Special Issue: Creative Citizen Conference September 2014

Creative Citizens: A Photo Collection

<abstract xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">Community-led design is a practice whereby people take the opportunity to engage directly and creatively in the formulation of solutions for their own environment. In community-led design, professionals, stakeholders and communities come together to develop sustainable solutions to complex design and planning problems. Such projects can include the co-creation of public spaces, communal and public services, as well as processes and tools for citizen participation.
Web 2.0 technologies and social media offer new opportunities for community-led design, potentially transforming the ways in which people take part in these processes and their ability to make an impact. This paper reports insights from the use of different types of media in community-led design projects and reflects on their role and their value for those involved, as well as for their wider communities.</abstract>

Learning from the use of media in community-led design projects

<abstract xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">This paper examines the Shoot to Live community media initiative and data collected from this study will provide a discussion on whether or not this programme can be used as a development approach for at-risk youth. Discourses on community media, youth and development will be used as the theoretical framework for this study. Accordingly, theory and practice from these constructs can be used to develop ideas that emerge from the Shoot to Live programme. This paper initially assesses some of the various degrees of success of this community media initiative. Finally, the findings of this study will play a pertinent role in the creation, evaluation and transformation of future community media programmes and youth development approaches particularly in developing countries.</abstract>

Can community media programmes serve as developmental approaches for at-risk youth?

<abstract xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">Environmental degradation is one of the main challenges facing the modern world. Transition to sustainable development is often cited as a strategy to contain the situation. Arguably, nation-states cannot manage this shift alone. Therefore, individuals are urged to participate in the process of transition to sustainable development by acting sustainably in their capacity as consumers and citizens. Sustainable consumption is an essential way for consumers to contribute to sustainable development. This article examines the roles that the creative input of consumers in the zero-waste brand community on Facebook might play for consumers. The focus is placed on the two theoretical possibilities: manifestation of environmental citizenship and means of self-expression. Drawing on the ideas of individualisation of responsibility and political consumerism, the article explores the creative input of consumers in the zero-waste brand community as a potentially political form of advocacy for sustainable consumption and development. The article concludes that the creative input of consumers in the zero-waste brand community might be viewed as an impact-oriented pro-environmental behaviour, whose role is a combination of manifestation of environmental citizenship and means of self-expression. As such, it fits better with the framework of depoliticised alternative hedonism than political consumerism.</abstract>

Creativity for sustainable development?

<abstract xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">This paper examines the democratic co-production between the artist Jeanne Van Heeswijk, the Liverpool Biennial, local citizens and its local and global social network of members, as together they develop alternatives to cultural and economic regeneration. In a neighbourhood that has suffered from over a decade of stalled regeneration programmes, Homebaked is located on the high street just a few steps from the famous Liverpool Football Club. It was set up as the first UK urban Community Land Trust (CLT) to design customised housing, support social enterprises, enhance the wellbeing of the community and open a co-operative community-run bakery. Homebaked’s principle is one of creating value, both social and monetary, which stays within the neighbourhood and is invested back into its communities. With the economic support through its extensive social network implemented through its Kickstarter campaign, the local and worldwide members of Homebaked have learned how to take matters into their own hands. Drawing on over four years of embedded PhD research, 24 Notebooks and personal experience as a volunteer and CLT board member, this paper aims to make visible the continuous shifts between a tentative agonistic framework between art biennial, artist and creative citizens as cultural co-producers, as they challenge and influence local economic drivers. The paper questions if artists and biennial, with their local and international communities, are capable of creating an ‘agonistic public sphere’ (<xref ref-type="bibr" rid="j_csci.74_ref_006">Mouffe, 2007</xref>), where they can address one another in the co-production of new cultural and economic infrastructures to create social change.</abstract>

Becoming Homebaked

<abstract xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">This paper raises the question of how a proposition such as ‘Creative Citizenship’ might fit into the UK policy landscape. It begins by describing the appeal of such a concept to politicians keen to latch on to an idea that positions the electorate as creative, engaged and technologically astute. However, Creative Citizenship runs the dangers of being yet another fashionable, wide-ranging concept that political leaders tend to be ‘mesmerised’ by as they write up their election manifestos. Initiatives based on such ideas rarely meet with success and therefore for Creative Citizenship not to meet with the same fate it must be more clearly defined. The paper outlines a manifesto for Creative Citizenship that would allow for a more targeted application on those areas of public policy where the features of Creative Citizenship might be seen to be making a positive difference.</abstract>

