Vlad Glăveanu

Principles for a Cultural Psychology of Creativity

This article focuses on a novel theoretical paradigm emerging in the study of human creativity: the cultural-psychological approach. It starts by differentiating between the long past of individualistic accounts of creativity (the lonely genius) and the short history of psychological understandings (the creative individual). The social and the cross-cultural psychology of creativity are both considered, together with their advantages and current limitations. Creativity is generally conceptualized as a process of artifact generation and five broad principles for a cultural psychology of creativity are presented. In clarifying the nature of creativity, a special consideration is given to the relationship between individuals, creativity, and culture. Finally, the role of the community in fostering and assessing creativity is suggested as a more realistic solution to the individual—society debate.

Rewriting the language of creativity: The five A's framework

For the past 5 decades the psychology of creativity has been influenced by what is known as the 4 Ps of creative expression: person, process, product, and press. This conceptual schema, initially proposed by Rhodes (1961), helped researchers structure their thinking about the phenomenon. However, it also supported an individualistic, static, and oftentimes disjointed vision of creativity. The present article aims to rewrite this fundamental language of the discipline by using terms that explicitly endorse a systemic, contextual, and dynamic approach. The 5 As framework—actor, action, artifact, audience, affordances—is grounded in current literature from sociocultural and ecological psychology as well as theories of the distributed mind and tries to achieve a more comprehensive and unitary perspective on creativity. Several theoretical, methodological, and practical implications are considered.

How are we creative together?: comparing sociocognitive and sociocultural answers

The present article aims to distinguish between a sociocognitive and a sociocultural approach to forms of “collective” creativity. While the first is well-illustrated by studies of group or team creativity, the second has generally supported investigations of collaborative creativity, most of them performed in the last few decades. The comparison between these two fields takes different levels into account, from the epistemological position adopted to issues concerning the theories and methods used. Special attention is given to reviewing models of creativity. However, although the literature on group creativity contains several cognitive models, there is a scarcity of such constructions for collaborative creativity. This is why a secondary aim of this material is to introduce a sociocultural theoretical framework and discuss its implications for developing situated models of creativity. In the end, the similarities and differences between the two paradigms are examined with reference to both theory and research and arguments are given for why it would be beneficial for sociocognitivists and socioculturalists to engage in a more consistent dialogue.

Habitual creativity: Revising habit, reconceptualizing creativity.

Current psychological scholarship is based on a dichotomy between habit, associated with automatic reflex behavior, and creativity, which involves deliberation, purpose and heuristic procedures. However, this account is problematic and contradicts everyday experience where mastery, for instance, is one of the highest levels of creative performance achieved within a habitual practice. This article argues that such a separation misrepresents both habit and creativity with important theoretical and practical consequences. A first step toward reconciling the two terms is made by revisiting a series of foundational strands of theory from psychology and related disciplines. In light of these sources, habit is reformulated as a social, situated, and open system, and habitual creativity defined as the intrinsically creative nature of customary action, reflected in the way habits adjust to dynamic contexts, the way they are used, combined, and ultimately perfected. Further distinctions are then made between habit, improvisation, and innovation. Both improvisational and innovative creativity are embedded in habitual forms and this is well illustrated by craftwork: a practiced type of activity on the basis of which artisans improvise, whenever obstacles or difficulties are encountered, and even get to innovate when their intention is to generate novel artifacts or work techniques.

Creating Creativity: Reflections from Fieldwork

The present article addresses the question of ‘When can we say something is creative?’ and, in answering it, takes a critical stand towards past and present scientific definitions of creativity. It challenges an implicit assumption in much psychological theory and research that creativity exists as an ‘objective’ feature of persons or products, universally recognised and independent of social agreement and cultural systems of norms and beliefs. Focusing on everyday life creative outcomes, the article includes both theoretical accounts and empirical examples from a research exploring creativity evaluations in the context of folk art. In the end, a multi-layered perspective of creativity assessment emerges, integrating dimensions such as newness and originality, value and usefulness, subjective reception and cultural reception of creative products. Implications for how we understand and study creativity are discussed.

