Creativity and Popular Culture

Creativity and Popular Culture PDF Author: David Holbrook
Publisher: Fairleigh Dickinson Univ Press
ISBN: 9780838634738
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 292

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Book Description
"In this book David Holbrook offers a fresh definition of creativity as a natural and fundamental dynamic in all human beings by which they seek to make sense of their lives. The symbolic expression of children is examined to support this view. Also examined are various manifestations of popular culture, manifestations that Holbrook suggests are manipulative - failing to satisfy primary needs, tending to encourage overdependence and regression." "Holbrook believes that commercial culture has intuitively found ways of exploiting the natural needs of children. Without being able to offer any genuine sustenance for the existential needs of the child, commercial culture uses unconscious material to arouse deep anxieties and to seize the child's fascinated interest while promoting regression. Holbrook considers children's comics and pop lyrics, among other cultural media, and through them shows that commercial culture tends to enlist a preoccupation with disturbances for which there are no solutions. The anxiety aroused undermines a child's achievements. Children often seek solace in "pop cults" and, in the words of the late Marxist critic Charles Parker, are made "agents of their own debauchery." The fascination of cult loyalty impedes their natural growth and maturation processes - and their infantile addiction can follow them into adulthood. Case in point is the nostalgia of the Beatles generation. Upon John Lennon's death in 1980, some individuals who had grown up listening to the Beatles declared that there was "nothing left to live for." Holbrook investigates such group hysteria, noting its effects on the family, and asks poignantly if the total perversion of adult-child relationships is necessary to sell electronic recordings." "Creativity and Popular Culture offers a new basis for discrimination in cultural criticism. That David Holbrook has hit his target is perhaps best proven by the fact that the publisher of one comic he discusses has refused to allow reproduction of the drawings."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

Popular Culture and the Civic Imagination

Popular Culture and the Civic Imagination PDF Author: Henry Jenkins
Publisher: NYU Press
ISBN: 1479891258
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 376

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Book Description
How popular culture is engaged by activists to effect emancipatory political change One cannot change the world unless one can imagine what a better world might look like. Civic imagination is the capacity to conceptualize alternatives to current cultural, social, political, or economic conditions; it also requires the ability to see oneself as a civic agent capable of making change, as a participant in a larger democratic culture. Popular Culture and the Civic Imagination represents a call for greater clarity about what we’re fighting for—not just what we’re fighting against. Across more than thirty examples from social movements around the world, this casebook proposes “civic imagination” as a framework that can help us identify, support, and practice new kinds of communal participation. As the contributors demonstrate, young people, in particular, are turning to popular culture—from Beyoncé to Bollywood, from Smokey Bear to Hamilton, from comic books to VR—for the vernacular through which they can express their discontent with current conditions. A young activist uses YouTube to speak back against J. K. Rowling in the voice of Cho Chang in order to challenge the superficial representation of Asian Americans in children’s literature. Murals in Los Angeles are employed to construct a mythic imagination of Chicano identity. Twitter users have turned to #BlackGirlMagic to highlight the black radical imagination and construct new visions of female empowerment. In each instance, activists demonstrate what happens when the creative energies of fans are infused with deep political commitment, mobilizing new visions of what a better democracy might look like.

The Invention of Creativity

The Invention of Creativity PDF Author: Andreas Reckwitz
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 0745697070
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 300

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Book Description
Contemporary society has seen an unprecedented rise in both the demand and the desire to be creative, to bring something new into the world. Once the reserve of artistic subcultures, creativity has now become a universal model for culture and an imperative in many parts of society. In this new book, cultural sociologist Andreas Reckwitz investigates how the ideal of creativity has grown into a major social force, from the art of the avant-garde and postmodernism to the ‘creative industries’ and the innovation economy, the psychology of creativity and self-growth, the media representation of creative stars, and the urban design of ‘creative cities’. Where creativity is often assumed to be a force for good, Reckwitz looks critically at how this imperative has developed from the 1970s to the present day. Though we may well perceive creativity as the realization of some natural and innate potential within us, it has rather to be understood within the structures of a very specific culture of the new in late modern society. The Invention of Creativity is a bold and refreshing counter to conventional wisdom that shows how our age is defined by radical and restrictive processes of social aestheticization. It will be of great interest to those working in a variety of disciplines, from cultural and social theory to art history and aesthetics.

Culture Crash

Culture Crash PDF Author: Scott Timberg
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300210655
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 321

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Book Description
Change is no stranger to us in the twenty-first century. We must constantly adjust to an evolving world, to transformation and innovation. But for many thousands of creative artists, a torrent of recent changes has made it all but impossible to earn a living. A persistent economic recession, social shifts, and technological change have combined to put our artists—from graphic designers to indie-rock musicians, from architects to booksellers—out of work. This important book looks deeply and broadly into the roots of the crisis of the creative class in America and tells us why it matters. Scott Timberg considers the human cost as well as the unintended consequences of shuttered record stores, decimated newspapers, music piracy, and a general attitude of indifference. He identifies social tensions and contradictions—most concerning the artist’s place in society—that have plunged the creative class into a fight for survival. Timberg shows how America’s now-collapsing middlebrow culture—a culture once derided by intellectuals like Dwight Macdonald—appears, from today’s vantage point, to have been at least a Silver Age. Timberg’s reporting is essential reading for anyone who works in the world of culture, knows someone who does, or cares about the work creative artists produce.