Creative citizenship and the public policy process

<abstract xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">The Creative Citizens project asks whether new media enhance new forms and scale of creative civic activities. If so, the project seeks to identify practices that will exploit this new individual and collective activity, presumably as a means of achieving authentic self-governance. This paper considers three potential obstacles to the realization of a creative citizenship: that the sort of political engagement it fosters may be too personal and episodic; that the commonsensical political knowledge typical of politics known at a distance as performance and simulation may impose further limits on effective understanding and engagement; and that the emerging new media environment may be different enough that today’s digital skills and relationships may be insufficient in the medium term. The paper looks at the same conditions that inspire the creative citizenship project and reaches reverse conclusions – but not on the grounds of nostalgia or pessimism.</abstract>

Obstacles to Creative Citizenship

<abstract xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">This paper is a representation of a live, audio-visual keynote address given at the Creative Citizens Conference in London (September 2014), co-presented by Hargreaves (IH) and Hartley (JH). It seeks to combine (i) autobiographical narrative storytelling – two of them, in fact; with (ii) an attempt to build concepts, themes and strategies out of that narrative, and how the two stories did indeed arrive at ‘one destination’; and (iii) plentiful use of visual prompts, combined with part-scripted, part-improvised dialogic commentary. This approach was risky on the day; it is even harder to render into two dimensions, not least because a vital element, the audience, cannot be represented in that format. Nevertheless, we offer the ‘paper’ as a record of how two intersecting lives and careers were both drawn to the ‘Creative Citizens’ idea, not only as a research problem but also as a component of the speakers’ own practice – one as a high profile journalist turned academic; the other as an academic with interests in alternative models of journalism. We think that our bio-trajectories are relevant to the way that the research project led by Hargreaves has been tackled.</abstract>

Creative Citizenship – two journeys, one destination

AHEAD OF PRINT

Volume 13 (2021): Issue 1 (December 2021)

Volume 12 (2020): Issue 1 (January 2020)

Volume 11 (2019): Issue 1 (January 2019)

Volume 10 (2018): Issue 1 (January 2018)

Volume 9 (2016): Issue 1 (January 2016)

Volume 8 (2015): Issue 2 (December 2015)

Volume 8 (2015): Issue 1 (January 2015)

Volume 7 (2014): Issue 2 (February 2014)

Volume 7 (2014): Issue 1 (January 2014)

Volume 6 (2013): Issue 1 (January 2013)

Volume 5 (2012): Issue 2 (July 2012)

Volume 5 (2012): Issue 1 (January 2012)

Volume 4 (2011): Issue 1 (January 2011)

Volume 3 (2010): Issue 2 (January 2010)

Volume 3 (2010): Issue 1 (January 2010)

Volume 2 (2009): Issue 1 (January 2009)

Volume 1 (2008): Issue 2 (January 2008)

Volume 1 (2008): Issue 1 (January 2008)

