Capturing feeling and experience in research about creativity

The Open University

Your invitation to Professor Stephanie Taylor's Inaugural Lecture

This event will take place on campus and is livestreamed via our webpages and via YouTube. You will receive the links to join online in the confirmation email from Eventbrite.In her inaugural lecture, Professor Stephanie Taylor will discuss the associations of creativity, its contradictions and how we can understand the experience of being creative.Abstract:Creativity carries contradictory associations. It supposedly drives the unworldly artist who turns away from practical concerns in pursuit of creative fulfilment, and also the hard-headed entrepreneur and the supremely rational scientist. Creativity is thought of as the special gift that marks off a minority of ‘great’ people, and a capacity that all of us possess and should exercise, for our mental health. These contradictions co-exist in psychology and to some extent originated there. Academic psychologists have discussed the creativity of exceptional people, developed tests for creativity, modelled creative processes, and proposed that creativity is a basic human potential often inhibited by society. In the late 20th century, psychology contributed to the identification and naming of the creative industries as a significant sector in contemporary economies. Critics have suggested that the sector is exploitative because it uses the romantic promise of creativity that derives from the arts in order to attract workers and induce them to accept bad employment. Is there another way to understand the continuing commitment of the workers, even after the sector was badly hit by the pandemic? My research centres on creative practitioners, including creative workers and artists. My lecture will consider the different insights into these issues that derive from critical discursive psychology. I will discuss how practitioners themselves understand creativity and its rewards, and how we can understand their emotions and feelings, or the affective experience of being creative.ProfileStephanie Taylor is a Professor in Social Psychology in the School of Psychology and Counselling. She was a student at The Open University and returned as an academic in 1998. Her teaching for the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences includes contributions to introductory social sciences, research methods and postgraduate psychology modules. Her research centres on the critical analysis of common sense knowledge that shapes our understandings of ourselves and our social worlds. For some years, she has researched and written about the experience of contemporary creative practitioners. Her books include Contemporary Identities of Creativity and Creative Work (with Karen Littleton), Narratives of Identity and Place and What is Discourse Analysis?<a href="https://www.open.ac.uk/people/sjt38" target="_blank" data-msys-clicktrack="0" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer">Read more about Professor Taylor</a>Event programme:17:15		 Registration, coffee and tea on arrival18:00 -18:40 	Inaugural lecture: Capturing feeling and experience in research about creativity18:40 - 19:00 	Q&A19:00 - 20.00 	ReceptionWe very much hope you will be able to attend what promises to be an inspiring event and have your say. View other Open University inaugural lectures at: <a href="https://www.open.ac.uk/research/events/inaugural-lectures" target="_blank" data-msys-clicktrack="0" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer">https://www.open.ac.uk/research/events/inaugural-lectures</a>

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