Through the Creator's Eyes: Using the Subjective Camera to Study Craft Creativity.

This article addresses a methodological gap in the study of creativity: the difficulty of capturing the microgenesis of creative action in ways that would reflect both its psychological and behavioral dynamics. It explores the use of subjective camera (subcam) by research participants as part of an adapted Subjective Evidence-Based Ethnography (SEBE). This methodology combines (a) obtaining first person audio-visual recordings of creative action with a miniature video-camera worn at eye-level, (b) accessing the subjective experience of the participant through a confrontation interview based on the recording, and (c) formulating interpretations and discussing them with the participant. Illustrations of the technique are offered from a study of craft creativity, chosen as a test ground for its micro-level forms of creative expression. Findings exemplify how the technique enables microscopic description of creativity at both process and content levels. The benefits, limitations, and possible applications of the method are considered in the broader context of creativity studies.

Political Imagination, Otherness and the European Crisis

Europes Journal of Psychology, 2015, Vol. 11(4), 557–564, doi:10.5964/ejop.v11i4.1085 Published (VoR): 2015-11-27. *Corresponding author at: Department of Communication & Psychology, Aalborg University, Kroghstræde 3, 9220 Aalborg, Denmark. E-mail: vlad@hum.aau.dk This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

The Difference That Makes a ‘Creative’ Difference in Education

The perspective of creativity as rooted in difference opens up new questions for researchers and educators concerning the sharing of perspectives and, most importantly, the role of contradiction between perspectives within the educational act. While differences of perspective between students, teachers, or students and teachers, can be considered a precondition for the emergence of new and valuable ideas or practices, this condition is necessary but not sufficient. The process of engaging with difference in a productive or creative manner includes,being aware or, recognising, and valuing different perspectives, but this process itself doesn’t explain how exactly novelty emerges in classroom settings. Furthermore, not any kind of difference fosters creativity under any circumstances. What type of difference is favorable for creative action in educational settings? The present chapter addresses this question based on a series of theoretically-informed empirical examples.

Creativity and epistemologies of the South

This article explores the potential for rethinking creativity coming out of a particular type of socio-cultural critique represented by the ‘epistemologies of the South’. Our premise is that current theories of creativity are not only in close dialogue with larger debates around notions of personhood, agency, society, economy and our relation to the environment, but they also have important societal implications. At the same time, the conceptual and methodological narrowness specific for much theorising in this area makes the psychology of creativity largely incapable to answer calls for social transformation coming from different parts of the world, in particular from communities that experience colonialism and oppression. In order to situate our approach, we will first briefly introduce the Colombian case as a complex social, cultural and geographical space where the implications of Western colonial thinking remain obvious to this day. Second, we will discuss what is characteristic for the new epistemological foundations emerging from the global South and consider their impact on creativity theory. In the end, we will reflect on how a new conception of creativity contributes to thinking differently about the world and about our possibilities of acting within it not only scientifically and practically but also ethically.

The Status of the Social in Creativity Studies and the Pitfalls of Dichotomic Thinking

Abstract Creativity studies seem to be a stronghold for individual-based psychological theories. The reasons for this are numerous and complex and, among them, we can identify certain limited or counter-productive ways of conceptualising the social. In this reply to comments I address both the status of the social in creativity studies and the dichotomies that follow from adopting an external view of society and culture. Among them, the separation between creative potential and achievement is particularly problematic, as it constructs a reified, static, and individual notion of potential, reflected in the measurement of divergent thinking. I propose, towards the end, a perspectival model of creativity that radically socialises divergent thinking by placing the social at the core rather than the periphery of creative production. Finally, I suggest that including time into our theory and research holds the key to overcoming many of the false dichotomies that underline creativity studies, at least in psychology. A thoroughly social perspective on creativity might seem like a daring or foolish endeavour but it is, in my view, also the most promising.