Cultural Science

A hallmark of human civilization has been to see ‘culture’ as a defining feature of humanity, epitomized in approaching the ‘humanities’ as the study of culture. Cultural Science: A multidisciplinary journal for the study of more-than-human culture radically breaks with this tradition and extends the domain of the study of culture beyond the human, both in the dimensions of multi-species and machine culture, and by considering all forms of cultural hybridization in a more-than human world. ‘Cultural Science’ investigates structures, interactions, and processes of cultural systems at all levels of analysis and scales of application. It approaches culture as a semiotic medium integrating creative processes in the biosphere, anthroposphere and technosphere as constitutive layers in the life of planet Earth.  ‘Cultural Science’ promotes inter- and transdisciplinary methodological pluralism, reaching from the classical sciences such as biology or ecology to established approaches in the social sciences and the humanities and beyond, venturing into posthumanist alternatives that investigate more-than-human forms of cultural creativity, diffusion, and tradition. ‘Cultural science’ endorses theoretical innovations that stand in line with coevolutionary theories bridging the natural and the human sciences and with novel views on agency and materiality that pursue ontological unification of human and non-human domains of meaning. It encourages active dialogue with science and technology studies, evolutionary and institutional economics, cultural evolution studies, biosemiotics, complexity science, or network analysis, specifying the ‘uses of culture’ from personal meanings to planetary platforms and systems of meaning. In doing so, we assign a crucial role to culture as medium of more-than-human action meeting the existential challenges of the Anthropocene.  ‘Cultural Science’ looks forward to publishing new work that may be critical, analytical and/or empirical, but is most often dialogical; interested in the production and translation of new ideas and knowledge, especially across perceived and disputed borders between systems, groups, and identities as well as academic disciplines.  Contributions to the journal transcend specialist topical foci while remaining on the firm ground of the respective disciplinary methodologies. Exemplary topical fields include:    The study of non-human cultures in the biosphere and the role of naturecultures in the interactions between humans and non-humans;  The role of digital media in the emergence of naturecultures; Explorations of human cultural creativity mediating biosphere and technosphere. Investigations into the emerging forms of cultural creativity of Artificial Intelligence.  Research on interspecies media of cultural expression, such as interspecies art and play.  New theoretical approaches to coevolution and cocreation of cultural media in the more-than-human world.    Journal history  Cultural Science Journal was launched in 2008 as part of the research program of the ARC (Australian Research Council) Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation, and John Hartley’s ARC Federation Fellowship. It published 14 issues between 2008 and 2016, before transferring to Ubiquity Press where it continued until 2021. In 2021, the journal moved on to a new home at the Cultural Data Analytics Open Lab (CUDAN) Tallinn University, Estonia. The editors-in-chief were Indrek Ibrus and Maximilian Schich. The journal is now published on the Sciendo platform, a subsidiary of De Gruyter. In 2023, the journal moved on to its third transformation, while remaining on the Sciendo platform, with new editor-in-chief Carsten Herrmann-Pillath, and a second editorial office at the Max Weber Centre for Advanced Cultural and Social Studies at Erfurt University, Germany, working in tandem with the Tallinn offfice.  Building on the work of Raymond Williams, ‘Cultural Science 2.0’, as it was framed by founding editor John Hartley, sought advances not only in the micro-contexts of culture, but also in systematic and general processes and the mutually conditioning relationships of micro, meso and macro contexts. Hartley and colleagues (Jason Potts, Lucy Montgomery, Carsten Herrmann-Pillath, Paul Ormerod and others) launched an effort aimed at conceptualising and studying such relationships systematically. The journal worked towards transdisciplinary frameworks linking the study of culture with evolutionary and institutional economics, complexity science and other evolutionary approaches to creative change.  This work has been pathbreaking, feeding into new approaches and further studies into evolutionary processes in media markets and cultural industries internationally (emergent fields of media innovation studies, cross-innovation systems, open publishing and so on). At the same time, parallel approaches have emerged linking the study of culture with other disciplines especially evolutionary biosciences, but also mathematics, physics, data science and network science, etc., resulting in novel and epoch making approaches such as cultural analytics, cultural evolution studies, computational humanities and social science, etc. ‘Cultural Science’, it can be argued, is evolving into an intensely dialogic, multidisciplinary and an ‘explosively’ (to use a Juri Lotman’s term) evolving domain.With the third transformation, Cultural Science 3.0, the journal further expands its reach, redefining and co-creating cultural science in the Anthropocene, embracing cutting edge developments in the posthumanist movement, while keeping its roots in emphasising the coevolutionary systems-based approach to culture explored since 2008.In this dynamically developing context, Cultural Science: A multidisciplinary journal for the study of more-than human culture wants to provide an arena where the relevant dialogues are held, where centuries of humanities-based knowledge on culture’s forms, languages and systems of meaning can meet the most contemporary scientific methods, where new questions are asked, where novel conceptualisations can meet or emerge from rigorous empirical or analytical work.　  Archiving  Sciendo archives the contents of this journal in Portico - digital long-term preservation service of scholarly books, journals and collections.  Plagiarism Policy  The editorial board is participating in a growing community of Similarity Check System's users in order to ensure that the content published is original and trustworthy. Similarity Check is a medium that allows for comprehensive manuscripts screening, aimed to eliminate plagiarism and provide a high standard and quality peer-review process. 