Creative Bodies—Creative Minds
Raymond Williams proposed the concept of “ordinary” culture, as a culture created not by the arts, but in the process of everyday activities of ordinary people in the early 1960s [1]. Half a century later, the creative dimensions of ordinary culture and its social dimension experience a revival of scholarly interest [2, 3], fuelled by technological advances and the networking potential of new media audiences across the globe. Gender scholars, in the meantime, have levelled criticism at the gendered definition of creativity too often conceived as a property of a lone male genius and at the gender bias of research on creativity that had tended to overlook activities in which women typically engaged. Feminists, in particular, emphasised the nurturing effects of creativity and its contribution to the actualisation of human potential and increasing the individual and community life’s choices [4].
Scholarly interest in creativity as a social and gendered phenomenon coincides with renewed interest in the body, embodiment and the material, championed by, among others, feminist new materialism, the sociology of emotions, cultural sociology, and sensory methodologies in qualitative research. The second Creative Bodies—Creative Minds conference aims to bring these strands of inquiry together with a special emphasis on the interrogation of gender. The areas of interest for conference presentations include, but are certainly not limited to:
- Gender in everyday, artisan, artistic and professional creative activities;
- Embodied creativity; the intersections of the sensory, the affective and the verbal;
- Material, processual and relational aspects of creative practices;
- Gendering of non-traditional sites of creativity;
- DIY, Maker Movement: from knitting, through home-making to Open Source;
- Gender in the new media and the creative industries;
- Creative embodiment of gender and challenging gender boundaries;
- Art and creativity in protests, social mobilizations and everyday activism;
- Gendering the economy and politics of creativity;
- The place of creative methodologies in teaching and scholarly research, art-based research;
- The gender of creativity in social and cultural theory.