Creativity,health and arts advocacy

Creativity is popularly related to innovation and new ideas. This invention‐cognition view of creativity is too narrow a concept for artistic creativity. Artistic creation is also about reproducing traditions and emotional (“affective”) processes. Widespread use of the popular invention‐cognition view of creativity in arts advocacy obscures wider dimensions of artistic creativity. This article focuses attention on the affective dimension of artistic creation. It surveys “arts therapy” literature and investigates how lessons of this literature can be used to improve the persuasiveness of arts advocacy arguments that appeal to the concept of creativity.     

Who we are at work: millennial women,everyday inequalities and insecure work

Based on research with millennial women in Canada, this article examines the process of workplace identity, or (un)conscious strategies of identity management that young women employ at work. First, despite increasing labour market participation from women, young women’s experience of the workplace can be one of precarity and insecurity. Many millennial women have responded with a ‘positive front’ – saying yes to all work tasks while highlighting their likability and acceptance of the status quo. This is not seen as a permanent strategy, but rather one that gets you into the workplace and ‘liked’ until your work speaks for itself. Second, and operating at the same time, young women also use tactics to confront intersections of ageism/sexism in the workplace. While some employ conscious strategies to be ‘taken seriously’ through dress, small talk, even taking on stereotypical traits of masculinity to be recognized as competent, others explicitly confront inequality through ‘girlie feminism’ with a pro-femininity work identity that challenges the masculine-coded norms of how a successful workplace operates and what it looks like. In jobs of all types, who we are at work is a constantly shifting negotiation between how we are treated and seen by others, the workplace as a social space, our past experiences and our own expectations. Considering young women’s work identities reveals how power and privilege operate in the workplace, and the possibilities of young women’s agential challenges to inequitable workplace norms and a precarious labour market.     

Creativity,Culture and Urban Strategies: A Fallacy in Cultural Urban Strategies

Two fields of knowledge have been of special importance for the emergence of culture-led urban planning in Norwegian cities: one concerns the understanding of the potential of culture as an economic driving force in urban regeneration, while the other focuses on the emergence of the concept of the “creative class” and has drawn attention to the importance of competence and creativity in urban development. Despite clear connections between the two fields, it may appear that false connections have been made in regeneration strategies in a number of cities. Based on analyses of the culture-led urban strategy of Kristiansand, a small Norwegian city, these knowledge fields are discussed and it is claimed that there seems to be a fallacy in how they are treated in the culture-led urban strategy. The fallacy concerns the way that creativity is equated with culture and further how theories about the emergence of the creative class are equated with a culture industry approach to urban planning. Questions are raised about the potential of culture industry strategies and it is argued that the potential for growth in small cities may not be as great as the public debate and research conducted in large metropolises might suggest.     

Chance,Creativity, and the Discovery of the Nerve Growth Factor

This essay analyzes the history of the Nerve Growth Factor (NGF) discovery, relating some of the principles of the theory of scientific creativity to the cognitive and personal qualities of the scientists that participated in the discovery, particulary Rita Levi-Montalcini and Viktor Hamburger. The discovery of NGF is especially attractive for the history of science as it involves chance, luck, creativity, and some extraordinary scientists.     

Creativity,geopolitics and ontological security: satire on Russia and the war in Ukraine

ABSTRACT

Some states create geographical imaginaries that envision the homeland as coherent and good, and the spaces of Others as disordered, dangerous and therefore legitimate objects of violence. Such ‘violent cartographies’ serve not only to justify policy actions, but constitute bordering practices aiming to provide stability, integrity and continuity to the Self, sometimes referred to as ‘ontological security’. This article examines the role of creativity and artistic imagination in challenging dominant geopolitical narratives. It examines satire on the Russian-language internet, which played upon the Russian state’s geopolitical narrative about the war in Ukraine 2014–15. Three themes within this dominant narrative – (1) the imperialist idea of Russia as a modernising force, (2) the gendering of Ukraine as feminine and Europe as homosexual and (3) the idea that the current war was a re-enactment of Russia’s historical battle against fascism – all became the object of fun-making in satire. I argue that satire, by appropriating, repeating but slightly displacing official rhetoric in ways that make it appear ridiculous, may destabilise dominant narratives of ontological security and challenge their strive towards closure. Satire may expose the silences of dominant narratives and undermine the essentialism and binarism upon which they rely, opening up for estrangement and disidentification.     

Creativity gaps and gender gaps: women,men and place in the United States

This article situates Florida's (2002) work on creative regions in the United States in the context of a critical discussion of place and gender and investigates the gender–class structure of his most and least creative regions. It analyzes the distribution of creative class, working class and service class occupations by gender within those 21 regions as well as earnings, household income, poverty and educational attainment using data from the US Census 2000. Women and men are compared within and across the two categories of most and least creative regions. The major finding is that the gender gap in earnings within categories of regions is larger than the creativity gap, i.e. the earnings gap within genders across regions. As new technology industries have been layered over old industries, altering spatial divisions of labor, gendered labor remains integrated in largely traditional ways.     

Momentarily immobile: Backpacking,farm work,and hostels in Bundaberg,Australia

The Working Holiday Maker visa encourages young people from 44 nations to live and work for up to three years in Australia, contributing immensely to the temporary migrant workforce in regional areas. However, the conditions they experience while completing 88 days of mandatory ‘farm work’ to apply for visa extensions often place them in vulnerable situations and states of immobility that are counter to the perception of backpackers as mobile. Types of accommodation specifically for temporary migrant farm workers are known as working hostels and in some cases the ways in which they are administered have perpetuated the precarious and immobile situations in which backpackers find themselves. This article explores the lived experiences of backpackers who have undertaken farm work in the Bundaberg region, a new ‘hot spot’ for seasonal migrant labour. Drawing on ethnographic observations and interviews with 35 working holiday makers, the article advances the suggestion that recent shifts in hostelling accommodation practices and increased competition for agricultural jobs in the region place individuals in increasingly precarious states of immobility.     

Group Identity, Individual Creativity, and Symbolic Generation in a BaKongo Diaspora

This article applies theories of group dynamics and individual agency to past material expressions of core symbols within particular African American religious beliefs. The past creation and use of such artifacts is analyzed using theories concerning modes of symbolic expression, the interplay of dominant and nondominant religions, formation and maintenance of social group identities, and the role of individual creativity and innovation within those processes. This analysis demonstrates the ways in which facets of the core symbolic expressions of the BaKongo people of West Central Africa evolved over time and across the trans-Atlantic region.     

How incipient colonies create territory: the textual surveys of New Spain, 1520s–1620s

The study of colonial surveying and cartography has become key to understanding the history of European colonialism because of the recognition that land surveys and maps not only represent territory but form part of the process through which territory comes into being. While many studies have therefore focused on the history of instrumental surveying and cartography in New Spain, roughly equivalent to present-day Mexico, between the seventeenth and twentieth century, the textual surveys of the sixteenth century that helped to bring the initial colonial territory into being have gone largely unstudied. Content analysis of textual land surveys included in sixteenth-century viceregal land grants for sheep and cattle ranches demonstrates variation in references to distance, direction, and borders that begins to reveal a process of negotiation among local actors and centralized state power that was contingent on environmental, economic, and demographic differences between highland and lowland landscapes.