Design, Creativity & Culture

Design, Creativity & Culture PDF Author: Maurice Barnwell
Publisher: Black Dog Pub Limited
ISBN: 9781907317408
Category : Design
Languages : en
Pages : 240

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Book Description
"This book makes reference to the full spectrum of design disciplines, providing examples from architecture, interior, product, graphic and fashion design, from a variety of cultures. It provides examples and illustrations from a wide range of topics from the Big Bang to The Matrix, cave wall drawings to Twitter and Modernism to mass culture."--Publisher.

Thinking Through Creativity and Culture

Thinking Through Creativity and Culture PDF Author: Vlad Petre Glaveanu
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 135147202X
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 520

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Book Description
Creativity and culture are inherently linked. Society and culture are part and parcel of creativity's process, outcome, and subjective experience. Equally, creativity does not reside in the individual independent of culture and society.Vlad Petre Glveanu's basic framework includes creators and community, from which new artifacts emerge and existing artifacts are developed. He points to a relationship between self and other, new and old, specific for every creative act. Using this multifaceted system requires that researchers employ ecological research in order to capture the heterogeneity and social dimensions of creativity.Glveanu uses an approach based on cultural psychology to present creativity in lay terms and within everyday settings. He concludes with a unitary cultural framework of creativity interrelating actors, audiences, actions, artifacts, and affordances.

Creativity and Popular Culture

Creativity and Popular Culture PDF Author: David Holbrook
Publisher: Fairleigh Dickinson Univ Press
ISBN: 9780838634738
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 292

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Book Description
"In this book David Holbrook offers a fresh definition of creativity as a natural and fundamental dynamic in all human beings by which they seek to make sense of their lives. The symbolic expression of children is examined to support this view. Also examined are various manifestations of popular culture, manifestations that Holbrook suggests are manipulative - failing to satisfy primary needs, tending to encourage overdependence and regression." "Holbrook believes that commercial culture has intuitively found ways of exploiting the natural needs of children. Without being able to offer any genuine sustenance for the existential needs of the child, commercial culture uses unconscious material to arouse deep anxieties and to seize the child's fascinated interest while promoting regression. Holbrook considers children's comics and pop lyrics, among other cultural media, and through them shows that commercial culture tends to enlist a preoccupation with disturbances for which there are no solutions. The anxiety aroused undermines a child's achievements. Children often seek solace in "pop cults" and, in the words of the late Marxist critic Charles Parker, are made "agents of their own debauchery." The fascination of cult loyalty impedes their natural growth and maturation processes - and their infantile addiction can follow them into adulthood. Case in point is the nostalgia of the Beatles generation. Upon John Lennon's death in 1980, some individuals who had grown up listening to the Beatles declared that there was "nothing left to live for." Holbrook investigates such group hysteria, noting its effects on the family, and asks poignantly if the total perversion of adult-child relationships is necessary to sell electronic recordings." "Creativity and Popular Culture offers a new basis for discrimination in cultural criticism. That David Holbrook has hit his target is perhaps best proven by the fact that the publisher of one comic he discusses has refused to allow reproduction of the drawings."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

Creativity, Religion and Youth Cultures

Creativity, Religion and Youth Cultures PDF Author: Anne M. Harris
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 131741019X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 225

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Book Description
This book explores the rich intersection between faith, religion and performing arts in culture-based youth groups. The co-constitutive identity-building work of music, performance, and drama for Samoan and Sudanese youth in church contexts has given rise to new considerations of diversity, cultural identity and the religious practices and rituals that inform them. For these young people, their culture-specific churches provide a safe if "imagined community" (Anderson, 2006) in which they can express these emerging identities, which move beyond simple framings like "multicultural" to explicitly include faith practices. These identities emerge in combination with popular cultural art forms like hip hop, R-&-B and gospel music traditions, and performance influences drawn from American, British and European popular cultural forms (including fashion, reality television, social media, gaming, and online video-sharing). The book also examines the ways in which diasporic experiences are reshaping these cultural and gendered identities and locations.

The Creativity Conundrum

The Creativity Conundrum PDF Author: Robert J. Sternberg
Publisher: Psychology Press
ISBN: 1134948859
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 156

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Book Description
This book challenges traditional notions of creativity as a trait, and brings forward ideas of multiple types of creativity, along with the possibility of development of creativity.

Experiencing Creativity

Experiencing Creativity PDF Author: Robert N. Wilson
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000675688
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 183

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Book Description
First published in 1986, neither the creative process nor the art object, singly or together, has been often in the forefront of sociological attention. The author suggests that we may safely assume that art is multidetermined, and that an adequate explanation of creativity will draw upon the conceptual and evidential resources of psychology, sociology, and anthropology. This is a study building on Harry Murray’s classic Explorations in Personality of the 1930s.

Play, Creativity and Digital Cultures

Play, Creativity and Digital Cultures PDF Author: Rebekah Willett
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135894477
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 256

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Book Description
Recent work on children's digital cultures has identified a range of literacies emerging through children's engagement with new media technologies. This edited collection focuses on children's digital cultures, specifically examining the role of play and creativity in learning with these new technologies. The chapters in this book were contributed by an international range of respected researchers, who seek to extend our understandings of children's interactions with new media, both within and outside of school. They address and provide evidence for continuing debates around the following questions: What notions of creativity are useful in our fields? How does an understanding of play inform analysis of children's engagement with digital cultures? How might school practice take account of out-of-school learning in relation to digital cultures? How can we understand children's engagements with digital technologies in commercialized spaces? Offering current research, theoretical debate and empirical studies, this intriguing text will challenge the thinking of scholars and teachers alike as it explores the evolving nature of play within the media landscape of the twenty-first century.