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Creative Agency / Creative Ecologies

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Creativity Policy, Partnerships and Practice in Education

Part of the book series: Creativity, Education and the Arts ((CEA))

Abstract

Harris reviews how their recent research has led to the establishment of Creative Agency, an interdisciplinary and cross-sectoral research lab at RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia. Creative Agency is what Barad has described as the kind of creative intra-action (“the mutual constitution of entangled agencies,” [Meeting the universe halfway: quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning. Duke University Press, Durham, 2007, p 33]), an encounter rather than an output of pre-existing individuals, identities, or fixed notion of expression and experience. Creative Agency is an ecosystem of like-minded artists, activists, researchers and citizens who wish to break down the walls of siloed productivity that keep creative practice and research atomized, alienated, and individual versus communal. It is an intervention into both the neoliberal academy as well as the commodification of the arts, creative and cultural industries more broadly.

This paper is an adaptation of a talk given by Harris at the National Institute of Dramatic Arts (NIDA) in Sydney, Australia, on July 10th, 2017 entitled ‘Creativity in Education: Surveying the Landscape’, and some core concepts from my current thinking highlighted in my keynote at the 2016 Creativity Summit in Melbourne, towards which this book is oriented.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Like Barad’s agential realism, a creative ecologies approach theorises the need to move from individualist projects (in Barad’s case metaphysics, in mine creativity) to more collectivist.

  2. 2.

    including the 2016 Harris Whole School Creativity Audit, the Harris Creativity Index, and empirical data upon which it is founded, can be seen in Harris 2016)

  3. 3.

    For more national creativity education policies, see Creative Learning through the Arts: An action plan for Wales 2015–2020, still the only national transdisciplinary creative arts curriculum in the world (Arts Council Wales 2015); Forrester and Hui (2007) on creativity in Hong Kong classroom; OECD (2015) on Korean classroom creativity training.

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Acknowledgement

The author’s sole-investigator study referenced in this article is funded by an Australian Research Council Future Fellowship grant (#FT170100022), and is entitled Transforming 21st Century Creativity Education in Australasia (2017-2021). There are no conflicts of interest regarding the publication of this manuscript.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Education, Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, Melbourne, VIC, Australia

    Anne Harris

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  1. Anne Harris
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Correspondence to Anne Harris .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Art and Design, UNSW Australia, Sydney, NSW, Australia

    Kim Snepvangers

  2. School of Education, University of Nottingham, Nottingham, UK

    Pat Thomson

  3. School of Education, Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, Melbourne, VIC, Australia

    Anne Harris

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Harris, A. (2018). Creative Agency / Creative Ecologies. In: Snepvangers, K., Thomson, P., Harris, A. (eds) Creativity Policy, Partnerships and Practice in Education. Creativity, Education and the Arts. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96725-7_4

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96725-7_4

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