ABSTRACT
This chapter explores understandings of creativity via an analysis of the rhetorical or discursive traditions that have contributed to the subjects’ study: where these understandings come from in terms of their theoretical heritage, what functions they serve, how they are used, and in whose interest. The focus, as in previous work (Banaji and Burn, 2007b; Banaji, 2008), is on discourses about creativity circulating in the public domains of academia, practice and policy. The aim of this approach is not to investigate creativity itself, but rather what is written and said about it. Creativity is thus presented here as something constructed through discourse, and the ensuing discussion aims to envision more clearly how such constructions work, what claims are being made, and how we as researchers, practitioners, project evaluators and/or policy-makers might choose to locate ourselves in relation to these claims. Saliently, this approach aims to clarify understandings of and strengthen judgements about claims made in relation to creativity. In the critical review of literature from which this chapter originates (Banaji and Burn, 2007a), the rhetorics of creativity are given names which broadly correspond to the main theoretical underpinnings or the ideological beliefs of those who deploy them. Thus: Creative Genius; Democratic Creativity and Cultural Re/Production; Ubiquitous Creativity; Creativity for Social Good; Creativity as Economic Imperative; Play and Creativity; Creativity and Cognition; the Creative Affordances of Technology; the Creative Classroom; and Creative Arts and Political Challenge. As other chapters in this collection testify, the rhetorics identified have complex histories, particularly in traditions of philosophical thought about creativity since the European Enlightenment and in parallel forms of artistic practice, and in pedagogic traditions related to creativity over the same period.
