my question from a social psychology perspective to you as an ethnomusicologist is are there any studies in social psychology that look at the differences between virtuosity and creativity and what are the differences between those people because it kind of ties in with the question asked online in terms of the link between the individual and the social and how are we different humans and I hang out with a lot of people in music psychology at Goldsmiths College so we had these conversations about universal assertions combined with what in social context can we actually say about these things when it comes to creativity so your thoughts are much appreciated thank you I don't know if I'm the right person to answer this really perhaps I'll move slightly sideways and say that somebody who's not a social psychologist a sociologist, Mark Banks wrote a really interesting book about creative justice in which he explored the potential conflict between social explanations social explorations and the kind of I want to use the word quality that's too crude but the sort of the specific aspects which somebody in an arts practitioner or art history area would recognise as distinctively making some activity good creative activity and some not whether it was good art good music or whatever in other words it's not simply a matter of ascribed labels and he was in a debate with Georgina Bourne about this it's a complex area I don't as somebody who's more or less turned if I feel particularly unable to come in on music but I think I would be always looking back to the context you know we're not going to be able to find meanings that can be tied neatly to a word and then carried over into every other context we're going to have to look at the particular debate the particular issues, the particular interests and so on that arise around it not a very full answer I'm afraid Okay thanks, thanks ever so much so we're up on time unfortunately but can I just thank everyone in the audience for the excellent questions thank you so much to everybody online thanks to everyone who's come along to the talk and finally can you just join me in thanking Stephanie for an excellent inaugural lecture Thank you very much