Everyday creativity in (post)socialism

Everyday Creativity in (Post)Socialism: Theoretical and Methodological Scoping

Cooperation partner in Graz: Univ.-Prof. Dr. habil. Libora Oates-Indruchova, PhD, Department of Sociology
Junior Fellow: Aleksandra Fila

Incoming Senior Fellow: doc. Vera Sokolova, PhD, Charles University, Prague; Tereza Jiroutová Kynčlová, PhD, Charles University, Prague
Incoming Junior Fellows: Elisabeth Pedersen, Masaryk University

Period: January 2022 to June 2023
Symposium: Exploratory Workshop (2.-3.6.2022)

Content:

Feminist critique of the male bias of discourse and research on creativity goes back to Virginia Wolf's "A Room of One's Own" (1994[1929]), in which she famously argued that individuals need certain social and economic conditions to express their creativity, and that these conditions are generally not present for women. Linda Nochlin continued the argument in relation to the visual arts and considered the structural barriers to women's creativity in her answer to the question "Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?" (1971). Angela McRobbie (1991[1980]) was the first to point out the andocentrism of research on subcultures in the Birmingham School of Cultural Studies. She noted that both Willis and Dirk Hebdige "[stützen sich] auf die Vorstellung [...], dass Kontrolle und Kreativität aus untergeordneten Klassenpositionen heraus ausgeübt werden" (McRobbie 1991, p. 18), excluding gender as another possible position.

The new millennium has been marked by efforts to redefine creativity in terms of gender and to address existing dichotomies in its conceptualization, such as professional/everyday and public/private. Gender researchers in particular have reconsidered gendered definitions of creativity, which often lead to the exclusion of activities typically practiced by women (Eisler and Montuori 2007, p. 480, Platt 2017, p. 362). New reconceptualizations argue that creativity is "in den alltäglichsten häuslichen Praktiken, in Arbeitsaufläufen und Freizeitaktivitäten präsent" (Edensor and Millington 2019, p. 38). This approach also involves mapping new geographies of making (and connecting): the making of self and social relations, the making of place and politics, and the making of environmental relations (Hawkins and Price 2018), all of which are relevant to gender researchers studying creativity.

Although some research has already been conducted on state socialist and post-socialist environments (e.g. Reid 2002), research is still thin on this ground. The aim of this project is to initiate a more systematic study of everyday creativity in state socialism and post-socialism.