Studio Studies: Ethnographies of Creative Production – Open panel at the EASST/4S Meeting (Oct 2012, Copenhagen)

Dates: 17-20 October 2012
Location: Copenhagen
Website: http://www.4sonline.org/meeting
Deadline for submission of abstracts: 11 March 2012

Organizers: Alex Wilkie and Ignacio Farias

Given the importance placed on ‘creativity’, ‘creative economy’ and ‘creative industry’ in both national and international policy contexts, it is surprising that understanding of creativity-in-action remains largely underdeveloped. What is more surprising is that creativity is commonly associated with (unobservable) cognitive activity that can only be stimulated by the environment, which has led many scholars to see social networks and/or urban environments as the main sources for creativity. What gets lost here are the concrete practices through which the ‘new’ comes into being in different disciplines and in different economic sectors. In foregrounding the view of creativity as a local process distributed amongst heterogeneous actors this panel seeks to explore and compare accounts of sites of creative practice. Our insight is that the studio is a defining feature of creative production. Thus, building on workplace and laboratory studies this panel aims to draw together emerging ethnographic work on creative practice and in doing so define and investigate a lacuna in the STS imagination. To address the studio, as a key site of creative production, we welcome presentations based on in-depth case studies that focus on key ‘creative industries’, including the arts, crafts and cultural and creative industries. Accordingly, this panel invites comparison of different creative models and practices, thereby acknowledging the diversity of in-situ creative practice as well as providing a survey of different creative disciplines.

A not exhaustive list of themes:
·       The sociospatial organisation of the studio.
·       Socio-material practices of affect, sense and sensation.
·       Disciplinary & interdisciplinary work.
·       Problematisation and the form of projects.
·       The role of (visual) inscription and conscription devices.
·       Practices and technologies of imagination, conception, and projection.
·       The role and production of creative knowledge.
·       Testing, evaluation and accountability.
·       Newness, uniqueness and originality.
·       User-involvement in creative production.
·       Economic and temporal processes.

Please submit your abstract electronically via the webpage of the conference: http://www.4sonline.org/meeting

The deadline for abstract submissions is March 11.