Inspecting Creativity: Making the Abstract Visible

Media education has an uneasy relationship with the rhetorics of creativity, which are explored in this article. In Learning: Creative Approaches that Raise Standards (OFSTED, 2010), creativity is operationalised. That is, as Marcuse (1972) tells us, the concept is made synonymous with a corresponding set of operations. The document takes the form of a ‘survey’, but its status as an Ofsted publication means that it is unlikely to be read merely as a neutral set of observations. It is more likely that this will be read as a set of guidelines for good practice – practice which, if adopted, is likely to lead to a favourable Ofsted grade in the future. In this sense the document operates, in a Foucaultian sense, as a discursive statement – it is regulatory, administrative and ‘limiting’. Ostensibly drawing upon a version of creativity produced, reified and reinforced by three other education policy documents (All Our Futures (1999), Creativity: Find it, promote it (QCA, 2004) and Nurturing Creativity in Young People (2006)) the Ofsted survey creates an illusion of continuity and coherence. It is, however, determined by the requirement for creativity to be amenable to inspection and, therefore, the concept is rendered unambiguous, unified and visible. By examining the rhetorical strategies employed in this document, and by starting with a rejection of the notion that ‘creativity’ is a ‘thing’ with essential qualities, it is possible to identify contradictions and tensions in this particular production of knowledge and ‘truth’. I suggest that such an approach, which borrows a philosophical stance from Foucault and specific tools of analysis from Fairclough, is necessary if we are to understand creativity as a concept that is always, already socially and historically constructed, rather than something which can be identified, implemented and assessed

What's in a word? the discursive construction of 'creativity'.

This work begins with the idea that creativity is a problematic concept generally and in education particularly. I argue that it is necessary to shed a belief in an ʻessenceʼ of creativity in order to understand how knowledge about creativity is produced. In a review of different approaches to creativity I identify the ways in which ʻtruth effectsʼ are produced in scientific and popular texts. Of particular interest here are approaches and assumptions (expressed through language and operations) in the domains of psychology, education and the arts. A post structuralist analytical methodology, drawing particularly on Foucaultʼs work, is justified in relation to the significance of concepts such as discourse, ideology, rhetoric and myth which, I argue, are crucial in understanding how creativity is made meaningful. The primary analysis is of key documents from the last decade which have sought to inform education policy on creativity: All our futures (NACCCE 1999); Creativity: Find it, promote it (QCA 2004); Nurturing creativity in young people (Roberts 2006); Learning: Creative approaches that raise standards (Ofsted 2010a). Attention is given to the discursive processes of authorising particular models of creativity in these documents, the ways in which tensions and contradictions are dealt with and the implications for ʻcreativityʼ in education. An explicitly reflective mode is adopted where appropriate, in order to highlight my epistemological development during the course of the research. This takes the form of ʻinterruptionsʼ between chapters. I argue, ultimately, that there is a case for only operating with the term ʻcreativityʼ in a reflexive, meta-discursive way and that this is a particular necessity in education

Mediaptating the ‘civic imperative’

Engaging young people is a perennial theme of UK elections, updated for the social media age but carrying long-standing assumptions. How ‘youth voice’ is articulated in specific practices, and on whose terms, is complex, especially in the ‘micropolitical’ social media age, but there is little space or time for this in either party campaigning or ‘old media’ analysis

The Affordances of Open Access in the Age of Online Scholarship

Editorial (intro): Welcome to the very first fully Open Access issue of the Media Education Research Journal. Articles are now available for anyone to read, free of charge, and in perpetuity with a Digital Object Identifier (DOI). There are no Article Processing Charges (APCs) either, so authors (or their institutions) do not need to pay to publish. This pivot to Open Access (OA) came at a time when there were lots of other ‘pivots’ occurring – not least the one to online learning during the pandemic. The pandemic was not a direct contributory factor to MERJ’s change in status, but (without ignoring the crisis and misery it precipitated) it did create a sense of possibility – it forced us to explore the affordances of the online world and, subsequently, has encouraged us to address the function and purpose of particular activities, acknowledging that some are not worse, and may even be better, online

Memory of Berlin: An accidental Autoethnography

Although the term autobiography features regularly in the essay film literature, autoethnography appears less so. John Burgan made Memory of Berlin (1998) in his thirties, to tell the story of how he was “triggered” by the fall of the Wall in 1989 to search for his birth mother, and through this film fuses the personal with the political and historical, and explores loss, trauma and melancholy. Using the lens of autoethnography, a form of inquiry which “puts questions and ‘issues of being’ into circulation and dialogue” (Bochner 53), I argue that Memory of Berlin embodies this autoethnographic spirit, if not avant la lettre, then certainly without its maker’s conscious engagement with theory. What is at stake in this is not merely whether or not Memory of Berlin can be described as autoethnographic in addition to autobiographical, but how identifying and understanding the autoethnographic mode might help us exemplify Catherine Russell’s argument that “autobiography becomes ethnographic at the point where the film or video maker understands his or her personal history to be implicated in larger social formations and historical processes” (276). Autoethnography, then, may be a term that we can make better use of in discussions of particular instances of the essay film, regardless of whether or not a filmmaker embarks on a fully consciously methodological endeavour

Media education in the time of coronavirus

Editorial published during the Coronavirus lockdown, considering the nature of Media Studies as a discipline and epistemological orientation

The comforting nonsense of creativity

Jonah Lehrer’s book Imagine: How Creativity Works was discredited when it was discovered that it included fabricated quotes by Bob Dylan. It was also criticised for cherry picking the science of creativity and adding little of worth to the literature on the subject. While this may be true, I suggest that much scientific literature about creativity is already epistemologically and methodologically incoherent, and characterised by the treatment of creativity as something with stable ontic status, rather than something which is always, inevitably produced through cultural processes of interpretation and association. An examination, using the tools of discourse analysis, of some of the research papers cited by Lehrer, along with other related examples, reveals some of the assumptions and rhetorical manoeuvres at work.Despite the overt falsehoods in his book, the stories that Jonah Lehrer tells us are consistent with the stories that the research, science, and policy tell us about creativity –all are equally fanciful. Nevertheless, if we choose to suspend our disbelief in such stories, and their rhetorical prestidigitation, there are some comforts and pleasures to be obtained from the illusion of essential humanity that they create

Editorial - David Bowie

The death of David Bowie, paradoxically, brings his ontic status into sharp relief, and, in turn, throws light on the construction of the figure of the artist – a spectre – the ‘creative practitioner’. An ontology of Bowie entails an interrogation of presence, absence and the historiographic portrait of the artist as a dead rock star (or not)